The oracle bone inscription is the earliest mature writing system discovered in China so far, and it is the source of Chinese characters and the root of China's excellent traditional culture, which is worthy of being cherished and better inherited and developed.
The study of oracle bones has important cultural value and inheritance significance. The reporter walked into the Research Center for Unearthed Documents and Ancient Characters of Fudan University (hereinafter referred to as the "Fudan Ancient Writing Center") to visit the contemporary acquaintances of the oracle bone inscription, and understand the research and application status of this "unpopular and unpopular", as well as the historical thought and cultural heritage behind the oracle bone inscription.
-- The editor
"Unpopular Learning" Glows with New Vitality -
When Oracle meets a contemporary soulmate
"People's Daily" reporter Huang Chao
Figure (1): "澹" in Shang and Zhou scripts and Qin scripts. Picture (2): Zenfu Ji's father's mustache, now in the collection of the Museum of Chinese Characters. (Data map)
The moment the word was born, it was like a thunderbolt that struck into the chaotic world, illuminating the dormant civilization. Since then, the wisdom of the primates of all things has broken through time and space to accelerate the inheritance, which is an unprecedented spectacle.
In the late Shang Dynasty, China formed the earliest mature writing system. At that time, merchants were good at asking questions, asking the heavens, asking the gods, and asking the ancestors. For divination and memorization, the royal family carved words on the tortoiseshell animal bones, called oracle bone inscriptions.
Will or no, can or can't, auspicious and unlucky...... For businessmen, the answer lies here. The content of the divination question is engraved next to the divination, that is, the oracle bone divination. After the Western Zhou Dynasty, this tradition gradually declined, and it was difficult to see the characters on the oracle bones used by Bu.
It wasn't until 1899 that the long-dormant ancient cipher only sent a faint signal, and was keenly captured by the Qing Dynasty goldsmith Wang Yirong - a piece of oracle bone shocked the world and opened the door to a civilization that had been closed for more than 3,000 years. Over the past 120 years, several generations of scholars, such as old officials breaking prison and detectives solving cases, have explored clues from the cracks in history, and have examined and released more than 1,000 words.
Today, there are still more than 2,000 uninterpreted oracle bone characters left by predecessors. Fortunately, from the hearts of the ancestors to the fingertips of the descendants, the oracle bone inscription met the contemporary bosom friend, and a group of scholars who devoted themselves to deciphering the ancient script continued to interpret new characters, so that the "unpopular and unpopular" rejuvenated.
The difficulty of "complete interpretation" is comparable to the discovery of planets
A scholar once said that "releasing a word is like discovering a new planet", which shows the difficulty of studying ancient characters.
It is precisely because of the difficulty that the Museum of Chinese Characters has issued several "reward orders" for the decipherment of oracle bone inscriptions in recent years, with rewards ranging from 100,000 yuan for a single word. Three scholars from the Fudan Center for Paleography have won awards, making it the most "unveiled" scientific research institution at present.
The Museum of Chinese Characters in Anyang, Henan Province. (Data map)
Interpretation is to find the past and present life of a certain word, as well as the unfinished relationship with other words, and Professor Chen Jian, the representative of the center's team, likes to use such metaphors. In recent years, he has deciphered two oracle bone glyphs that he had completely unknown before, that is, the other two ways of writing the ancient character "澹".
It is recorded in "Shuowen Jiezi Zhubu": 徹, Tongye. The oracle bone inscription has a literacy, and the bent fingers represent exertion, and the ritual mustache is removed, so as to indicate "to (withdraw)". The argument found that the character had undergone two changes in its evolution: the strong hand was changed to "grasp", and the partial "彳" representing action was added. The newly released glyph, on the left side of the "show", has "bei" or "blood", which is the ideogram of "澹".
This is a common phenomenon in the evolution of paleographies. The word has the meaning of "go to the sacrificial vessel or sacrifice", and there are sayings such as "both sacrifice, order" in the ancient books of the pre-Qin dynasty. Finally, it becomes "澹", simplifying the Chinese character to write "tho".
