| Soothsaying originated from the auspice superstition in primitive religious beliefs. In ancient times, human beings regarded the coincidences among different happenings in their affiliation with the natural world and also in their activities in order to survive, which had no cause-effect relation among themselves, as the premonition instructed by ghosts and gods. A long time of such practice had resulted in consciousness communication between men and gods by use of some auspice instruments as a medium. Thus relevant augury signs were created to predict good or ill luck, blessing or disaster in the near future. No sooner had the inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells of the Shang Dynasty been found than they were regarded by many experts as the "soothsaying text in the Yin Dynasty-the latter part of the Shang Dynasty". Sun Yerang initiated the research of soothsaying by bones or tortoise shells, whose work was furthered by scholars like Luo Zhenyu and Dong Zuobin, and later in-depth research was carried out by Qu... All these have promoted the systematization and theorization of the study in this field. Along with newly discovered archeological articles, a great number of ancient soothsaying materials, bone or tortoise shell soothsaying materials, soothsaying documents including The Book of Change of the Chou Dynasty as well as other auspice materials have been increasingly found. Based on the research achievements of the scholars in both ancient and contemporary times, established in the achievement of archeological and cultural study, this dissertation has made full use of some precious excavated subterranean materials as well as records and documents handeddown from ancient times in order to make systemic pectination and full-scale analyses and to probe into the origin of bone or tortoise shell soothsaying tradition.This dissertation aims at forming a more complete and intuitionistic understanding of the forepart bone and tortoise shell materials through systematic trimming of ancient bone and tortoise shell auspice records. Based upon this, this paper probes into the origin of bone or tortoise-shell soothsaying and summarizes different types of archeological cultures. The author endeavors to find the internal relation and the corresponding relevance in its development so as to further probe into the traits of its origin, its changes through history, its influence on the Shang society, and the soothsaying practice in the Chou Dynasty and its relevant issues. This paper innovates in the following aspects. First, it has systematically trimmed and neatly summarized the auspice bone practicality excavated through this century. Second, it has made horizontal and longitudinal comparison between these auspice bone materials in order to unravel its significance and effect on ancient culture and religion. Third, the analyses of different archeological cultures in turn help to determine the time and type of a certain archeological culture by using auspice bone practicality and other excavated utensils as reference and evidence. So the elaborating research in this paper has filled in the gaps in the fields of bone or tortoise shell study.The bone or tortoise shell auspice practice in the ancient Chinese civilization has a complete system with a long history and endless development. The author of this dissertation endeavors to find out the effect and influence of bone or tortoise shell auspice in the Yin and Chou Dynasties through tracing and exploring its origin.In ancient auspice practices, tortoise shell auspice may have an origin which is different from bone auspice. But t|ie fact is that the burning of tortoise shell appeared much later, which indicates that as a form of auspice, it might be an imitation of bone auspice. In the soothsaying practices in the Shang and Western Chou Dynasties, tortoise shell auspice and bone auspice were equally applied. And from the Eastern Chou Dynasty, soothsaying began to be limited to tortoise shell auspice. Ancient people thought that the images on tortoise shel... |
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