Editor's note
Speaking of oracle bones, people usually think of oracle bones. In fact, a larger number of oracle bones discovered so far are without characters, which is what the academic circles call "oracle bones without characters".
In the past, these wordless oracle bones were not taken seriously, and as a result, a lot of unwritten information was omitted. With the continuous deepening of academic research, the wordless oracle bone provides more and more information, and its academic value is increasingly manifested.
Characterless oracle bones refer to tortoise shells and animal bones unearthed in the Neolithic and Shang and Zhou dynasties and without written information.
In the process of early excavation and collection of oracle bones without characters, people often abandoned them like slugs and did not pay attention, making it difficult to count the exact number of oracle bones without characters at present.
However, according to the statistics of some scientific excavations, the total unearthed reached 24,781 pieces.
In terms of handed down collections, the number of wordless oracle bones collected by institutions and individuals at home and abroad is also considerable. For example, the Shandong Provincial Museum has a total of 8,080 oracle bones, and 4,412 without words. In addition, the wordless oracle bones have been used for other purposes in history. For example, it was used as a knife-point medicine to cure diseases and to make fake oracle bones for profit, and it was destroyed in large numbers.
According to Mr. Li Xueqin's speculation, the ratio of oracle bones with characters and without characters found in Yin Ruins is about 1:3. In this way, there are as many as 450,000 oracle bones without characters, far exceeding the number of oracle bones with characters.
irreplaceable academic value
The ancients must foretell everything, and the unearthed oracle bones are the products of sacrifices in the Shang and Zhou dynasties.
In the Shang Dynasty, tortoise shells were used as divination tools, and in the late Shang and early Zhou Dynasties, divination was used together. The purpose of divination was to ask fortunes and fortunes in sacrifices, expeditions, astronomy, calendar, weather, agriculture and animal husbandry, field hunting, clans and countries. It can be seen that divination was a major event in the political life of the Shang and Zhou dynasties.
Restoring and restoring the divination scenes of the ancients, studying their divination process and divination system, and discussing the ancients' outlook on good and bad luck and religion are the proper meaning of oracle bone research.
As an oracle bone material dating back 3,300 years ago, the ancient civilization it represents still has many mysteries to be solved.
The first is to reconstruct and restore the principles and processes of oracle bone divination in the Shang and Zhou dynasties.
Previous studies on the divination system were mostly based on oracle bone inscriptions and handed down documents, ignoring the information carried by the oracle bone object itself.
Non-text materials such as wordless oracle bones have inherent advantages over text information in reconstructing the divination process of Shang Dynasty oracle bones.
Therefore, the in-depth study of it can reproduce and restore the picture of the ancient people's oracle bone divination three thousand years ago, and solve the ancient mystery - what is good and what is evil.
The second is to re-examine the origin of the early Chinese ritual system.
Confucius once talked about the ritual system of the three dynasties, saying, "Yin is due to Xia rituals, and the profit and loss can be known; Zhou is due to Yin rituals, and the profit and loss can be known; if it succeeds Zhou, it can be known for hundreds of generations" ("The Analects of Confucius: For Government") ").
He said that the ritual systems between Xia and Shang and between Yin and Zhou were in the same line. We believe that this is indeed not easy. The academic view that the ancient Chinese ritual system originated in the early Zhou Dynasty is biased.
For another example, a staging and dating system featuring the characterless oracle bone itself can be constructed based on the marks of attack and drilling on the oracle bone without a word and the drilling pattern as the standard for staging and dating of the oracle bone, and then help to determine the age of each piece of oracle bone.
Oracle bone inscriptions are not the whole of oracle bone science. Characterized oracle bones and uncharacterized oracle bones are both organic components of oracle bone research. It is necessary to view and understand oracle bone science from a comprehensive perspective.
Research Status of the Soldiers and Soldiers
At present, the achievements in oracle bone writing research have attracted worldwide attention.
In fact, wordless oracle bones carry a large amount of natural information, remediation information and related information: natural information includes information on the front, back, and side of the oracle bone, as well as the access system, material species, and size identification. Remediation information includes attack, treatment, drilling Chiseling, cauterizing, foreshadowing, scraping, sawing, drilling, etc. The related information mainly includes oracle-bone conjugation, habit-carving, text examples, oracle-bone drawings, rubbing and ink filling, digital hexagrams, brushes, cotton textiles on oracle-bone slices, and use of Old bones forgery, etc.
All these provide irreplaceable information for the historical research of oracle bone science and help it to open up new fields.
Since the discovery of oracle bones in 1899, scholars have preliminarily established the face of wordless oracle bone research by focusing on the divination process, the divination system and the shape of the oracle bones.
However, due to the lack of attention for a long time, the research still has not made great progress.
First, there are defects in the oracle bone description.
First of all, in terms of content, there is almost no description of the wordless oracle bones; secondly, the description method needs to be improved.
In the past, the description of oracle bones was mainly based on rubbings and facsimiles, lacking clear photos.
Now the academic circles realize that not only should the three methods of extension, copying and photocopying be used together, but also the details of the wordless oracle bones should be described and written to meet the needs of scholars in the study of oracle bone materials.
Second, there is a lack of links in the research content.
The research on the drilling form, the divination process and the divination system of the wordless oracle bone is still at a superficial level, which leads to the inability to understand the original face of the oracle bone divination, which affects our understanding of the oracle bone and oracle bone inscriptions.
Third, the database construction of non-literal materials such as wordless oracle bones has not received attention and needs to be put on the agenda.
Looking back on the research process, the wordless oracle bone research is still a weak link that needs to be changed urgently.
A promising way forward
At the beginning of the 21st century, the oracle bone scientist Huang Tianshu first proposed the concept of "oracle bone morphology", which expanded and extended the research scope of oracle bone science.
However, from the perspective of research content, we believe that the concept of "oracle bone non-literal materials" seems to be more accurate and realistic.
The collection and collation of non-textual oracle bone data has been stagnant at present.
In terms of content, this arrangement should include natural information, remediation information and related information.
Characterless oracle bone descriptions should also adopt the same trinity method of extension, copying, and illuminating as oracle bone inscriptions, and should be supplemented by written descriptions and explanations, such as Zhushu, Moshu, Tuzhu, Tumo, oracle bone species, size, shape, Information on drilling and harbinger patterns, sawing and scraping.
Therefore, there is still a lot of work to be done in the collection, arrangement, description and even the construction of the "non-text data" database of wordless oracle bone materials.
At present, the examination and interpretation of oracle bone script is more and more difficult, and its research has fallen into a bottleneck.
On the contrary, there is still a lot of room for improvement and breakthrough in the sorting and research of non-literal materials.
The wordless oracle bones are directly related to the study of Chinese divination rituals, political systems, religious beliefs, and ways of thinking in the Shang and Zhou periods and even earlier. Therefore, the study of wordless oracle bones is in line with the development trend of oracle bones in the future.
As the country attaches great importance to the unpopular and unique studies represented by oracle bone inscriptions, it is necessary to integrate academic forces to conduct systematic research on oracle bone non-textual materials, so that the overall in-depth study of oracle bone inscriptions and the history of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties can achieve a qualitative leap.
In short, wordless oracle bones contain rich historical and cultural value, and are neglected academic bonanza.
It is the bounden duty of oracle bone scholars to change the current weak situation and promote the comprehensive development of oracle bone research.
(Author: Li Xueshan, professor and doctoral supervisor of Henan Normal University, this article is a major project of the National Social Science Foundation of China in 2020 - the research and database construction of the non-textual data of oracle bones of the Shang Dynasty [No.: 20&ZD305] staged results)