Similar to Sumerian proto-cuneiform writing, the nature of Chinese writing is fundamentally ideographic, in which concepts or thoughts are represented visually rather than through abstract speech sounds. This paper explores ten ways to form Chinese characters by using the decoded characters through their ideograms. A character comes from thoughts, the thoughts come from images, and the images themselves come from the object or the event depicted. Therefore, the same character can be used in different dialects or languages to depict the same concepts. Only when there are enough ideograms to create their graphs for phonography can we develop phonography. During the first stage of hundreds of years, most Sumerian clay characters were pictograms and ideograms. The majority of the phono-semantic compounds appeared in the second stage when the foreign Akkadians used Sumerian characters. Just as the majority of Shang bone characters were pictograms and ideograms, most phono-semantic compound characters were modified and created by the foreign Zhou people later. At present, western theories have not followed the traditional path to the meaning of thought. The ten strategies of ideographic writing are the conventional path to the meaning of thought, rather than a bridge between language.

The words for the moon phase in the inscriptions on bronze wares in the Zhou dynasty are open to different interpretations, and the calculation of the moon phase dates clarifies the ambiguities of the bronze moon phase words. Calculation of the time interval between the calendar solunar dates in two bronze ware inscriptions can be made, because the calendar solunar dates (gan-zhi 干支) were in a constant cycle of 60 days. Calculation of the date interval between the two moon phases on the same two bronze ware inscriptions also can be made , because the moon phase is also in cycles. The narrative tradition in the inscriptions of the Shang and Zhou dynasties includes a date series: the day in the solunar cycle, the month and the year of a king’s reign, and the day in the moon phase cycle. By comparing whether the two intervals meet or not, one can verify whether the bronze moon-phase idioms are meaningful, and it can also be confirmed whether the chronology of the kings of Zhou compiled by the previous scholars is resonable and create a new chronology through iterative calculation. The time intervals calculated in this paper chronicle every imperial event from the Zhou dynasty to the Shang dynasty, which rebuild a new chronology for the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. All modern attempts are hindered by a basic assumption, that the bone calendar of the Shang Dynasty is the same as the bronze calendar of the Zhou Dynasty, but it is completely different from the bronze calendar of Zhou, when reading the Bronze Annals (this paper) alongside the Bone Annals (last paper) and as seen in Table 24. In addition, although the inscriptions related to the lunar phases are extremely difficult to understand, through computation, the records of three lunar eclipses on bronze vessels in the Zhou and Shang dynasties are newly recognized, which helps to reconstruct a new chronological list of the kings of Zhou.

The four angels standing on the four corners of the earth and the four winds of the earth by season are a same concept in a Shang Oracle Bone inscriptions. By the Yellow River in middle China, there are easterly winds during spring, southerly winds during summer, westerly winds during autumn and an northerly winds during winter. For example, when the Shang people saw the monsoon coming from the east for several days, they believed it shows that the angel of the east had come here, and announced that spring had come and they started farming. Even today the farmers are not only based on the calendar’s date to farm, also check up the new temperature keep for several days. Similarly when the southern monsoon comes and keeps, the Shang people know it is summer. However, due to seasonal lag, May, June, July, August and September are the warmest months in the middle China, it is not generally recognized that the four seasons on the calendar are equal. Two unearthed Shang bone tablets record the names (features) of the four angels on the four corners of the earth and their four winds of the earth, but so far wrongly explaining seven out of the eight characters in the bone script which name the four-end-wind inscription bone tablet. This paper deciphers the following bone scripts: The character Vibrate震 ( ), pictured that a mouth ( ) issues three forces ( ), which means shouting, the god shouting means thunderclap, the dog’s shouting means shock to awe, the belly’s shouting means pregnancy and birth娠. The character for sprout, separating out, spearing out and exploding out is depicted as Xi 析 ( ) , depicting an axe ( ) to a tree ( ). Thus, on the famous four-end-wind inscription bone tablet, the first inscription says 東方曰析，風曰震 “the east angel names Xi ‘dawn or budding’, the spring wind means thunder or birth (or the spring wind angle names thunder)”. The character Assist襄 ( ) is a picture of a host ( ) around two aliens (夷， ) and walk (行 ), it means the host helps the aliens to walk around his land. The picture is also seen as a Multiracial Zone, like a soil in which several grasses root togerther, thus it means Soil 壤. And the multi-race fusion leads culture prosperity, thus it means Rich and Varied 穰. The character Grow 長 ( ) is a person figure with long hair, in which the plant grows in a way similar to the man hair grows. One of the strategies is for the scribe to create a narrative picture (Chinese character) on the parable of the most familiar thing (for example, human body parts). Thus, the second inscription reads 南方曰襄，風曰長 “the south angel names Rich or Assistance, the summer wind means growth”. The character Dye 染 ( ), depicting a tree 木 ( ) with hatching 彡 ( ), it means the tree with multicolors, or dye is made from plants. The character Bride-kidnapping 彝 ( ), depicting two hands holding a girl with her arms back, it means marriage and extends the meaning of the cardinal law. In other perspective, it means Capture, Receive and Harvest 收 ( ). One shape is with two functions in Chinese characters. Thus, the third inscription says 西方曰染，風曰收 “the west angel names Dye or Color, the autumn wind means harvest”. The character Hug, Pack, Wrap and Womb 勹（ ）is a figure of a woman bows down and hugs a baby but the baby is omitted. Similarly a script for riding a horse is depicted as Yi 夷 and Qi 騎 ( ， ， ), the horse is omitted. The character Destroy毀 ( ), composed of an honoust man ( ) under the hand-mallet ( ). Thus, the fourth inscription says 北方曰包，風曰毀 “the north angel names Pack or Seed, the winter wind means destruction”. The first three pairs of characters Sprout-Birth, Enrich-Growth, Colour-Harvest are mutual glossing, the last pair of characters Pack-Destroy is in opposite, which forms a cycle.

