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On the Meaning of Shang In The Shang Dynasty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

Kwang-chih Chang
Kwang-chih Chang*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138
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Abstract

For nearly a century scholars have debated the meaning of the oracle ¬bone graph shang 商 used by the Bronze Age theocracy in reference to itself and one of its settlements. Since the Zhou, the word shang has borne a political significance as the term for a ruling power group, yet there is no agreement as to the graph's meaning or why it stood as the eponym of China's first historic civilization. Following from Wang Guo-wei's 1923 contention that shang was first a place name — a claim attested to in inscriptions in the common phrase dayi shang (great settlement Shang), the present essay finds that this place was the hallowed site of the ancestral sacrifices of the Zi clan, and offers philological and artifactual evidence that the graph shang first depicted a rite performed before an ancestral image. Over the course of several centuries, the original, literal meaning of shang as the graphic depiction of the telling ritual, gao 吿, was generalized and extended to refer to the ancestral temple, the city where the temple was located, and finally to the Shang dynasty itself.

近一個世紀以來, 學者們一直在辯論甲骨文中商人用來自稱或指其城邑的״商״字的意義究竟何在.遠自周朝起,״商״即用來指有統治權勢的一族因而帶有很强的政治含義, 但對該字之本義以及其如何成爲中國歷史上第一個王朝的名字學者們尙未達成共識.王國維在1923年指出״商״原爲地名, 從第一到第五期的卜辭都證實這一說法是有根據的.本文以爲該地原爲子族祭祀先祖的神聖之地, 並以語文學及器物上的證據證明׳׳商״的字形原爲對在祖先像前舉行某種祭祀活動之描繪.在其後的幾百年中,״商״字的原始及字面意義從描繪舉行“吿”禮而逐漸一般化,擴大化到可以用來指宗廟,宗廟所在的都邑,最後以至商王朝本身.

Type
Articles
Information
Early China , Volume 20 , 1995 , pp. 69 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1995

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