[Summary] Shang Zhou bronze ornamentation reflects the ancient people's mind about classification and symbolism. The archetypes of the bronze ornamentation are divided into realistic objects, imaginary objects, and "consciousness variants" objects. The functional transformation of inscriptions and ornaments on zhou dynasty bronzes reflects the transformation of the Zhou people's "divine consciousness" to "humanistic consciousness". The origin of Chinese characters can be explored by means of cognitive archaeology, from the three ways of making chinese characters, namely shape, sound and meaning.
Professor Qu Feng's new book "The Wedding of Bronze and Writing: Myths, Art and Thoughts of Xia Shang Zhou" has made a very meaningful exploration of the art and literature of Xia Shang Zhou from an anthropological perspective, aiming to reveal the transformation of "divine consciousness" to "humanistic consciousness" reflected in Xia Shang Zhou's art and literature. Qu Feng is an anthropologist and poet from archaeology, and he told me on WeChat that he had long stopped writing poetry, but in this book, I still felt the meaning of poetry.
In the introduction to the book, the author gives the Xia Shang Three Dynasties a definite sentence, that is, "the legendary Xia, the Shang of bronze and oracle bones, and the Week of Literature", reflecting the author's basic views on the Xia Shang Three Dynasties. The Xia Dynasty, which is between the prehistoric period and the Shang Dynasty, has not yet found a systematic script, and the records of the Xia Dynasty in the historical documents passed down from generation to generation are mostly oral legends recorded by later generations in writing, which cannot be used as reliable evidence for restoring the history of the Xia Dynasty. The book's study of three generations of art and literature begins with oracle bones and bronzes from the Shang Dynasty, when in fact the Xia Dynasty was subtracted.
This book is very interesting to read, and different readers will have different feelings. I think that both art and literature in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties involved ways of thinking that expressed a certain meaning in a certain form, which is a question worth studying. Archaeology should not only study the relationship between archaeological remains and human society, but also study the relationship between archaeological remains and human behavior and thought. Exploring the cognition of ancient humans through archaeological remains can lead the interpretation of archaeological remains to a deeper field.
One
Bronze ware is often considered an outstanding representative of Shang Zhou modeling and decorative arts. Qu Feng said: "Perhaps we have to admit that we cannot define the bronze of Xia Shang Zhou with similar terms like 'artwork' and 'ceremonial vessel', because they are not only related to arts and crafts, but also to thoughts, values, beliefs and even psychology, mythology and life consciousness." Speaking of psychology, we are reminded of a word that can be used in my discourse entirely: soul. That is to say, the emergence of bronze ware is also related to the soul of the people of that era, when it is the soul of culture, and it is rich in regional characteristics and ethnic characteristics. His research on Shang Zhou bronzes almost all fell on the interpretation of bronzes.
The shape of the Bronze Container of the Shang Zhou Dynasty is roughly divided into two categories: one is the "instrument", the "Shuowen Jiezi" "vessel, dish also", the overall shape is similar to the shape of the pottery; the other is the "thing", the "Shuowen Jiezi" "thing, all things also", the overall shape imitates the appearance of a certain animal, and the bronze ware that imitates the shape of animals in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties has three categories: beasts, birds and people.
Qu Feng believes: "In the shamanic concept, people and animals are essentially equal, and humans and animals can transform into each other. Shamans also have animal assistants, and in the rituals they lead, they and their assistants wear animal skins and masks, and use other characteristics to complete the transformation into animals. In their view, all phenomena in the natural environment are brought to life by a life force or soul, the souls of men and animals can inhabit matter such as bones, and the souls can be separated from the body and travel around the world, or upwards and downwards to the upper and lower realms. "It is said that the Shang Dynasty tiger cannibal copper pot unearthed in Anhua County, Hunan Province, the whole is made of a fierce tiger squatting, the legs and tail of the tiger are made of instrumental feet, the tiger's mouth is wide open, and the person looks at ease in the mouth. This bronze vessel does not represent a tiger eating man, but a symbol of the shaman's spiritual travel.
