Western Origins of Yijing?

[Cobie]

 

 

Who knows.  Most of the I Ching is from the Warring States period.  It’s origins are mythical (taken as fact by traditional texts). Modern scholarship dates the oldest bits to late 9th century BC (using bronze inscriptions). Rome's origins trace to around the 9th or 10th century BC as small settlements. 

 

Edited 12 hours ago by Cobie

[Nungali]

35 minutes ago, Cobie said:

 

 

Who knows.  Most of the I Ching is from the Warring States period.  It’s origins are mythical (taken as fact by traditional texts). Modern scholarship dates the oldest bits to late 9th century BC (using bronze inscriptions). Rome's origins trace to around the 9th or 10th century BC as small settlements. 

 

 

I and other know .... but apparently you dont  ?  

 

He   cited a date of 53 bc , which is why he was originally asked how that had to do with  9th C BC  ?  

 

And if you are postulating  that a few  small settlements  relating to Rome's origins ( that is not Rome itself :The first 'Roman Kingdom ' started  753 -509 bc  ) got a legion together to  do a military campaign into China   ...... well ..... all I can say is 

 

 

enjoy your burger 

 

 

 

 

Edited 12 hours ago by Nungali

[Apech]

It's completely irrelevant to the topic but relocation of defeated enemies to remote parts of one's empire is not without precedent.  The Persians did it.  So there may have been some ancient 'race' mixing I suppose.  But the I Ching is essentially Chinese whether or not some peoples moved from A to B in 1000BC or whatever.  After all the King James Bible is at the core of the English canon - but of course the Bible comes from the Middle East ... so ... what?

[Apech]

Indo-European:  Hi there!

Chinese: Yo person with a funny hat, how are you.

I.E.: Fine, fine, sorry about that bit of an invasion by the way.

Ch.: That's ok, it's happened before, it'll happen again.

I.E.:  I feel quite assimilated now by the way.

Ch.: So...what you been up to?

I.E.: Well it's strange, I dropped some sticks on the floor this morning and when I looked at the pattern I saw that my heifer will bring forth a piebald calf in the three months.

Ch.: Cool, sounds a bit like the ancient traditions of divination we have going back thousands of years.

I.E.: Well that's nice of you but it's just a pile of yarrow stalks at the end of the day.

Ch.: Well do you mind if I take your method and turn it into the most sublime and sophisticated system of divination ever created by mankind?

I.E.: Not at all, knock yourself out!  I'd help out but I have a burial mound to build.

Ch.:  Cheers then and say hi to the Sky Father for me.

I.E.: Right!  Catch you later Chinese guy.

 

(sorry sometimes when I've been on DaoBums a while my mind just gets out of control).

 

 

 

[心神 ~]

Neolithic China (c. 10,000–2000 BCE)

People shifted from hunting and gathering to farming, village life, and pottery. In the north, millet farming spread (often linked with cultures like Peiligang and later Yangshao, c. 5000–3000 BCE). In the lower Yangtze and southeast, rice farming grew early (often linked with Hemudu, c. 5000–3300 BCE). Later, large walled settlements and clear social ranking show up in the Longshan era (c. 3000–1900 BCE), with more conflict and regional leaders. In the southwest, the Sanxingdui area developed a powerful bronze culture a bit later (main phase c. 1200–1000 BCE), showing that “early China” was already many regions, not one center.

 

Erlitou / “Early Bronze Age” (c. 1900–1500 BCE)

This is a major bronze-working society centered in the middle Yellow River region. Many scholars connect Erlitou with the traditional Xia story, while others treat it as its own early state culture. It shows palaces, planned roads, elite burials, and large-scale bronze production.

• In Ramsden’s paper, the potential Proto-Indo-European / Indo-European influence on “China” is pushed back before Xia, into late Neolithic–early Bronze Age western China, then argued to crystallize in the early Zhou. He proposes that “a band of Indo-Europeans entered into west China early on and began to inhabit an area near a mountain where jade could be obtained”, and from there their descendants moved east and mixed with local matriarchal and agricultural tribes. From there, he sees traces, sustained influence by Western Zhou, especially through the Zhou–Qiang/Western Rong connection, Zhou’s Sky God worship, caste-like four occupations, and chariot burials, which he treats as the political expression of that earlier Indo-European stream.