Modern attempts to decipher the Shang bone scripts have been hampered by the fundamental assumption that the scripts are recordings of the sound of the language and not ideas. Some phonetic “translations” could be proposed without the possibility of verification, and some graphic “translations” without meanings are seen as the names of sacrificial rituals by previous scholars. Actually, a character is derived from a thought, and the thought is derived from a figuration, while the figuration itself is derived from the graphed object or event. Therefore, the same character can be used in different dialects or languages to depict the same concepts. Based on the bone scripts being ideograms, several bone scripts used frequently for the names of the day were assumed to be the moon phases; thus, the time interval between two corresponding days with its moon phase was calculated for verification. Extensionally, according to the time interval between the two days, and the moon phase recorded on the bone tablets (or bronze wares) and the chronological table of the kings of Shang compiled by the pre vious scholars, the assumptions of the moon phase characters are attested by the calculations of the numbering days of the solunar date. Solunar dates (Chinese: Gan-Zhi 干支) were used to record dates with a cycle of 60 days. Conversely, on consideration of the dates and moon phases for the bone inscription events, the prevous chronology is improved with iterative methed, and we propose new chronology for Shang kings. In addition, through computation, three records of a lunar eclipse on the Shang bronze inscriptions and on the Zhou bronze vessels are newly recognized, which helps to reconstruct the years of the kings of Shang and of the kings of Zhou; the Shang bone calendar’s New Year started from the summer solstice of the year, from the full moon of the lunar phase and from the dawn of the day.

The original graphs cannot be made up, they must have something like them. The meaning of a graph is what it looks like and its implication, which belongs to the content word (which carry semantic content). With the need of grammar, when the meaning of a content word does not indicate the meaning of the sentence, but the relationship between other content words in the sentence, the content word becomes a function word or grammatical word. A Shang bone script for god’s will, god said and someone said is dipected as wei隹 ( “eagle”). The consensus amongst the cycle’s scholars is that the word wei 隹 (only, along) is often seen and used as a function word in ancient Chinese classic books. At first, a script was created to describle the represented object and its symbolic meanings. A word in the Oracle Bone Inscriptions is used as a content word in most of the cases, and also used as a function word in a few cases discovered by scholars. Thus the word wei隹(bird pictograph) in the Shang bone texts first should be a content word, is a pictogram of the bird, in which its meanings were expressed iconically as “bird say, angel say, tell angel, talk by the messenger between man and god”. And in the later period of the Oracle bone text the script was added kou 口(oral) to emphasis “say” and became as a new graph wei 唯. The function word wei 隹 (only, along) can be derived from its content meaning “god says”, and the content word wei 隹 (say, tell, allegedly) can be used to read the Oracle bone and the Bronze inscriptions and the classic books in their literal sense and logically, and to give an answer to some puzzling problems in the inscriptions. Through this discussion, we have used many examples of Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Jinwen, in which there are many undeciphered words. The purpose of this paper is to show how to decipher the Oracle bone scripts by using these undeciphered words. The key point is that the meaning of Oracle bone script comes from its shape, not its sound.