Imagine a sacrifice more than 3,000 years ago, in which meat was cooked in a mustache and steamed, and merchants worshiped and offered to their ancestors. Today, these utensils displayed in the museum seem to be ancient and unreachable. However, through the word "tho" related to the mustache, it seems to see the mission of each utenvelope, and the dynastic atmosphere and life situation behind it are reproduced in front of you.
Actually, this is not my most rewarding decipherment. Chen Jian humbly believes that the technical difficulty is not high. But behind it is the foundation accumulated over the decades: it is necessary not only to understand the stroke characteristics of the oracle bone character form, comprehensively sort out the use of words, but also to deeply grasp the evolution sequence and law of the literacy glyph, examine it with a dynamic eye, and deduce the unknown from the known.
Mining copper in the mountains, peeling off the cocoon, Chen Jian regards it as an intellectual enjoyment, and it is a "game" that he often plays alone. Usually walking, queuing, there is always some fragmentary time, and I can think about certain words for a long time when I see them. "Give me a word and I can think far away. Interpretation is to weave words into a big net to see how much they can relate. ”
Of course, to achieve "complete interpretation", in addition to glyph examination, it is also necessary to explain the vocabulary. Reading through the results of the examination in all the oracle bone dictionaries, if the meaning of the words is smooth and unhindered, it proves to be reliable. From collecting information to comparing the opinions of various families, arguing and refuting difficulties step by step, and finally being recognized and cited, included in the dictionary, all the way through.
Oracle interpretations are more like natural sciences and require hard evidence and take a long time to publish. For example, Chen Jian's 2019 "Oracle Bone Gold Inscription is Used as the Word "遊" Supplement", the first draft was written in 2010. This kind of article is detailed and richly cited, and some of them have as many as 70,000 words. Some of the issues that are controversial in litigation often have a sense of relief after he has studied them.
Outsiders seem boring, but he enjoys it, and often has a flash of inspiration in the middle of the night. In the early years, pencils were always indispensable at the bedside, and when inspiration struck, they were immediately written on the wall and carefully sorted out in the morning. "Reading the articles I've written, I feel very happy. Speaking of this, Chen Jian smiled. It's long, and it's not a kind of romance.
Historian Li Xueqin believes: "The basic work of paleography should still be based on the interpretation of characters. Words can't be deciphered, and it's hard to talk about other studies. "In the past hundred and twenty years, the oracle bone inscriptions that are ripe for interpretation have been gradually released.
In 1903, Liu Yi easily recognized more than 40 characters in his self-published "Tieyun Hidden Turtle: Self-Introduction", of which more than 30 words were correct; in 1904, Sun Yi let him get "Tieyun Hidden Turtle", and "read it after two months of hard work" to write "Examples of Deed Texts", and released another 185 words.
Subsequently, through the continuous efforts of Luo Zhenyu, Wang Guowei, Guo Moruo, Yu Xingwu, Tang Lan, Li Xueqin, Qiu Xigui and other famous artists, about 1/3 of the oracle bone inscriptions were interpreted. The rest are all "hard bones". For example, the word "unitary" adds a few oblique dots, which appear thousands of times, and has not been explained conclusively.
After walking through thousands of mountains and rivers, the eyes suddenly opened up. At present, there are about 50 scholars specializing in oracle bone inscriptions in the world, and there are also a number of scholars from Jilin University and Capital Normal University. It is they, through the simple strokes abstracted by the merchants' clothing, food, housing and transportation, to restore the fireworks engraved on the tortoiseshell and animal bones, so that the music of civilization can be heard from afar.
The fragment is waiting to be broken and reunited
"Guihai Buzhen: Ten years. March. Yi Chou Xi Rain, Ding Mao Ming Rain, Wu Xiao Cai Sun Rain, Gale Wind, Ji Ming Qi. ”
This is a divination message, to the effect that on the day of the third month of Guihai, there will be no disasters in the second half of the year. The test showed that on the second day of the decade, it rained at night. By the fourth day, it was raining. On the evening of the fifth day, it was both rainy and gale. On the sixth day, when the sky was bright, the clouds dispersed and the sky opened.