Xia (traditional dates c. 2070–1600 BCE)

Traditional histories describe Xia as the first dynasty, linked to flood control and the rise of hereditary kingship (often tied to the story of Yu the Great). Archaeology supports early states in this time range, but the Xia name comes from later texts, so the match between text and excavated sites stays debated. The big historical shift here is the move into stronger centralized rule and early bronze-age state society.

 

Shang (c. 1600–1046 BCE)

Shang is the first dynasty with strong written evidence. Key events include the rise of a powerful royal house, major bronze ritual culture, and oracle bone divination (the earliest large body of Chinese writing). The late Shang capital at Anyang (Yinxu) shows royal tombs, war captives, and a state built around lineage, ritual, and warfare.

 

Zhou (c. 1046–256 BCE)

The Zhou defeated Shang and promoted the political idea later called the Mandate of Heaven, used to explain why rule can change hands. Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE) built a feudal-style network of allied states and kin-based rule. In 771 BCE, the western capital fell, and power shifted east. Eastern Zhou (770–256 BCE) splits into two famous eras: Spring and Autumn (770–476 BCE), when many states competed under a weakening Zhou king, and Warring States (475–221 BCE), when strong states fought for total control. This period also saw major philosophical traditions (Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, Mohism) and huge military and administrative reforms.

 

Qin (221–206 BCE)

Qin unified the warring states under Qin Shi Huang in 221 BCE. Major events include standardizing writing, weights, measures, and currency, building roads and defensive walls, and creating a highly centralized bureaucracy. The dynasty collapsed quickly after harsh policies, heavy labor demands, and rebellion. The Terracotta Army belongs to this period.

 

Han (206 BCE–220 CE)

A long, foundational dynasty. Western Han (206 BCE–9 CE) expanded territory and built strong state institutions; the Silk Road connections grew during Han expansion into the northwest. Confucian learning became central to government training and legitimacy. Wang Mang briefly interrupted as the Xin dynasty (9–23 CE) with reform attempts that triggered major unrest. Eastern Han (25–220 CE) restored Han rule but faced court faction fights, powerful landholders, frontier pressures, and big rebellions like the Yellow Turban Rebellion (184 CE), leading to fragmentation.

• 53 BCE → Battle of Carrhae happens during Western Han.
• Post-53 BCE → Roman prisoners relocated to Margiana (Pliny’s account).
• 36 BCE → Battle of Zhizhi (Ban Gu, Han Shu) also occurs during Western Han.
• After 36 BCE → Captives resettled in Liqian (Hexi Corridor, Gansu) also within Western Han.

 

Spoiler

 

The article gives the basic outline of the Battle of Carrhae, and ancient authors describe the same sequence. Plutarch writes that Crassus marched east “seeking to outdo the exploits of Pompey and Caesar” in Life of Crassus (§11–12), leading an army of about “forty thousand infantry” into Parthian territory. Cassius Dio, in Roman History 40.21–27, recounts the same campaign and describes the Parthian commander Surena using mounted archers and heavy cavalry to destroy the Roman columns. Plutarch states that “twenty thousand were said to have died and ten thousand taken prisoner” (Life of Crassus §25.7). He also records the story that after Crassus’ death the Parthians “poured molten gold into his mouth” (Life of Crassus §33), a detail repeated in later summaries.

 

For the fate of the ten thousand prisoners, the article’s reference to relocation eastward echoes Pliny the Elder. In Natural History 6.18, Pliny says that after the Parthian victory King Orodes II stationed Roman captives in “Alexandria in Margiana,” a fortified oasis on the northeastern frontier of Parthia. Pliny names the location and describes Margiana as a strategic border region. This is the main ancient statement about the Romans’ later location.

