The secret of the Xia Shang Bronze Lord: The character in the oracle bone was not made by the Shang Dynasty?

There are six types of Chinese characters and ways of using them, collectively known as the Six Books, namely pictograms, huiyi, fingering, shape sounds, false borrowing, and transliteration, and the first is pictogram. Nowadays, after the change of affiliation and italics, many Chinese characters can no longer see the traces of pictograms, but if you trace the roots back to the oracle bone, it will be clear at a glance.

Bronze Jue began at the Erlitou Cultural Site, which is a drinking vessel and ceremonial vessel popular in the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, equivalent to today's wine glasses, and bronze statues are equivalent to wine jugs. The basic characteristics of the bronze knight are: round abdomen (individual square abdomen), one side of the mouth front end of the flow - the flow of the pouring wine, the posterior pointed tail, the flow and the mouth or a column, the abdomen on the side of the handle, under the three cone-shaped long feet.

The character for the knight in the oracle bone is the pictogram of the bronze jue, but what is less known is that the relationship between the bronze knight and the word "jue" is not as simple as a pictogram imitation, and it also contains some secrets of the origin of Chinese characters. (Below, bronze lords of the middle and late Shang Dynasty)

01: Changes of the Xia Shang Bronze Lord

The so-called "time-shifting ease", with the changes of the times, the progress of technology, and the change of aesthetics, the shape of the bronze knight will also have subtle changes, which has left a clue to the origin of the knight character in the oracle bone.

So far, the Xia Shang Bronze Jue has been mainly excavated from three cultural sites, namely the Erlitou Cultural Site (1800 BC - 1500 BC), the Erligang Cultural Site (also known as the Zhengzhou Shangcheng Site, 1600 BC - 1300 BC), and the Anyang Yin Ruins (1300 BC - Shang Dynasty). Whether the Erlitou site is a summer ruin, there is still a great controversy, this article is temporarily considered to be a summer ruin. From the Erlitou site to the fall of the Shang Dynasty, after more than 800 years, there have been many changes in the Xia Shang Bronze Lord.

First of all, from a technical point of view, the Xia Dynasty bronze knight carcass is light and thin, rough in production, and the three-legged body is light and thin; after the late Shang Dynasty, the bronze knight's body is thick and exquisitely made, the three legs are thick and angular, and the body is thick.

Secondly, from the perspective of ornamentation, the body of the Bronze Lord of the Xia Dynasty generally has no inscriptions and patterns, and occasionally there are beaded patterns; after the late Shang Dynasty, the body of the Bronze Lord has exquisite ornaments such as gluttony, cloud thunder, banana leaves, etc., and even some small parts are also decorated with animal images.

Third, from the perspective of shape, the bronze jue of the Xia Dynasty is an oval body, with a long and narrow stream, a short tail, and no columns between the mouths; the bronze knights in the middle and late Shang Dynasty evolved into a round body, a round bottom, and the mouth of the stream was heightened, with more than one or two columns, and the column body was lengthened and moved backwards.

Among them, the Bronze Jue of the Xia Dynasty, represented by Erlitou, generally does not have a short column between the mouths, but the famous breast-nailed bronze Jue (see the picture above) has a short column, but the length and narrowness of the stream are very obvious. The early bronze lords of the Shang Dynasty represented by the Erligang culture generally inherited the Erlitou cultural style, all of which were flat and flat bottom, the flow was very narrow and long, and there were short columns between the stream mouths, and then the Shang Dynasty basically had short columns, hollow lower abdomen, and some of the permeable hollow holes, so that the ventilation was ventilated when warm wine was added to the fire.

The picture below is the normal form of the Erlitou Bronze Lord, which is manifested as an "oval body", "no column between the flow mouths", "long and narrow flow", and there is no ornamentation on the bronze lord. Compared with the bronze knights of the middle and late Shang Dynasty in the first picture of this article, the difference in shape between the two can be described at a glance.

02: Created by the Knights or the Xia People

After a general understanding of the changes in the shape of the Bronze Lord of the Shang Zhou Dynasty, let's take a look at the characters in the oracle bones.