The oracle bone characters do not represent words of the language but thoughts or concepts. The bone text did not record an oral language. Perhaps we can say that it recorded an artificial language. The French scholar, Léon Vandermeersch says that the oracle bone inscriptions are a formula. A better analogy is to say that it is like a computer language. Is it English? The answer is yes, but it is not like English at all. Similar to Sumerian protocuneiform writing, the nature of Chinese writing is fundamentally ideographic, in which concepts or thoughts are represented rather than speech. This paper will present hundreds of examples of the oracle bone scripts that demonstrate these qualities. Excavated deer antlers Г-shaped axe and hoe and Г-shaped spear are figurative in the Oracle script jin 斤 (axe) and bing 兵 (weapon). A number of ideograms are derived from the Г-axe character. The ideograms of Sumer, Mo-so, English and Oracle script, are created from thoughts and by recording these thoughts, they are similar to narrative arts that express emotions. So an ideograph, which records ideas, not words or sounds, sometime also creates language. In addition, other kinds of small and light antler Г-shaped spear can be tied to the front end of a long slender and flexible pole, waved in a swinging motion instead of thrust. This weapon has a much longer killing distance than a spear for thrust. Bing-Г (兵) perhaps is the key technology of Shandong Longshan Culture from the Central Plains, and the predecessor of Ge-Г (戈).

The intent of this paper is to introduce a method of deciphering oracle bone characters; specifically the interpretation of the Compound Ideograph. Utilizing this method, the article applies known characters to hypothesizing the expression of unknown characters. This view of Chinese characters comes from such work as I Ching or Classic of Changes and Shi-poem or Classic of Poetry, where the figurative mean and depiction of a realistic scene or parable are captured and symbolized within a pictorial representation or ideograph. By returning pictographic combinations to the realistic scene, all the meanings of an ideograph are derived from the scene and scene’s parable. The following explains the correlation between the combinations with the intended meaning. The ideographs are shown in that the first part is the pronunciation sound in Chinese while the second part in italics is the scene combined pictographs. [1] The English character of Bow for shooting arrows is borrowed figuratively to express “to bend the knee or body, as in reverence, submission”, “to cause to bend; make curved”, and is extended to Bowl to denote the Container figure like a bow. [2] The character of Sol means the sun, and its scene maps a lonely man like the sun without partners around, so Sol is used to denote solitary (alone, lone), sole (single), etc. in its figurative sense. [3] The Chinese character Gou-ear (句) is a scene of the ear with an ear-hook. Gou-ear means the hook in ear’s figurative sense, for a man uses his ear as a hook, or an ear looks like a hook on the wall. In another perspective, Gou-ear depicts Be-hooked, meaning Arrest, Capture, or Chain-up. When an ancient encounters a hook or a man stooping to work, and tries to tell others about it, he may say a tool like the ear (projecting out of the head) or a man working like the ear (figure), which is similar to saying that it looks like a bow in the West. [4] A character Fu-man:tiger (赴) is made of a tiger and man, reading ‘the tiger is like a man standing up’. A scene-parable of the tiger standing suggests “pounce, jump”, extending its meaning to “go to like a tiger jump, dedicate on”. It is a man determinative ideograph: the tiger is determined by a man standing. ‘Man is read as his feature: standing’ is called semantic loan. Similarly, Yue-man:deer (跃), means a deer like a man standing, also meaning a leap. Xiong-man:pig (熊) means a bear; a pig standing is like the bear. [5] A character Lian-ear:mouth (聯) is a narrative scene of the mouth-ear-mouth, words to words through the ear, telling a narrative story of people that are connected in the ear in the wild restricted visibility, which is derived to the connection, union, and contact. [6] Dong-kid (動) means a move, a scene of a boy (semantic loan), for a child’s behavior is the non- stop action for a moment. [7] A character Yu-pup:gape (欲) is a scene of the mouth opened up, which maps ‘want’. Man’s want means wish, man’s want from heart or by nature is hard to draw and ancient Chinese oracle priest to draw ‘animal’s want’, which was used metaphorically to mean the very wish, appetite, and desire (sex, material). Overall, an ideo-character is a narrative picture or story which tells thoughts or ideas, not record language words, and then is pronounced the glyph in it later. Thus the character creates the word.