CHINA ARQUEOLOGIA golden-age-chinese-archayeolog

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ancestral sacrifices, so that they offered sacrifices to
Ancestress Yi on a yi day, to Ancestor Gui on a gui
day, and so on.
The purpose of divinations such as these was to
ensure that the various rituals and offerings would
be acceptable to the ancestral spirits. The inscriptions
on this scapula are unusual in several respects:
the engravers have not recorded the day-date of the
divinations or the name of the diviner, nor have
they numbered the cracks; the ancestors themselves
do not appear to be the usual kings and consorts
who regularly received ancestral sacrifices. These
features suggest that the divinations were performed
by diviners other than those who normally
divined the king's affairs. The archaeological context
and the affinities with other diviner groups of
inscription style and content suggest that these
diviners were probably active during the reign of
Wu Ding (d. c. 1189 BCE) or slightly later.
DNK
1 Excavated in 1971; reported: Guo Moruo 1972, 2-11 (no. 12);
Guo Moruo 1978-1982, no. 31993; Zhongguo 19833, Fu
[supplement] 3.
2 Zhongguo 19833,1161.
3 In both charges translated, the final character for "pig" is,
unusually, repeated; perhaps two pigs were to be offered.
4 See Zhongguo 19833,1161.
Inscribed turtle plastron
Height 19.5 (7 5 / 8 ), width 12 (4 3 A)
Shang Dynasty, twelfth century BCE
From Huayuanzhuang, Anyang, Henan Province
The Institute of Archaeology, CASS, Beijing
In October 1991 the Anyang Work Team of the Institute
of Archaeology excavated 1,583 oracle-bone
fragments, found in layers, from a well-made storage
pit in the eastern section of Huayuanzhuang,
located some three hundred meters south of the
village of Xiaotun. Of the fragments that bore writing,
574 were turtle plastrons (557 fragments) and
carapaces (17 fragments); 5 were bovid scapula fragments.
The onerous task of reconstituting some of
the original bones — the turtle shells, in particular,
were badly fragmented — was completed in June
1992. The main topics divined on the bones found
in this pit involved sacrifices, hunts, weather, and
sickness.
Eight divination charges are recorded on this
plastron. 1 The first (top right, to be read from the
center out, then down) may be translated as follows:
"Crack-making onyiyou [day 22 in the 6oday cycle]:
'Prince You [?] goes to the foothills of Xinnan [?]; if
he nets pigs, he will catch some.'" This charge,
expressed in the positive future tense, was paired
with a negative abbreviated charge inscribed on the
left side of the shell (reading from the center out,
then down): "Crack-making onyiyou: '[Prince You]
may not catch some.'" This balancing of positive
and negative charges, with the undesired charge
expressed more weakly than the desired charge, was
a common feature of divinations performed on
plastrons during the reign of Wu Ding; it presumably
reflected some early sense of yin-yang balance
that the Shang perceived in the workings of the
world. The symmetry of the turtle plastrons, which
permitted opposing divination charges to be carved
on either side of the central spine, encouraged
such balanced formulations. 2 In the present case,
the engravers numbered five cracks on the right
side of the plastron and five cracks on the left side,
185 | SHANC ORACLE-BONE INSCRIPTIONS