The knight character in the oracle bone (see figure below) is a standard hieroglyph, that is, the physical depiction of "jue", painted exactly like an ancient wine vessel shape, with two or three "feet" underneath it, in the middle is a container (abdomen) for wine or wine, a small square like a hand-held handle, also known as "pàn", and the arrow symbol "" on the top indicates "column".

Figure 1 and Figure 3 do not have columns (Figure 6 is not easy to set up a column because of the design of the lid), and Figure 3 shows that the flow is long and narrow. Most importantly, Figure 3 is almost a microcosm of the bronze knight commonly used in the Erlitou culture.

Du Jinpeng, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out: The word "jue" in the oracle bones of the Shang Dynasty should obviously be the Jue of the Erlitou culture or at the latest the Shang culture of the Erligang period, but it is no longer visible in the late Shang Dynasty.

Therefore, "art comes from life", and the process of creating words is the same, which is based on actual things or social cognition at that time. If the word "Jue" was created in the middle and late Shang Dynasty, it should be created according to the shape of the first figure in this article, and it would never be a facsimile of the bronze Jue, which is almost no longer used in the early version. Otherwise, the first problem faced by the created knighthood is that there is no mass base, and everyone will generally feel "not like". Therefore, this "jue" character is likely to have been created in the Erlitou cultural period and was used until the late Shang Dynasty.

Like the knight characters in the oracle bones, there are also some hieroglyphs of ancient artifacts in the Shang Dynasty oracle bones and jin texts, some of which are obviously the hieroglyphs of popular artifacts at that time, and some of which can no longer be found at that time, indicating that many oracle bones should not be written by the Shang Dynasty.

Finally, another text that is closely related to our lives, unitary, can make us further understand that the emergence of Chinese characters may be earlier than we think.

"Unitary" is one of the twelve branches, the original meaning is wine vessel, belongs to the ancient ceremonial activities of the wine vessel, equivalent to the Xia Shang Zhou period "honor vessel", its status from the Zun, Dian and other texts have a unitary part can be seen, in addition to the unitary and three points of water composed of wine characters. The unitary character in the oracle bone is a pointed bottom bottle, Figure 1 and Figure 2 should be because it is not very convenient to write with a knife, so the text is somewhat deformed, and Figure 3 appears to be extremely formal. Incredibly, Figure 3 is almost identical to the Yangshao culture's Dingxi Majiayao site in Gansu Province (see below, where there are a large number of such pointed bottom bottles).

The problem is that in the past 5000 years, the inheritance of more than 2000 years of Yangshao culture declines, the original yangshao culture in the status of the pivotal bottle should also decline, more than 4500 years ago when the Rise of Longshan culture, at this time the pointed bottom bottle has changed greatly, interested friends can understand the "Longshan culture pointed bottom bottle", you will see that there is a big difference in the shape of the two. By the Xia Shang period, the pointed bottom bottle of the Majiayao site was already difficult to find, and even if it occasionally existed, it was not a popular style, and it was impossible to become the basis for the creation of the word "unitary".

The text originates from life, and it is not difficult to see through the relationship between the "unitary" character and the pointed bottom bottle of the Majiayao site, and the history of the appearance of the "unitary" character is about 5,000 years. To a certain extent, this can be corroborated with the literature records, according to legend, more than 4700 years ago, when the Yellow Emperor rose, its historian Cangjie made characters or sorted out the text, when the pointed bottom bottle of the Majiayao site may still be popular in the Yellow Emperor tribe, so Cangjie created words according to this; perhaps, before there was a "unitary" character, Cangjie will be many characters including "unitary" one by one to sort out, standardize, and eventually have been passed down to this day.

It can be seen that there must be writing during the Xia Dynasty, it is very likely that it has become a system, but the number of words may not be as rich as the oracle bone, and the dispute over whether there is a text in the Xia Dynasty today should end. Since there is already a script and the Bronze Lord is so important, will the Xia Dynasty people not give the Bronze Lord a name and create a word?

Reference: Where did Oracle come from? Is there a text older than it? 》