The bronze ornamentation of the Shang Zhou Dynasty reflects the mind of the ancients about classification and symbolism. The patterns of bronze ornamentation, a large number and mainly animal patterns and geometric patterns. Animal prints have two ways of expression, one is a description of visual forms, such as cows, tigers, birds and other real animals; the other is the creation of imaginary forms, such as gluttony, dragons, phoenixes and other animals that are not in reality. Animal patterns of the same motif are generally divided into two kinds of patterns, pictography and symbolization, and the so-called "simplification" is actually symbolic.
The Fish Pattern of Banpo Culture in China's Neolithic Period is divided into pictographic fish patterns and geometric fish patterns, and similarly, Miaodigou cultural faience pottery is divided into pictographic bird patterns and geometric bird patterns. The primitive art of the Australian Aborigines, with one imagining, anthropomorphizing and symbolizing in the visual form of animal and plant painting that makes them totems, and another based on the geometry of circles, arcs and straight lines, was not intended to convey a naturalistic description of animals and plants faithfully, but rather to provide a visual marker for the idea of totemic relations. Whether it is the bronze ornamentation of the Chinese Shang Zhou Dynasty, or the prehistoric faience pottery, or the australian indigenous primitive art, it can reflect that the image and abstraction are the two ways of thinking that humans have. The figurative and abstract forms of the same motif express in reality the meaning of both connection and difference.
The bronzes of the same motif in the Shang Dynasty with the same motif express different meanings in different levels of tombs. For example, the owner of the tomb of Yin Xu No. 5 (that is, the so-called "women's good tomb" in the academic circles) is the "woman" and "mother" of the royal family, and the bronze containers excavated from the tomb are mostly multi-layered ornaments, and the figurative food patterns, dragon patterns and other complex shapes are covered with fine thunder patterns. The Shang Dynasty cemetery in Guojiawan Xincun is a low-ranking family cemetery, most of the tombs are buried with pottery, the number of tombs with buried bronze containers is very small, and the bronze ornamentation is only simplified or symbolized with food patterns, rare or absent ground patterns. It can be seen that the figurative and intricate ornamentation and abstract and simple ornamentation on the bronze symbolize the different identity levels of the tomb dead.
Zhang Guangzhi pointed out that the key to the manipulation of social systems lies in the stratification of society and economy, "in China this stratification is manifested in three projects that can be confirmed by archaeological and documentary data, namely the hierarchy of clan branches, settlements (leading to cities and states) and the monopoly of shamanic classes and shamanic rituals (including art treasures)", "in the hierarchical universe, ancestors and gods dwell on the above level." The living person communicates with them through a shaman or shamanic figure with the help of animal companions and ritual vessels, including ritual vessels decorated with animal images. In a civilization like China, which equates the power of the wisdom of ancestors or gods with the power to rule, the monopoly of shamanic service and the possession of the treasures of art, i.e., shamanic instruments, are necessary conditions for the upper echelons of society."
Qu Feng believes that although the bronze culture of the Shang Zhou Dynasty is a shamanic civilization, it cannot only use the general theories of shamanism such as cosmology, soul view, and psychedelics to explain the Shang Zhou bronzes, but needs to be further explained by neuropsychology. He suggested using the object of the "consciousness variant"—that is, the object seen by people's consciousness in an abnormal state—to explain the surreal figurative ornaments and geometric abstract ornaments in the Shang Zhou bronzes. In this way, the gluttonous pattern with the nose as the axis of symmetry, the entangled dragon (or snake) pattern, as well as the arc geometric pattern (vortex pattern, four-petal order pattern, etc.), and the polyline geometric pattern (cloud thunder pattern, diamond check pattern, etc.) can be interpreted cognitively using the neuropsychological "consciousness change state" model.
Two
Cow bones and turtle shells were used as props for divination in the Shang Dynasty, and the content and results of divination were mostly engraved on cow bones and turtle shells, and the cow bones and turtle shells used for divination became an important carrier for recording the Shang Dynasty script. The Shangshu Zhoushu Tushi says, "But the ancestors of Yin have a scripture and a book. The "oracle bone" characters resemble bamboo and wood Jane connected with rope, and the "canon" characters seem to hold the simple book in both hands, and it is estimated that the Shang Dynasty already had a simple book written with a pen, but it has not been found archaeologically.
