The Qi Family Tree Bone Inscription refers to the Xia dynasty king list, and the deciphered bone names match the names of the Xia kings recorded in the classics. First, this bone inscription is authentic according to Sarah Allan and Kuang Yu Chen’s recent study of the engraved strokes of script viewed under microscope. Secondly, this paper introduces the interactive events between Xia Si (夏姒) people and Shang royal people in the Shang bone texts, such as the Shang conquest of the Xia Si, using the Xia people to serve the Shang King affairs, resettling the Xia people north and letting them fight others. This paper specifically interprets the bone scripts of Xia Si to mean that Xia indicates lowland for farming, and Si is the family name of the Xia recorded in the classics. The script for Si (surname) is derived from the image of a silkworm, as the Si are a silkworm totem people. Another decoded script for Xia is a river name, Xia (river) is named after “canal digging and irrigating”. Third, this paper deduces that the Xia people were living in the Jiang Xia (now Jiang Han or Jiang and Han rivers) plains, the Shijiahe site is the ruins of the Xia or Pre-Xia, and a large number of the Shijiahe red pottery figurines for dances were unearthed, which is consistent with the Xia dance and music recorded in the classics. The unearthed jade statues of deities look like silkworm moths, which corresponds to Xia Si being a sericulture tribe. After the Shijiahe culture, the Xia people built a last capital at Panlongcheng (or Panlong City), near the Xia River outlet. Because the classic Poem for the war epic named Shang Hero (殷武) says, “Got there the hero Cheng Tang (達彼殷武), went to conquer Jing Chu in strength (奮伐荊楚, Jing Chu 荊楚is the alternative name of Jiang Xia 江夏).” Another classic Poem for the Shang national epic called Long Growth (長發) says, “The states of Gu and Wei have been conquered (顧韋既伐).” The Gu and Wei are the current Xiangyang 襄陽 and Suixian 隨縣 on the east and west pathways to the Jiang Xia Basin from the Yellow River Basin, based on their ancient names and their sounds being homophonic. After occupying the states of Gu and Wei, the Shang army went south to form a situation of surrounding the Panlongcheng site of the Jiang Xia Plain. Thus, King Jie of Xia gave up the capital and went north to through the Ming Pass (present-day Wusheng Pass 武勝關) to the Huai River Plain of the East People 東夷, and there was the Battle of Ming Tiao in the Ming Pass. Finally, this study introduces an article about the oracle bone script ten classifications or designs, explaining how to decipher a script. The script for names engraved on the bone tablet were deciphered, corresponding to the name of the Xia Emperors in the classics. The meaning of the deciphered characters of the Xia Emperor names is consistent with the deeds of the Xia Emperors recorded in the classics. In the Qi family genealogy, there are inscriptions of the event of an older brother dying and his younger brother assuming the throne, which matches the record in the classics.

The oracle bone script is an ideograph that represents an idea or concept rather than a word or speech sound in general. The ‘ten writings’ means the ten methods used to create characters, to show how ideographs to express a concrete subject and an abstract concept. Ten Writings includes (1) character’s form picturing (象形), (2) form marking (指事), (3) form-form resembling (比喻), (4) form narrating (敘事), (5) form-pattern transferring (字式), (6) form-form modifying (偏正), (7) form-form suggesting (轉注), (8) form borrowing (形借), (9) form-meaning borrowing (意借), (10) form-sound borrowing (音借). The traditional six-fold classification scheme (Six Writings) was originally popularised in the 2nd century CE, is not a guide for the reader on how to decipher an unknown bone script. Ten Writings (十書) system is not a theorization analysis, is an operation manual to deciphering the oracle bone scripts, illustrated through some specific instances below. A script called “Yi, 以” ( , later , turned 90 degrees to show properly, similarly hereinafter) shows “a worm ( ) which has a big head and a long tail and a woman ( )”, it is understood as the “woman looking after the worm”. Later, its simplified form is a “worm ( )” only, which is from （ ）and means “worm totem people”. It is common to find a shape with more than two functions in Chinese characters. Therefore, this script Yi of “using worm for silk and cloths” extends “use”, “by means of” and “with”, it sounds Yi. In other perspective, the “worm” also means “(cloths process) start” and “begin”. And “(the silk people) looks like each other” and “similar”, so the “worm” is also a symbol of “similar”. Because the costume worn by people in ancient times was a nation identification. The same word “worm” for “start” and “similar” sounds Si (silk). The Chinese word for silk also sounds Si. In a worm totem perspective, the script Si means “worm people”. Similarly, the script for “sheep people” is represented as a man wearing a headdress of sheep horns. In addition, the worm character may be pictured from silkworm, later the proper noun “silkworm” was used as the general term “worm”. Now the character “worm” includes worm, insect and snake, even some animals. The variant of Si ( , “worm”) is written as ( , , , “worm”), which are the same as ( , , ) being used for a tribe name. When a common script may be simplely written as ( , “worm”), if a same script for tribal name may be decoratively written as ( ), as the word of the name are written in capital letter. The tribal name Si 以 ( ) is the surname of the Xia dynasty royal family Si 姒 in the Classic of Shiji 史記, the bone text “Xia Si 下以” is the Xia Si 夏姒for the Xia dynasty in the classics. The Shang oracle bone script for the idea BORROW is shown as an ideogram (Jia 假, ) combining a pictogram SHOULDERING-HOE (荷, “farming”, “carrying”) and a pictogram SUN, it together suggests a third scene “under the sun a woman carries a hoe to irrigate the rice fields”, meaning “farming”, “peasant”; in other perspective “borrow sunlight to farm”. The Jia 假and Xia 夏 were one word, and the bone texts for the Jia 假 are about the Xia River 夏水where the Xia dynasty lived.

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.