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Root / 中國漢文 / clean / 商殷朝 / 商 / 甲骨文 / 殷墟 / 花園莊東地 / H3 / 花東373
癸卯卜貞□吉又(有)史死 一
不其吉又(有)史其死 一
Divined on Guimao, tested…auspicious, there will be officers who die. 1
If it is inauspicious, there will be officers who might die. 1 509 In the grammatical form “Is not 非…is 唯 (> only)”, the meaning of is worse than “sickness”. A comparison can be made with 鼎(貞)：非 (孽)隹(唯)疾 “Tested: It is not evil, only sickness” (HJ 13845), and allows us to deduce that is either a variant form of 疾or that the two words were synonyms; see Huang Tianshu [1991] 2007: 26-27, and the divination ac- counts on White 1518 and HJ 21054. is a phonetic loan for nie 孽 “evil”; see 286.11. 510 This divination can be synchronized with 391.10-11 (also dated Jiawu). Reading this micro- set of three divinations together reinforces that the technical term 用 “Used” referred to a judgment on the divination crack, and not to whether or not the divination statement was applied and actually carried out. This is because 372.8 proposes to report about stone cutting, and 391.11 proposes not report about it. Both divination statements, although they differ slight- ly and are not purely antithetical, are followed by “Used”. “Using” both, in the sense that both divination statements were applied and actually carried out is obviously a contradiction. This issue is discussed in the commentaries to HYZ 6.1 and 252.3. 511 Reconstructed by Zhu Qixiang 2006: 1028. HYZ 374 | 323