 

Seventeen years later, in 36 BCE, the campaign against Zhizhi appears in Chinese sources. Ban Gu’s Han Shu (Book of Han), in the “Xiongnu Annals” section (Han Shu 70), describes the attack on Zhizhi’s fortress. Ban Gu uses the phrase “arrayed like fish scales” (魚鱗陣) when noting how a group of Zhizhi’s soldiers formed up during the fighting. Later English-language summaries of Han Shu use that same wording to translate the formation described in the original text.

 

The argument linking this formation to Rome originates with Homer H. Dubs. In his 1941 note and in his 1957 article “A Roman City in Ancient China,” Dubs proposed that the “fish-scale formation” in Han Shu resembles the Roman testudo. Dubs wrote that the soldiers at Zhizhi “can scarcely have been other than the remnant of Crassus’ men settled by Orodes in Margiana” (Dubs, 1957). He based this on Pliny’s reference to Roman prisoners in Margiana and Ban Gu’s description of the formation at Zhizhi.

 

Ban Gu also records that, after the fall of Zhizhi’s fortress, General Chen Tang brought “many captives” back into Han territory and settled them on the western frontier. The Han Shu uses the term 驪靬 (Liqian) for a county in the Hexi Corridor. The name Liqian/Lijian appears earlier in Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), where it is used as a place-name for a western country known to the Han court. Dubs pointed to this earlier usage and proposed that the name Liqian reflected a Hellenistic or Greco-Roman toponym. In the 1957 article, he wrote that 驪靬 “represents the Chinese attempt at rendering ‘Alexandria’,” referring specifically to Alexandria in Margiana.

 

The article also mentions the idea that “Li-Jien sounds like ‘legion.’” This argument appears in later popular treatments. Chinese linguist Yang Gongle, quoted in China Daily (2007), addressed this by stating that “there is no link between the name Liqian and the Roman legions,” attributing the similarity to coincidence of modern pronunciation.

 

On genetic studies, the article refers to work done at Lanzhou University. Early 2000s local sampling in Zhelaizhai (identified with ancient Liqian in regional scholarship) reported West-Eurasian associated markers in some residents, a point widely repeated in press summaries. A later published genetic analysis is Ruixia Zhou et al., “Testing the hypothesis of an ancient Roman soldier origin of the Liqian people in northwest China: a Y-chromosome perspective,” Journal of Human Genetics 52 (2007): 584–591. Zhou’s team writes: “77% of the Liqian Y chromosomes were restricted to East Asia,” and concludes that “a Roman mercenary origin cannot be accepted as true according to paternal genetic variation.” These are the authors’ own words describing their results.

 

Archaeological commentary on Liqian appears in modern overviews, including summaries of the Dubs hypothesis. One such overview notes that “no artifacts that might confirm a Roman presence, such as coins or weaponry, have been discovered in Zhelaizhai,” and that this absence is the main reason “Dubs’ theories have not been accepted by the vast majority of historians.” This line appears in a descriptive passage about the state of evidence, not as an argument.

 

The article’s final point, that Rome and Han China were aware of one another, reflects repeated references in the Chinese histories. Sima Qian’s Shiji and Ban Gu’s Han Shu both use the name 大秦 (Da Qin) to refer to the Roman Empire. The Hou Han Shu (Book of Later Han) records embassies traveling along the long-distance trade routes in the first and second centuries CE. These texts give the historical basis for the article’s closing note that contact or travel between the two empires was possible.

 

 

 

Three Kingdoms (220–280 CE)

China divided among Wei, Shu, and Wu, with constant war and shifting alliances. This era is famous for strategy, fortress warfare, and later legends that shaped Chinese historical memory. Unification came when the Jin defeated Wu in 280.

 

Jin (266–420 CE)

Western Jin (266–316) reunified China briefly, then fell into internal conflict (elite civil wars) and invasions. Eastern Jin (317–420) held the south while the north fractured into multiple states. Large-scale migration to the south changed population patterns, economy, and culture for centuries.

 

Sixteen Kingdoms (c. 304–439 CE, mainly northern China)

A patchwork of short-lived states, many founded by non-Han elite groups, with constant warfare and shifting borders. Despite instability, this period helped spread Buddhism and reshaped northern politics.

