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What do you think this acient Chinese expression means?


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As this is very pre-Shang, it's hard to say. I would be hesitant to connect it to any Chinese philosophy that arose in the warring states era. It's possible it's a depiction of a deity, a sign of fertility, or some spiritual connection. But it's just a fun guessing game; I couldn't tell you in the slightest. 

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  • 10 months later...
On 3/31/2021 at 9:42 PM, Ericchiriboga said:

As this is very pre-Shang, it's hard to say. I would be hesitant to connect it to any Chinese philosophy that arose in the warring states era. It's possible it's a depiction of a deity, a sign of fertility, or some spiritual connection. But it's just a fun guessing game; I couldn't tell you in the slightest. 

Since this is a guessing game, I'd say it suggests knowledge of Dactyloscopy/Fingerprinting. See the whorls & loops motif around what appears to be the eyes, nose, and mouth, and in the forehead region. 

🤔

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It has all the hallmarks of a scribal writing (very ornate, very sophisticated) that later derived in more sketchy pictographs. I would go with @Ericchiriboga's guess that it's very ancient. My rough idea is that it's one of those scribal symbols that have been found carved in bone, and going back to the birth of agriculture in China. Han civilisation?

It does look like it's been carved in bone.

It's perhaps interesting that the "radiating motif" on the top is strongly reminiscent of very common radicals in modern Chinese that very much look like a crown on top of the symbol.

I've been trying to install Tagaini Jisho, which is an excellent Japanese dictionary, with no success, due to a problem of paths in the binary. As kanji Japanese is a simplified version of written Chinese, and this dictionary allows you to do a search by radical, it could be interesting to try to figure out what modern pictograph more closely corresponds to it.

Too bad @Strange is no longer around. Maybe someone else is familiar with Chinese pictographs.

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  • 1 month later...

Looks amazing) surprisingly, from the first sight I didn't even see anything resembling human. Now I see 2 human faces: a little one in the upper part and the big one as the whole composition. No doubt, the skill of the creator is outstanding, there are so many tiny details. And most of them survived till nowadays, that's wonderful.

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