552 ANNUAL KEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 31 



spear ; and so on. But ideographs were also used ; thus wei, " to do," 

 is represented by a drawing of a hand guiding an elephant, just as 

 the " mali " guides the elephants piling teak in Eangoon to-day ; and 

 nien, " harvest " or " year," is pictured by a farmer bringing in 

 sheaves of grain on his back. 



How do we determine the modern equivalents of this ancient 

 script? We have no Eosetta stone such as provided the clue to the 

 ancient hieroglj^phics of Egypt. We must restrict ourselves to the 

 Chinese writing itself and trace the development of its characters 

 down through the various periods with the aid of actual archeologi- 

 cal evidence. Literary sources can not be trusted except when au- 

 thenticated by actual remains. Hence we are restricted to the 

 inscriptions on the bones themselves, on bronze vessels, and on stone. 

 Those on the bronzes are very important, and when we have elim- 

 inated the forgeries we have a valuable body of source material, 

 such as the San Shih P'an, now in the Old Palace in Peiping and 

 dating from about 860 B. C. Following the bronzes, we have the 

 Han stone monuments, mainly in the official or li script, which show 

 that the characters were first written with a brush and then carved 

 in the stone. From these we may trace the evolution of the Chinese 

 writing down to its present form, which has altered comparatively 

 little since the beginning of the Christian Era. This development 

 during the period from about 1400 B. C. down to the time of Christ 

 has to do mainly with the form of character. But what of its mean- 

 ing and of its sound ? At present I have catalogued all the charac- 

 ters in my own collection of bones and in most of those published 

 by others. For purposes of comparison I am arranging in order all 

 the sentences in which a given character appears, whether on the 

 bones, the bronzes, the early stone monuments, or in the classical 

 literary sources. From such an arrangement of these groups of 

 sentences, sometimes containing a hundred or more examples, it is 

 possible through comparison and a study of the context, largely to 

 fix the meaning of an individual character. In this task the reli- 

 ance has been very largely on the bone inscriptions, which have thus 

 been used to interpret themselves. 



As for the sound attached to the characters in the Shang Dynasty, 

 to my mind this problem is to be attacked by means of the "bor- 

 rowed characters" (chia chieh), where two characters having the 

 same sound are used interchangeably. In the Shang period it was 

 not uncommon for a simpler character to be substituted for a more 

 intricate one having the same sound. During the official examina- 

 tion period, when the so-called eight-legged essay was in vogue, 

 a man would have been " plucked " for using a character in this way. 

 Starting with this use of homophones and with the rhymes found on 

 the ancient bronze bells and in the Shih Ching or " Book of Odes," 