The oracle bones of the late Shang Dynasty had about 4500 words, and only 1/3 of them could be read. Oracle is "the earliest known chinese ancient script, the glyph is basically fixed, has the function of phonetics, can form sentences to express meaning, obviously there should be a process of development before this." If you trace back from the archaeological culture, before the late Shang culture in Anyang, Henan, a large number of early Shang cultural sites such as Erligang, Shangcheng, Nanguanwai, Xiaoshuangqiao, and Taixi, Gaocheng, Hebei province, have found a large number of 'carved symbols' and 'Zhushu symbols', which are relatively close to the late Shang oracle bones in terms of morphology. These 'symbols' can be broadly divided into two categories, one may be a personal name or family emblem, and the other may be a number. According to the existing knowledge of oracle bones, it is difficult to interpret personal names or clan emblems, and such unexplained words account for the majority of discovered oracle bones."
Along this line of thought, you can also go back to the Erlitou culture. "As of now, dozens of 'carved symbols' and two 'Zhushu symbols' have been found at the Yanshi Erlitou site in Henan, which can also be divided into two categories, one type of form like 'things' and the other type of form like 'number', which is very similar to the situation of the early Shang 'symbol'."
Exactly, it is unclear what the ancient Chinese script, which predates the Shang Dynasty oracle bone, looked like. "Most of the pottery inscriptions of Shaanxi Banpo culture are abstract symbols of faience fish patterns and frog patterns, longshan culture pottery carvings are the remnants of the early Dongyi people, and the carvings of Liangzhu culture are self-contained systems, and these carved symbols have no direct relationship with the Shang Dynasty oracle bones", not the predecessor of the oracle bones.
There is no archaeological material to understand how the ancient Chinese characters were produced, but some enlightenment may be obtained from the method of creating Chinese characters. Paleographers interpreting the Shang Zhou oracle bones and jin texts are inseparable from Xu Shen's "Explanation of Words and Characters" of the Han Dynasty. There are six kinds of word-making methods mentioned in the "Explanation of Words and Narratives", including referential things, pictograms, shapes and sounds, willfulness, transposition, and false borrowing. The Calligraphy of Han and Yiwenzhi says that there are six kinds of calligraphy: pictograms, symbolic events, symbolic meanings, symbolic sounds, transliterations, and false borrowings. Transposition and sham borrowing are orthography rather than orthography, and should be excluded. The pictograms, symbolic events, symbolic meanings, and elephant sounds of the Book of Han are the same as those of the Pictograms, Fingerings, Sounds, and Huiyi in the Shuowen Jiezi, but the statements are different. According to Oracle, the hieroglyphs probably developed from figurative pictures, and the symbols probably developed from abstract symbols. The number of xiangsheng characters is the largest in shape and sound, and the "Shuowen Jiezi" includes 9353 small seals, of which there are more than 7000 shaped sound characters, and the oracle bones that have been recognized are also mostly shaped and sound characters. The meaning of the image is similar to the meaning of the meaning of the meaning, and the meaning of the word should be understood from the composition of the glyph, for example, the stop is the martial, the human word is the faith, and the lack of any. It is not difficult to see that the four methods of character creation have three paths to create characters, namely shape, sound, and meaning, and shape, sound, and meaning are exactly the three basic elements of Chinese characters. I think that the origin of Chinese characters can be explored by the method of cognitive archaeology through the three character-making paths mentioned above.
The oracle bone is a visual record of the language of the Shang Dynasty, which can be passed down through the space and time limitations of the spoken language, and some of the oldest literary works are preserved in the oracle bone. "It's raining today. Its rain from the west? Its rain from the east? Rain from the north? It rains from the south? "This passage describing the rain is so interesting to write.
