Corpus Viewer
Root / 中國漢文 / clean / 商殷朝 / 花園庄（洹北） / 花园庄东地甲骨 / 英譯文 / HYZ 113.15.txt
(Our lord/I) will be in person227 (for the registration rite of the) Many Com- manders’ forty head of cattle (to) Ancestress Geng. 228 3 hunt for pigs. Both instances take place abroad. The activity being spoken about here is a royal hunt including the king. 225 (囟), a pictograph of the cranium, is used in its original sense on 125. When this graph occurs as a sentence-initial I agree with Edward L. Shaughnessy (Xia Hanyi) (1989, 2012) who reads it as a phonetic loan for si 思 “to hope, (optative) would that”. Shaughnessy notes that one of its distinguishing features is to introduce the final proposition of a compound divination charge; for other instances, see 395+548.10, 401.12 and 409.12. It occurs frequently in Zhouyuan OBI, for in- stance: 囟(思)有正 (H11:1), 囟(思)正亡左(H11:82) and 囟(思)亡咎(H31:3). It is important to emphasize here that divinations with this sentence-initial were not questions. (Shaughnessy says they were wishes.) is listed in the Shuowen jiezi: 音忽, 拜從此 “Pronounced hu. (The graph) bai is from this”. This graph occurs in compounds used to write the words zou 奏, bai 拜 and bi 賁. (賁 occurs in Western Zhou bronze inscriptions as a phonetic loan for bai 百.) Ji Xiaojun (1991) suggests it is the ancestral form of 夲, which the Shuowen jiezi says is “read like tao 滔”; since 滔 and dao 禱 “pray” had the same pronunciation, and since the word usually occurs in divina- tions about the harvest, hunting and rain, Ji proposes to read it as 禱. (The Shuowen jiezi de- fines 禱 as 告事求福 “Announce matters (to the spirits) to seek good fortune”.) See 409.9. (=mian 面) is a deictic pictograph graph that uses 首 “head” as its base image and adds a curved stroke running from the forehead down to the nose to indicate the “face”, mian 面; see Yao Xuan 2005: 132. The word appears two more times in the corpus: at 195.2: 呼微面見于婦好; and at 226.7: 歲妣庚牡一。子占曰：面囗自來,多臣 (殺). In the former, and before the verb jian/xian 見,I read it as a verb, “to face”, although alternatives are to take it as a compound verb with 見,“see, have audience (with)”, or even as an adverb, “in person”; in the latter, the ZSKY editors read the graph after 面 as Qiang 羌 (noun), and if this can be trusted, it recom- mends that it was functioning as a verb. (面羌 would then be parallel with 面多尹 here.) The phrase “mian bu sheng 面不升” occurs in the “Pinli” 聘禮chapter of the Yili 儀禮, and Yang Tianyu’s commentary (2007: 256) says, “面 is just like di 覿”. The “Pinyi”聘義chapter of the Liji 禮記also has the sentence “Bin simian sidi 賓私面私覿”, and Lu Deming’s Shiwen commen- tary glosses 覿as jian 見 “to see, be admitted to (private) audience”. The sequence of divinations above stem from (10)-(11). The king had a nightmare about potential misfortune on an upcoming hunt and it implicated the Many Commanders. The HYZ 113 | 163