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 3.10.txt
Divined on Xin, tested:20 Going21 to Dark Bird,22 the sick are not going to die. 1 18 Guo (馘) is a pictograph of the “scalp” (Lin Yun 1998: 148). The identification is mainly based on the early Western Zhou bronze inscription Da Yu ding 大盂鼎which spells the adverb huo 或 as + 或 (=馘). In the HYZ OBI it is a person’s name. Guo occurs on a total of four shells: here, 181, 273, and on 409. A rule of coherency recommends they all originally formed a set. 273 reveals the ailment was an injury suffered from a fall. ) is a compound pictograph that either writes the word miu 繆 “twist, wring” or niu 扭／紐 “twist, tie”. HYZ script uses it as a phonetic loan to write the word chou 瘳 “recover, heal, be cured”; see Yao Xuan 2012, cited in GuLin bubian, 852-855. A variant spelling (44.1) adds the phonetic zhou 帚; yet another Shang scribal variant adds the phonetic you 卣 (HJ 9019v, HJ 9284) and not 帚. On 241.11, it occurs opposite of “die” (si 死). Outside of divinations about illness and injury, this same graph was also used as an adjective modifying jade tablets (286.18); in this instance, it was used as a phonetic loan to write the word jiao 皎 “shiny and white”. 20 It is immediately striking that only 125/2452 individual divination accounts (5%) on seventy- six surfaces (15%) either directly record or can be “covered by” the technical term zhen 貞 “test, certify”. The stark minimalism of these hard statistics indicates an enormous disparity with divi- nations produced by Anyang-based diviner groups working for the Shang kings where it is rec- orded with a mesmerizing regularity. The regulated and limited usage of divinations introduced by this word in the HYZ OBI indicates a fundamental difference between divination for the Shang kings and divinations for other people, including members of the royal family. A corpus-based approach to these divination accounts detects a refined and complex multi-step divinatory prac- tice at work; there were levels to it. There was a difference between divinations introduced by the word zhen and those without it. I reject the hypothesis that a divination account without the word zhen in the preface should be understood and read as though it were there (Jao Tsung-I 1959: 70). It is also inaccurate to refer to all divination statements in the HYZ corpus as zhenci 貞辭 “test statements” (Li Xueqin 2006: 198), since statistically such a low percentage actually were. Introducing a divination statement in HYZ divination practice with zhen “test” had two main applications: 1) to verify the results of an earlier divination (446.15-21, 181.31-35, 123 + Jiyi 561, 446.8, and 61); and 2) to find out the right course of action as it concerned mortality, health, and well-being. 56/125 (45%) instances of “test” divinations were of this second type, and amongst these, 44/56 (79%) of divinations specifically inquired into whether or not an animate subject (human/animal) would die or have something bad or calamitous happen (examples are 53.25, 241.11, and 321.5). 64/125 (51%) of test divinations were in an abbreviated shorthand and only recorded the word zhen and the name of a person. There is debate about the orientation of this set of inscriptions and whether they should be read “zhen + name”, or in the reverse as “name + zhen”. Test divinations about the person called Xian in the two-shell set 78.2-3 and 464.1-2 strongly suggest that “zhen + name” is the more accurate reading, at least 82 | HYZ 3