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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 273.4.txt
…sheep (to) Ancestress Geng. 409 The words I read (姒)丁 are written . Yao Xuan’s transcription has “母由(?)”. The graph at the top is “woman 女/母”, and below it is . It seems rather straightforward howev- er that the element at the bottom is not you 由, and my reasons are: 1) “女/母 + name” is clearly the object of the ritual proposed in this divination, and there is no ancestor called by the name Mu You 母由 “Mother You” or “Lady You” anywhere in the OBI; 2) The rectangular element under “woman” looks like ding 丁; 3) the vertical stroke to the right of 丁and what opens up under it is not “mouth”, which would be expected if writing 由. Knowing that this graph writes the name of an ancestor, I read the three graphic elements as a ligature, “si ding 丁”; 司 is written upside down. Qiu Xigui (2012: 1.523-526) reads as si 姒 “wife of elder brother”; see too JC 1906. The only “elder brother” in the HYZ OBI is the deceased “Elder brother Ding 兄丁” (236). HYZ 441 mentions another ancestress called Si Geng 司(姒)庚. The deceased Lady Hao was called both as Si Xin 司辛 and as Si Mu Xin 司母辛; see Li Xueqin 2016: 18-24 and Song Zhenhao 2011: 410 The commentary to 39.21 provides the definition of this verb and how it may differ in appli- cation from 禦. : The graph read here as the word dian 顛 “fall” (Tang Lan 1999: 60) is composed of three elements: hill 阜 + kneeling man 卩 + sun 日; the kneeling man and the sun elements face down- wards and the combined meaning of this compound pictograph is a man “falling” down “hill” or “steps”. This word occurs outside of the HYZ OBI and allographs from other scribal groups write it , with “child” 子 and not 卩, and with ding 丁and not 日. The motive behind replacing 日 with the similar shaped 丁in the variant form was to add a phonetic speller. 412 Although there are no prefatory dates, I suspect this sequence of three divinations can be synchronized with 3.8-9↔181.20-21↔409. 273 states lord Guo’s ailment. 268 | HYZ 275+517