The Study Of Characters Involving Physical Injury In Yin And Shang Oracle Bone Inscriptions

The Shang Dynasty was a slave dynasty that widely used torture,with a wide variety of penalties and cruel means.The slaveholder class often humiliated and ravaged the bodies of slaves or captives.There are a considerable number of characters in oracle bone inscriptions that show the state or action of human body being harmed by human beings,which can be compared with the records of human sacrifice,punishment and war in Shang Dynasty in handed down literature.If summarized as ’ penalty word ’,it cannot cover its complete connotation.Therefore,it is necessary to redefine and systematically examine the words of physical violence.In this paper,’human body injury word ’ is used as a new aggregation name,covering the words related to the persecution of human body and the physical casualties.In the aggregation class of this kind of characters,the glyph contains ’ humanoid ’ components as the main body of death or injury in the motivation of word formation,and assists in adding knives,instruments,ropes and other pictographic components that cause physical disability or other ways of injury such as water and fire.In the selection of glyphs,this paper selects the representative glyphs in different groups of each single character and classifies them according to the characteristics of configuration.Mainly based on the glyphs included in the ’ new oracle bone inscriptions ’,and referring to the original rubbings of the ’oracle bone inscriptions collection ’ to analyze the glyphs and texts.The oracle bone inscriptions and related ancient writing materials are compared with the handed down documents and dictionaries,and the academic interpretation opinions are comprehensively interpreted.The first chapter,combined with the handed down literature records,defines the human body harm behavior and the human body harm word.The word of human body injury is divided into two parts:the second chapter expounds the word of personal injury,the word of binding injury,the word of instrument and the word of fire injury;the third chapter expounds the words of organ corporal punishment,the words of cutting,the words of suffocation and the words of hammering.In the fourth chapter,it analyzes and explains the characters of the victims with outstanding characteristics in oracle bone inscriptions.In the fifth chapter,we try to summarize the text characteristics of the human body harm words and the merchant’s world view.The discussion of this paper is in order to systematically present the glyph characteristics of human body injury characters in oracle bone inscriptions,and to explore the organic relationship between oracle bone inscriptions and the history of Yin and Shang dynasties from this perspective.