Three
Qu Feng believes that after the appearance of the long bronze inscriptions of the Zhou Dynasty, the bronze ornaments changed accordingly, saying that the ornaments on bronze are a special language between man and god, full of people's understanding of the scene of another god world. In the Shang Dynasty, it was a mysterious emotional expression and narrative that went hand in hand with the oracle bones, but in the Zhou Dynasty, when the long chronicle inscription became popular on bronze, the ornament became a real decoration at this moment, becoming a polite memorial to traditional culture. Needless to say, casting inscriptions on bronzes must be more troublesome than casting ornaments, but the Zhou Dynasty was not afraid of this trouble, and the discovery of a large number of long-form inscription bronzes proved the Zhou people's enthusiasm for this cause. Why the writing was engraved on bronze in such a laborious way is never mentioned in the text themselves, but we can guess that bronze is a substance that is not perishable, and the Zhou people must have wanted to give the text an immortal character. They did. It is because of them that we can read these oldest books today—and they are also the oldest works of literature, the oldest physical documents. It seems that it can be understood that the functional transformation of inscriptions and ornaments on Zhou Dynasty bronzes reflects the transformation of Zhou Ren's divine consciousness into humanistic consciousness.
Qu Feng said that there are "books" on the bronzes, and I added to his statement that there are also "poems" on the bronzes. Wang Guowei was the first to discover that some Zhou Dynasty bronze inscriptions rhymed, and after Wang's "Two Weeks of Golden Stone Rhyme Reading", some paleographers collected the rhymes in the two weeks of bronze inscriptions, and the Li Gui Ming was the earliest rhyme in the Western Zhou Dynasty.
Bronze inscriptions rhyme according to the harmony of vowels, vowels the same rhyme, vowels close to the rhyme can also rhyme, this is the so-called "rhyme", such as Gengyang rhyme, true rhyme rhyme, fat rhyme, etc., different tones can also rhyme. Rhymes can be done with one rhyme throughout the inscription or instead. Zhou Ren uses the phonology of words to create sound harmony at the end of sentences, and sentences form a certain sense of rhythm, making the inscription more colloquial. The Bronze Inscriptions of the Zhou Dynasty opened the precedent for the use of rhyme in pre-Qin prose, and at the same time provided a linguistic form for the production of pre-Qin poetry.
Some ancient poems are preserved in the Zhou Yi, such as: "Trapped in stone, according to tribulus; entering his palace, not seeing his wife." "The crane is in the yin, and its son is in harmony; I have a good lord, and I am with Erjing." Obviously has a "xing" taste.
I agree with Qu Feng: "The popularity of writing means that the symbolic art of prehistory and early historical era has declined, and after the Shang Dynasty, the art of ornamentation is no longer the main language for the expression of Chinese emotions." In the written system, the symbolism of the early visual arts was preserved intact by poetry and appeared in the form of so-called 'Xing'. This may have been a helpless escape of prehistoric art, and certainly a successful migration of symbolism. Thus, to this day, poetry still possesses properties similar to those of prehistoric art, such as the consistent obscurity, the religious sublime, the ubiquitous metaphors, and so on. ”
The literary works of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period paid special attention to ideology and reasoning. The principle of the Analects is "etiquette", the style is prose, and he likes to talk about poetry. The Tao Te Ching tells the truth of the "Tao", the style is rhymed prose, and he likes to say folk songs. These two works are the embodiment of the ideas of Confucius and Lao Tzu, and have cultivated many Confucians and alchemists. In the early Western Han Dynasty, the promotion of Confucianism and the respect of Huang Lao were intertwined.
Reading "The Wedding of Bronze and Writing: Myths, Art and Thought of the Xia Shang Zhou", I was inspired to have many ideas, and only these fell on the text.
(December 11, 2021)
Author: Chen Yong, Tianjin Municipal Museum of Culture and History
Originally published in: Northern Cultural Relics, No. 2, 2022
Comments are omitted here, please refer to the original text for the full version.
Original title: Cognitive Archaeology Exploration of Art and Literature in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties - "The Wedding of Bronze and Writing- Myths, Art and Thought of Xia and Shang Zhou" after reading
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