 

Southern and Northern Dynasties (420–589 CE)

China stayed divided between southern courts and northern regimes. In the north, the Northern Wei (386–534) and successors pushed major reforms, including sinicization policies and support for Buddhism (famous cave temples and sculpture traditions). In the south, literati culture, poetry, and court life flourished, even as political control shifted between dynasties.

 

Sui (581–618 CE)

Sui reunified China and rebuilt strong central government. Major events include constructing the Grand Canal system to link north and south and launching massive military campaigns, including against Goguryeo, which drained resources and helped cause collapse.

 

Tang (618–907 CE)

Often seen as a high point of imperial culture and power. Tang expanded influence across Central Asia and strengthened institutions. Major events include the Wu Zetian reign (the only woman to rule as emperor in her own right, 690–705), the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) that devastated the empire and weakened central control, and the growth of cosmopolitan cities like Chang’an. Poetry, art, and Buddhism flourished, alongside later crackdowns and political turmoil.

 

Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907–960 CE)

After Tang fell, the north cycled through five short dynasties while the south and parts of the east had multiple stable regional kingdoms. It was a politically fragmented era but economically active, especially in the south.

 

Liao (916–1125 CE)

Founded by the Khitan, Liao ruled parts of the north and northeast and interacted with Song through treaties and border politics. Liao used dual administration styles to govern different populations.

 

Song (960–1279 CE)

A major period for economic growth, urban life, printing, education, and technology. Northern Song (960–1127) faced strong northern rivals and lost the north after the Jurchen invasion; the capital fell in 1127 (the Jingkang incident). Southern Song (1127–1279) rebuilt in the south with a strong economy and navy but eventually fell to the Mongols. Neo-Confucian scholarship became highly influential.

 

Western Xia (1038–1227 CE)

Founded by the Tangut people in the northwest. It controlled key Silk Road routes and often fought or negotiated with Song, Liao, and later Jin, before being conquered by the Mongols.

 

Jin (1115–1234 CE)

Founded by the Jurchen, Jin defeated Liao and took northern China from Song, ruling a powerful northern state. Jin later fell to the Mongols (with Southern Song as a temporary partner against Jin).

 

Yuan (1271–1368 CE)

The Mongol-led dynasty founded by Kublai Khan. Yuan ruled a vast empire framework, promoted long-distance trade, and connected China more directly into Eurasian networks. Social status hierarchies and heavy demands contributed to unrest. The dynasty fell amid rebellion and regional breakdown.

 

Ming (1368–1644 CE)

A Han-led restoration after Yuan. Ming strengthened bureaucracy, rebuilt agriculture, and expanded maritime power early on through the Zheng He voyages (1405–1433). Later centuries saw strong commercial growth, major urban culture, and also fiscal strain, frontier pressures, and internal rebellion. Beijing became the main capital; major rebuilding and expansion of the Great Wall happened across Ming rule.

 

Qing (1644–1912 CE)

Founded by the Manchu, Qing expanded China’s territory to its largest imperial extent and managed a multi-ethnic empire. Early Qing saw strong rulers and stability; later Qing faced major crises: the Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860), unequal treaties, internal uprisings like the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), and reform struggles. The dynasty ended in the 1911 Revolution, with the last emperor abdicating in 1912.

 

[Cobie]

China's book burning (213 BC),  later a lot of the lost texts were rewritten from memory/imagination. 

 

 

Edited 11 hours ago by Cobie

[心神 ~]

2 hours ago, Cobie said:

 

Who knows.  Most of the I Ching is from the Warring States period.  It’s origins are mythical (taken as fact by traditional texts). Modern scholarship dates the oldest bits to late 9th century BC (using bronze inscriptions). Rome's origins trace to around the 9th or 10th century BC as small settlements. 

 

 

Development of Yijing Divination System

 

Archaeological discoveries now show concrete links between late Shang divination practice and the number-based hexagram system behind the Yijing. Andrea Bréard and Constance A. Cook, in their article “Cracking Bones and Numbers: Solving the Enigma of Numerical Sequences on Ancient Chinese Artifacts” (Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 2020), describe a large corpus of Shang–Zhou bones, bronzes, jades, stones, and potsherds covered with structured number strings. They note that these artifacts bear “records of numerical sequences” whose mode of production was long unexplained, and that “structural links to the Book of Changes, a divination manual that entered the Confucian canon, are evident.”

