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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 267.5.txt
On Jiachen, make the morning sacrifice (to) Ancestor Jia and pair one ewe. 2 404 The object of sui 歲 is lao 牢, modified by the locative clause zai Rong 在戎. The divina- tion was not made at Rong. The preposition zai 在was used because the pen-raised cattle were located there. 405 Yao Xuan reads bu wei zi piao 卜未子髟 as a prognostication, but she does not offer an explanation of its meaning. I separate the four words into two parts; “卜未” is a prognostica- tion and “子髟” a verification statement or notation. This is mainly because the sentence 卜未 子髟 makes no sense grammatically.卜has to be referring to the divination or the divination crack. The adverb 未 (/妹) occurs elsewhere (for instance 220) in prognostications, and when it does the verb or verb phrase it negates has been omitted because it was previously stated in the divination statement proper. In this divination account 未 “not yet” refers to not making the sacrifice with cattle that are at Rong. This leaves 子髟. A place/lineage called 髟occurs in the HYZ OBI (see HYZ 6.2), but there are no instances of a person called 子髟 “lord Biao”. I read 子 as referring to the protagonist, “our lord”, and biao/piao 髟 as a phonetic loan for fu 孚 “trust”; the sentence 子髟 means, “Our lord trusted (it = his prognostication).” Several different graphs were used to write the word fu “trust” in early epigraphic sources. Shang scribes used . The received version of the Yijing uses 孚, and a Western Han period copy of the Yijing (Mawang- dui) writes it with the loan fu 復 “return”. The Warring States bamboo manuscript Great King Jian Stops the Drought 柬大王泊旱 (ShangBo 4) uses the graph biao (表) as a loan for 孚, for instance in the passage 尚 (表>孚),將祭之 “Would that (we) set our will and divine about it by the Great Xia (=type of turtle). If it is trusted, (then) we will sacrifice to it [said about the cause of a drought]”; see Shen Pei 2007. : Takashima (2010: II.345, note 8) comments, “The graph is a drawing of meat with a hand and sometimes gesturing to put the meat on the sacrificial stand (示).” This explanation is based on it being the ancestral form of 祭 (written in Zhou period script). Paul Serruys (2010: I.319; Bingbian 139.5) translates it as a “meat sacrifice.” Ji 祭 was one of the three cyclical or “seasonal” rites (翌—祭—肜), the rotation of which took approximately one calendar year. 264 | HYZ 268