Early scholars called the oracle bone "turtle shell", "qiwen", "bu ci" and so on, but these titles are not accurate today. "Turtle shell" emphasizes the text carrier, although the current oracle bone is mainly based on tortoise shell, but there are also cow bones, deer bones, tiger bones, bones and even human skulls; "Qiwen" emphasizes the use of knives to carve, but the oracle bones are also written with cinnabar, ink block material, at that time may have invented a brush; and "Bu Ci" Although it is also the main content of the oracle bone, but there are also notes, notation inscriptions and inscription practice, so it is still appropriate to call "oracle bones".
A complete statement generally includes four parts: narrative, predicate, divination, and examination. The narrative records the time of divination and the virtuous and the divinator who performed it; the fate records the content of the divination; the divination records the opinions of the Shang king; and the results of the divination matters recorded by the examination of the words. For example, today, taiwan's "Academia Sinica" Institute of History and Language also collects a piece of turtle belly armor with Bu Ci, which reads "Oracle Bone Bu, Virgin Woman Good Jiaojia." Wang Zhanyue: Its only Ding Jiao, Jia. Its only Gengjiao, Hongji. Jia Shen Bu, the virgin woman is good and jia, not jia. Thirty years and another day, Yun Bu Jia. Thirty years and another day Jia Yin, not Jia, only a woman. (See Yin Xu Script C, 247).
The meaning of these two paragraphs is that on this day, the Bu people presided over the divination and asked the woman if she would have a child smoothly. After the Shang King saw Bu Zhao, did he say that it was Ding Ri or Geng Ri Sheng Ji Li? On the same day, bu ren asked again, is it not auspicious for a woman to have a child? Thirty-one days later, the day of Jiayin was indeed fulfilled. Why not be auspicious? Because I gave birth to a girl. The last sentence is "word testing", which is added after divination. However, there are so many kings in the Shang Dynasty, so who is this "king"? Of course, it is impossible to see from a "king" word, which involves the periodization of the oracle bone and historical examination.
Beginning in 1928, the second year of Wang Guowei's death, the Institute of History and Linguistics of academia sinica began to conduct archaeology of yin ruins until 1937, when a total of 15 scientific excavations were carried out. These fifteen scientific excavations have obtained a total of 24,922 pieces of oracle bones, including 22,718 pieces of word nails, 2,200 pieces of bones, in addition to 1 skull of a carved cow, 2 skulls of deer, and 1 rib of a cow. Compared with private excavations, scientific excavations clearly have many advantages, the first is well preserved, the second is the clarity of excavations, and the third is the concentrated work. All this provided great convenience for the interpretation and study of later oracle bone scripts.
In 1933, Dong Zuobin, the "Yantang" who participated in the excavation of Yin Ruins, published the "Study Example of Oracle Bone Dating", proposing to break the oracle bone according to ten criteria such as lineage, title, virgin, pit position, fangguo, character, type, grammar, glyph, and calligraphy.
Dong Zuobin divided Yin Xubu ci into five phases, of which Pan Geng, Xiao Xin, Xiao Yi, and Wu Ding were the first phase; Zu Geng and Zu Jia were the second phase; Xiao Xin and Kang Ding were the third period; Wu Yi and Wen Ding were the fourth period; and Di Yi and Di Xin were the fifth period. This goes further than Wang Guowei's argument. In addition, in 1945, Dong also published the "Yin Almanac", which summarized the "Zhou Sacrifice" system of the Shang Dynasty based on the rituals of the Zujia, Diyi, and Dixin periods. What is the weekly ritual system? Simply put, the five kinds of sacrifices performed by the Shang king to the first king and the first concubine in turn were carried out in a cycle of ten decades.
The discovery of the Zhou ritual system provides a roughly clear list of the lineage of the Shang kings. This genealogy table can generally confirm the record of the Yin Benji, thus proving that the existence of the Shang Dynasty is beyond doubt; it also adds some new historical materials to us, such as providing the name of the first king, such as providing the name of the first concubine, shang tang (big b) with the sacrifice of concubine, she is the birth mother of the great ding after the Shang Tang; and also provides some new interpretations of the ancestral documents, such as the meaning of the ten days of tiangan in the name of the shang king, which is obvious from the oracle bone, in fact, this is the name of the sacrifice day of the first king, which is not repeated from each decade." "Three reports and two shows" is typical.