 

In the same study, Bréard and Cook document “numerical gua” written as stacks of six digits on Shang and Western Zhou objects. One key passage describes “the numerals 667668 written along the edge of a whetstone,” and later a pottery jar with “eleven sets of neatly inscribed numerical gua with six lines” made up of 1s, 6s, 8s, and a few 5s and 9s (for example “111111” and “116881”). These are explicit six-place sequences of even/odd values, laid out vertically like hexagrams. Bréard and Cook argue that “dice and divination stalk use, either in combination or separately, appear in fact to have been underlying the rather stable numerical patterns in ancient China all the way back to the late Shang dynasty (1300–1046 BCE).” Taken together, their description of stable six-number patterns, their use of the term “numerical gua,” and their conclusion about late-Shang cleromancy directly support a developmental bridge from Shang sortilege to later hexagram divination.

 

Within that same corpus, Bréard and Cook summarize earlier Chinese work on the famous Yinxu Sipanmo “Yi gua” bone studied by Cao Dingyun (“Yinxu Sipanmo ‘Yi gua’ bugu yanjiu,” Kaogu 1989) and on Western Zhou oracle bones from Fengchu, Qishan, published by Cao Wei (“Zhouyuan jiaguwen,” 2002; “Zhouyuan xinchu Xi Zhou jiaguwen yanjiu,” 2003). They note, for example, a Fengchu fragment H11:85 where a six-digit sequence “766718” is followed by 曰 and a short divinatory text, and they stress that these sets occur in clear divinatory contexts on plastrons and bones. This means that by late Shang / early Zhou, diviners were already writing six-step numerical results right on the same media as crack inscriptions.

 

Rao Zongyi pushed this line of evidence earlier than anyone. In his Chinese-language work on “shuzi guaxiang” (numerical hexagram images) and in the abstract “The Yi-Kua in the Shang Dynasty and Various Problems Pertaining to Divination” (Early China, Supplement 1, 1986), he famously stated: “The method of divining by yarrow stalk in accordance with the scheme of 64 hexagrams did exist in the Yin Dynasty. Numerical strings of three and six lines on oracle bones recently unearthed provide the new evidence for the above statement.” Rao explicitly links “numerical strings of three and six lines on oracle bones” to a 64-hexagram system already operating under the Shang (Yin).

 

Bréard and Cook’s survey shows that Rao’s “numerical strings of three and six lines” are not an isolated curiosity but part of a wide pattern of six-digit gua, written as vertical stacks of numbers and appearing across media (plastron, bone, handles, jars, whetstones) from late Shang into Western Zhou. Their quantitative work backs up Rao’s qualitative thesis: stable six-step numerical patterns, generated by some randomizing device (dice, stalks, or both), already form a divinatory code before the received Zhouyi text appears.

 

The binary and complementary logic inside Shang oracle-bone practice lines up cleanly with the later yin/yang line structure of the Yijing. A widely reproduced Shang plastron from Anyang, cast in the reign of Wu Ding, carries a paired charge. Wikimedia’s file description for “Shang dynasty inscribed tortoise plastron.jpg” glosses the left inscription as “戊午卜古貞般其有 [wùwǔ (day 55) Gu divined: Ban will have misfortune]” and the right as “戊午卜古貞般亡禍 [wùwǔ (day 55) Gu divined: Ban will have no misfortune],” with the verdict “吉 [auspicious]” written at the bottom. This is a very clear, concrete example of Shang crack divination working with a pair of opposite statements (misfortune / no misfortune) and then recording a favorable outcome, “auspicious.”

 

Modern summaries of Shang pyromancy emphasize this structure. The Smarthistory overview of oracle bones notes that Shang records typically include a charge, prognostication, and verification, and that diviners asked whether an action “would be misfortune over the next ten days” and then checked the result. David Keightley’s classic work on Shang oracle language, as summarized in later secondary literature, underlines that divinations focus on disaster versus safety, illness versus health, curse versus protection.   

