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Reports from the Shang: A Corroboration and Some Speculation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

David N. Keightley
David N. Keightley*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720
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Abstract

Scholars trained in Taiwan tend to read the oracle-bone crack notation as shang chi, “highly auspicious”; scholars in the People's Republic read the same graphs as erh kao,“two reports.” In the first part of this article, a reexamination of the evidence, which was significantly assisted by Ho Hou-hsüan's presence at Berkeley, leads me to conclude that, contrary to what I wrote in Sources of Shang History, erh kao is the correct reading. The second part of the article considers the possible meaning of various kao crack notations, how certain strategic period II inscriptions might be punctuated and translated, and how we can explain the disappearance of kao and the appearance of chi, “auspicious,” as a crack notation in period III and later; some account of the discussions at the Berkeley “Workshop on Divination and Portent Interpretation in China” is provided. Finally, I suggest that kao, “report,” may have referred to the sounds produced by the cracking, but it is clear that we need to know more about the technical aspects of crack production. The comments of five scholars on the hypotheses proposed are given at the end of the article, together with my reply.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
Early China , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , 1985 , pp. 20 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1983 

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References

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