Through this weather record, it can be seen that the Shang Dynasty had officials who specialized in observing the weather. Back in the day, it was still full of fantasy: the person in charge of divination had a word in mind, and there was a renovated oracle bone beside him. The charcoal fire was blazing, and the blazing wattles were pulled out, and after the open flame was blown out, the drill and chisel on the oracle bone were burned. With a "bu" sound, different cracks appeared on the surface of the oracle bone......
As the earliest meteorological record in China, this divination is extremely valuable, and it is included in the 776th article of the "Oracle Bone Conjugation Compilation". However, the original material was too mutilated, and it was only after splicing that it was broken and reunited.
The oracle bones were unearthed, and Chinese culture was immediately connected with the Yin Shang bloodline, which is a puzzle for later generations to trace back to thousands of years of civilization. Unfortunately, it was the late Qing Dynasty and the country's power was weakened, so collectors kept it as their private property, and many of them were scattered abroad, resulting in fragmented research.
Among the oracle bones that are currently alive, more than 80,000 pieces have been officially published, of which fragments account for more than 90%. Oracle bone conjugation is the synthesis of various aspects of information, splicing fragments together, making them into a complete or relatively complete material.
Fragments are everywhere, and Jiang Yubin, a researcher at the Fudan Center for Paleography, is the one who looked for a needle in a haystack. This version of the oracle bone that records the weather was conjugated by Jiang Yubin, and the word "fierce" in "gale wind" was also interpreted by him.
In reality, researchers rarely hold the fragments in their hands and follow the map, and mostly rely on rubbings and data compiled from physical photos. Buying books, reading books, and buying books, Jiang Yubin's research room was piled up, and there was almost nowhere to put his feet. Tortoise shells and cattle shoulder blade specimens are a must-have on his desk, and he often observes the rubbing and knows the relevant parts well.
Over the years, he has turned through dozens of anatomy books and stewed a lot of beef fan bones, observing the traces of the formation of blood vessels in and out of the bones, and their presentation on rubbing. "Discussing the materiality of oracle bone texts and looking at the relationship between physical forms and divination words, I have gained a lot. ”
How to judge the success of conjugation? This requires not only that the shape is tightly fitted, the front and back lines are the same, but also the font, style, and content must also match. Over the years, more than 7,000 sets of conjugations have been completed by relevant scholars. These oracle bones and public materials have already formed a database in their minds.
As a living science, oracle bone research is constantly changing. In recent years, platforms and mini programs such as "Yin Qi Wenyuan" of Anyang Normal College, "Zhu Duoduo" of Henan University, and "School Heavy Treasure" of Capital Normal University have been launched one after another. Through the collection, research and judgment of big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, it has gradually become a reality from the ideas of scholars.
Yang Yi combined the oracle bones published by Jilin Province Bo with the new results of previous materials (black and white rubbing). (Data map)
With more than 6,600 entries and 3 million visits, the Fudan Ancient Writing Center's "Jade Lianzhu" oracle bone conjugation information database was launched at the beginning of this year, bringing together information such as conjugation and provenance. "Many scholars have bothered to sort it out, but they have found that their predecessors have already achieved results. We continue to update in the hope that it will be convenient for everyone to avoid this kind of situation. Yang Yi, one of the initiators of the project and a doctoral student, said.
For beginners, the first piece is very important. Every other week, Jiang Yubin would guide the younger disciples by hand, often for five or six hours. Not long ago, during a class discussion with his students, he found that the Jilin Provincial Museum had released a batch of fragments of color photos, and the teachers and students were very excited. New conjugations soon came out. "Once conjugations are found, most are easy to verify. The sense of accomplishment is overwhelming. ”
This kind of feeling may be difficult for ordinary people to understand. But conjugation research is like a bridge connecting time and space. Some of the old materials of the "broken and rotten newspapers" have doubled in value once they are conjugated. The most famous is a conjugation of Wang Guowei.
Regarding the lineage of the Shang kings in the "Historical Records of Yin Benji", most of the scholars of that year were skeptical. In 1917, Wang Guowei spliced the bones to form a relatively complete lineage. The comparison confirmed the general credibility of the information contained in the Historical Records, and corrected some of the fallacies.