Of course, the weekly ritual system also raises some subversive understandings.
For example, in the "Yin Benji", we all know that the Prince of Shangtang Died Early, and was successively replaced by Tai Ding's brother Wai C and Zhongren, and then passed to Tai Jia, the son of Tai Ding; but in the Zhou Sacrifice Bu Ci, the order of sacrifice is Da B, Da Ding, Da Jia, and Bu Bing, of which only Bu Bing has no match for the sacrifice of the first concubine, which can be seen to be a collateral ancestor, which is consistent with the foreign C of the literature. But the key here is not that there is no zhongren, but that the big A is actually in front of Bu Bing! Whether Da Ding died early is unknown, but it is obvious that the three generations of Da B, Da Ding, and Da Jia were passed down from ancestor to grandson, which seems to prove that the "primogeniture inheritance system" had already appeared in the early Shang Dynasty, rather than the "brother-to-brother and brother-in-law system" of the literature!
In 1930 and 1931, Guo Moruo, the "Dingtang", successively published "The Society in buci" and "Research on Oracle Bone Script", marking the era of oracle bone research into the era of comprehensive theory history.
Tang Lan said that Guo Moruo "issued his examples", which more refers to his 1933 "Bu Ci Tong" and 1937 'Yin Qi Zhi Compilation'. In fact, Guo Moruo's greatest contribution to the study of oracle bones is the study of ancient texts with historical materialism. Guo Moruo describes himself as "studying the antiquity of Chinese society from the point of view of emerging science" in terms of the words that have been printed by the various families", for example, in the "ShiZu Concubine", Guo Moruo is related to the early marriage and believes that "Zu Concubine" is the original text of "Mu Mu", which comes from the cult of fertility; for example, in "Shi Chenzai", Guo Shi is also associated with the slave society, believing that "Chen" is a slave who looks down on the head, and "Zai" is the sinner of the deacons under the house.
Guo Moruo had regarded the Shang Dynasty as a "golden stone and use era" and "the end of the clan society" in the early days, and many of his interpretations were questioned in the case of such a theory. One of the most famous examples is that he believes that the original word for "ancestor" is "and", and "and" symbolizes male genitalia, which is actually influenced by the so-called "fertility cult". In fact, the original meaning of "and" is likely to be only a kind of shelf for cutting meat and carrying meat for sacrifice (that is, the original text of "trick"), which is extended to the ancestor of the sacrifice. Primitive fertility cult may have influenced the Shang Dynasty to create characters, but it cannot be seen that the Shang Dynasty script must have been influenced by primitive society.
But overall, Guo's contributions to Oracle research remain outstanding and he has the courage to correct his own erroneous views. Mr. Chen Mengjia summed up a major feature of Guo Moruo's oracle bone interpretation, that is, it is not in the invention of a word, but in the grammatical structure of bu ci; the words of his interpretation are not all correct, but they are generally correct; Mr. Wang Yuxin also said that Guo Shi was "the first scholar to use the position and viewpoint of historical materialism to guide the study of ancient characters and ancient history." All this makes Mr. Guo Moruo not only a paleographer, but also a Marxist historian.
Lin Wu Gongzi was a writer of literature and history, specializing in the history of the pre-Qin, Qin, and Han dynasties. He is the signed author of today's headlines, the signed author of Wukong Q&A, the columnist of the surging history, the columnist of The History of NetEase, the co-author of Baidu Ta, the co-author of the whole history, and the published three kinds of physical books such as "Pre-Qin Ancient Guozhi", "Wu Yue Chunqiu of the Pre-Qin Ancient Guozhi", and "The Complete Painting Collection of Mountains and Sea Classics", and his works are scattered in "National Humanistic History", "Advancing together in the same boat", "Beijing Evening News", "Crazy Reading", "Awakening Lion Guoxue", "Hundred Forums", "Weihai Evening News" and other newspapers, magazines and self-media. Thanks for reading, welcome to pay attention!