Who were the Dingling: Part II

Sun Aug 19 22:37:50 UTC 2001

First, the tao-as-knife and proto-pi disc forms are
from Mogil Tepei xol[Minusinsk Basin], and can be seen
in Kudiakov, T.U.S., Kyrgyzy na Tabate, Novosibirsk:
Nauka sibirskoe otd-nie, (1982):pp. 55, 66-68,112,
123, 125, 129, and three examples of bridles on horses
on p.133.

This fish and moon motif corresponding to Hopkins'
graph #13 of the shaman is the precise motif on the
 horse tack examples found in the study of the
Predmatov cultural complex, 'Kopenski yaa
tas[VIII-IXbb.], in D.G.Savinov, Narody t uzhnoi
sibiri v drevnetiurksuiu epokhy, Leningrad:Izd-vo
leningradskogo universiteta, (1984), Plate V, #3. What
is pictured here is a fish, on either side of which
are two crescent moons. This is opposed to the lunar
eclipse in that the parts of the sun passing into and
going out of, would take the place of the moons in the
design. Thus, a 'sun-anti-sun/christ-anti-christ'
motif, and the idea of a 'blaze' on a horse's
forehead.

Hopkins, The Word Wu 'Shaman' as Graphic Camouflage,
New China Review(1920):

'Coming to the sound of these restored symbols, we
find in its later scription viz.:____it is not
pronounced huo, or any variation of that sound, but
i. We want, then, some word pronounced i or yeh, but
having such a sense as could be fittingly represented
to the eye by a picture of flames. Does such a word
exist? Once more, the answer is in the affirmative.
Although not found in the Shuo Wen, Kangshi cites from
other dictionaries a character ___'i,' and on the
authority of the Yu P'ien, gives the meaning of ___
___'firelight.'

Accordingly it is this word i, 'firelight,' which in
my belief was the syllable primitive written more or
less as in my hypothetical restoration shown in figure
13, and later as ___, later still by ___. And when
ultimately the borrowed senses of 'armpit,' and
'also,' had obscured the true meaning 'firelight,'(a
fate to which homophonous words were constantly
exposed in Chinese), the phonetic compounds cited by
Kangshi were devised to represent by a different
method the primary meaning once illustrated by ___'i.'

Such is the explanation I venture to put forward to
account for the presence of the symbol ___ at the
foot of the Archaic character ___ling,....But assuming
that ____ did in fact convey ideographically the sense
of firelight or flame,[why] was it sought to attach
this idea to the image of a posturing shaman?....But a
hypothesis is not necessarily an illusion....I trust
that future discoveries may either confirm my
conjectures or prove how they are erroeous....The
thesis now proposed is that not only is the shaman
represented in the character ___wu, and seen in his
ceremonial functions in the most archaic type of
___ling, but that disguised out of all recognition
he is present also in ___wu, 'not-to-have,' and
furthermore that it is no other than he, who with
large and emphatic feet, is posturing in the
compound ___wu 'to dance.'

....In the phraseology of divination by the shih
plant, it is said, 'So-and-so, the son of his
ancestors approaches him.'...In the upper register I
read 'Bade the shaman make-offering for rain,' in the
lower, 'Bade the shaman make rain.' Tso-yu is a
recognized phrase for thaumaturgic rain-making as the
Pei Wen Yun Fu proves: 'Wang pu cheng tien ling
wang[lai wu]tsai wang-yueh shi tz'u chi huo chui erh
po shih wu fu i chih erh [The king took an omen as to
hunting in Ling:[nothing]harmful in going[or
returning]. The king's ____ said good luck. It is now
noted that there were captured birds, 215, hare 1,
pheasants 2.'

The character here transcribed chi 'recorded' is left
undecipherable by Lo Chen-yu, and is conjectural on my
part. It is also possible that '215' should be '115',
but as in numerous other passages both on bronze and
these bones, the multiple of the hundred (or of ten)
is so closely attached to the following figure that it
is hard to know in this case whether both the
horizontal stroke or only the upper one are to be
reckoned.

This peculiarity is frequently found on bronzes in
enumerating gifts of horses, and where in modern
Chinese ___ ___ ___ma ssu p'i 'of horses four head'
would be written, we have in numerous instance first
the old form of ma, then three horizontal strokes,
then the fourth horizontal serving both as the fourth
digit and as upper stroke of the last character, p'i.'
Hopkins here may have another key: ....or, a 'horse's
forehead.'

The earliest known proto-writing from China thus far
can be seen at
http://www.muc.de/~tueting/ARCHAIC.RXML
Though the writer here states that it is simply a
list of animals caught from a hunt. There are three
characters, possibly more, that may point to Hopkins'
work as being the clue not only to the jade p'i disc,
but to deciphering this proto-text.

In the fourth column from the left, second graph
from the bottom is a hare. A bird is also represented,
and possibly also a horse. The word for 'hunting' or
'going to the river to hunt,' may also be here.
Lastly, the allusive phoenix may be hiding here as
well. Interestingly, the hare graph has a line
drawn across the leg. Hopkins continues:

'Thus, on a miniature broadsword of bone in my
collection we find the form ___in the expression ___
___ling chien 'magic sword'(fig.5) and again on
H.437....in ling pi 'magic disc.'....equally
pronounced ling, meaning a handbell....figure 10 is
chou ___'to cast metal.'

Naturally, it is speculative to suggest that the
Dingling could have been responsible for contributing
metallurgy or shamanism into the Uralic (Ket or Arin,
for instance), yet if jade was being exported, or if
seals were being harpooned on Lake Baikal, if people
were migrating, then it becomes a possibility. This
could happen relatively swiftly, considering those
rivers that flow north...or those from the Selengge to
the Pacific such as the Shilka or Amur. In this case,
and depending on the route, there seems a minimun
total portage of less than 100 miles.

'The tailgan of the Water Khans is arranged at a
river, the participants drinking the water thereof,
and divining, not by means of throwing down the cups,
but by pouring melted tin upon the water....The
domestic blacksmiths, the master heats the iron and
strikes it with a hammer, whilst tha shaman reads the
prayers.'
[Klementz, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, V.3,
p.17]

The mark on the leg of the hare at the URL mentioned
above could have a semantic equivalent in those
tatoos, the camel brands, which include the whorl
pattern found in Bates, 'Ethnographic Notes from Marsa
Matruh,' Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and
Ireland(1915):716-739. Figures 11 and 12 have two
horizontal lines on the upper part of the leg, fig. 3
is the whorl just behind the nose, reminiscent of
Mair's article on Tocharian whorls and the
introduction of the chariot into Central Asia.

What could be proto-taos and proto-pi discs are found
in the Kemerovskoy Oblast of mammoth bones, and are
described in Inst. arkheologii etnographii, Godova i a
itogova i a sessi i a (5th, 1997):103-107. The
symbolic idea of the eclipse model could well have
come from fire emerging from around the tinder of a
fire-drill. These items appear to have holes in them,
reminiscent of Chinese knife-money.

Mike Lawrence <hoosiersky2002 at yahoo.com>

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