Since then, the view that "there is no history above the Eastern Zhou Dynasty" has been broken, and China's letter history has advanced by hundreds of years. As Guo Moruo said, after seeing the oracle bone script, the real situation of ancient society is as bright as it is now, and the various social institutions and consciousness in "Poems", "Books" and "Yi" have found their source.
Conjugated piece by piece, studied from generation to generation, even if only two fragments are spliced, it may activate the ancient genes behind it. The ancient and mysterious dynasty is no longer a phantom in the classics, and the symbols on the oracle bones vividly appear in front of people and become the mark of Chinese civilization.
A word is a piece of cultural history
In February, the new Yinxu Museum was opened to the public, and an oracle bone with turquoise inlaid text and recording hunting patrols was eye-catching, which is the only existing piece in the mainland museum. Not far from the new museum is the core area of the Yinxu ruins, which spans 3,000 years with one foot, and the audience seems to breathe and smell with the ancestors. Looking back at the beginning of the Chinese character "family tree", it is really meaningful.
The new Yinxu Museum in Anyang, Henan Province. (Data map)
Chen Yinke once said, "Every word is explained as a cultural history." Without words and traditions, we would know nothing about the past, and the eternal world would be like a long night. From these "Shang Dynasty diaries", we can see that the ancients feasted, played and played music, traveled by car, as well as the process and results of the war, the influence of the weather on agriculture, and so on.
In addition to restoring the face of history, the greatness of our writing lies in the fact that we can see our culture. The oracle bone inscription is the most valuable legacy left by the ancestors of the Shang Dynasty, who used meticulous observation and astonishing imagination to transform what they saw, did and felt in their daily lives into characters, and contained the main methods of character creation for future generations.
Liu Zhao, director of the Fudan Center for Paleography, said that there are many pictographs and ideographs in the oracle bone inscriptions, many of which retain their early forms. This is the means of "taking everything from afar, taking everything from near", and the carrier of recording ideology and culture. From it, you can experience the intention of the ancients when they made words——
The character "De" is like holding a shell, indicating that the ancient "shell" was a treasure or used as currency. The word "supervisor" is the image of the water in the human vessel, and the ancients had the habit of using water as a mirror. The word "Bao" is like an adult carrying a child, from the perspective of an adult is protection, from the perspective of a child is dependent, rich in meaning, and full of human feelings......
Not only that, but some of the characters on the oracle bones have a stable and tense structure, and they are inscribed in a way similar to that of brush and ink books. The use of pens, knots, and chapters is quite lawful. The humble notches evolved into the various elements of later calligraphy, and the source can be found here.
"We can read ancient books from thousands of years ago, which is the only one in the world. Ge Liang, deputy research librarian of the Shanghai Museum, said. The oracle bone inscription is the only self-source script in the world's ancient scripts that have survived to this day, and others, such as ancient Egyptian sacred scripts and ancient Babylonian cuneiform scripts, have finally become "dead scripts" due to drastic changes in the user population and culture.
"Spread in a different place, stay in a different time", the Chinese characters with the oracle bone inscription as the source are the crystallization of the Chinese civilization that has never been interrupted and complemented by it. In 2017, Oracle was inscribed on the Memory of the World Register.
What is clear is that, as a collective memory, Oracle has met more contemporary bosom friends:
Some netizens made text emojis, painted oracle bone inscriptions into animations, and reproduced the beliefs of their ancestors, and some enthusiasts explained words through short videos, and were urged by fans to change.
In Anyang, the hometown of oracle bone inscription, people practice calligraphy in the study studio and experience the art of oracle bone calligraphy, so that the transfer is smooth and tactful. As soon as tourists leave the high-speed rail station, roads, business districts, and cultural spaces are immersed in the world of oracle bones.
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If you are a teacher, please organize a lively Chinese lesson for your students to explain the origin of Chinese characters.
If you're planning to travel, check out the oracle bones of Yinxu at the museum and see the ancient writing that shocked the world.
Oracle, like an unspeakable old man, looked at us, as if he had a lot to say. She restores the still young face of the ancient civilization from the rubbings of history, and answers the two eternal questions of where we came from and where we are going.
(Source: People's Daily, April 14, 2024, 7th edition)