 

The paired inscriptions for Ban thus show the same kind of binary opposition, two contrary possibilities, one of which is marked as auspicious after reading the cracks, that later hexagrams encode abstractly as broken versus solid lines. Technical vocabulary carries straight through from Shang to the Zhouyi. In Shang inscriptions, the verb 貞 (zhēn) routinely appears in formulae like “Gu zhēn” (古貞) meaning “Gu divined,” or more literally “Gu performed zhen.” The Chinese “Key Concepts in Chinese Thought and Culture” entry on 元亨利貞 (yuanheng lizhen), drawing on the Yijing, explains that in the divinatory sense, Lizhen (利贞) “refers to a favorable reading by a diviner and an auspicious prospect.” Scholarly discussions of the phrase 利貞 in the Yijing, such as those surveyed in studies of heng and zhen, note that Gao Heng glossed 利貞 as “beneficial to divine,” treating 貞 explicitly as the act of divination.

 

This is directly relevant to the Yijing’s stock formula 元亨利貞. The same four characters open Hexagram 1 and appear elsewhere in the Zhouyi. Modern philological work makes the continuity plain: a Brill chapter on heng in the context of Yi divination observes that 利貞 means “favourable to divine”; when the sacrifice was accepted, the divination could proceed with the expectation of a positive outcome. In other words, the technical Shang verb 貞 (“to divine, to test by oracle”) and the evaluation “favorable divination” underlie a central formula in the Zhouyi judgments. The vocabulary of zhen and li zhen shows conceptual inheritance, not a new invention.

 

The received Yijing tradition itself remembers precursor “Changes” systems that it connects to Xia and Shang. The ritual classic Zhouli (Rites of Zhou) says that the Grand Diviner (太卜 taibu) “handles the three Yi methods: the first is Lianshan (Arrayed Mountains); the second, Guicang (Return to the Storehouse); and the third, Zhouyi,” and adds that “there are a total of eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams in these texts.”   

 

A modern study of the Guicang and the “three Yi” notes that early exegetes treated Lianshan and Guicang as predecessors of the Zhouyi; an English article on “New Notes on the I Ching” states plainly that “In historical documents, Lianshan (连山) and Guicang (归藏) were considered as the predecessors of the book of I Ching,” citing the Zhouli as a key source.

 

Excavated Guicang material reinforces this continuity. Anke Hein’s discussion of authenticity and the Chinese textual heritage points out that the Guicang, where preserved, “uses the same hexagram system” as the Zhouyi, and that debates around the three Yi focus on whether they represent different texts or methods within a common hexagram framework. This lines up with the ancient claim that Xia, Shang, and Zhou each had their own “Changes.” It also strengthens the idea that the Zhouyi hexagrams are not a standalone creation but a further development of dynastic divination codes.

 

Dating work ties this all chronologically back toward the Shang. Modern reference summaries of Edward L. Shaughnessy’s research report: “Based on a comparison of the language of the Zhou yi with dated bronze inscriptions, the American sinologist Edward Shaughnessy dated its compilation in its current form to the early decades of the reign of King Xuan of Zhou, in the last quarter of the 9th century BC.”   That places the redaction of the Zhouyi text only a few generations after the fall of the Shang (c. 1046 BCE), squarely within Western Zhou, not in the much later Warring States.

 

At the level of general conclusion, recent handbooks emphasize gradual development, not a rupture. Joseph A. Adler, in his 2022 chapter “Yijing Divination” in The Yijing: A Guide (Oxford University Press), writes that “The hexagrams of the Zhouyi and their associated method of divination did not spring fully formed from the mind of Fuxi or anyone else.” He stresses that hexagram divination evolved out of earlier techniques, especially Shang crack-making and early milfoil (stalk) casting. Richard J. Smith, in the overview to The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton, 2012), describes the I Ching as having “originated in China as a divination manual more than three thousand years ago,” and notes that it was only later, in 136 BCE, that an emperor “declared it a Confucian classic.” Both Adler and Smith frame the Yijing first and foremost as a divination text whose roots reach back to the late second millennium BCE.

 

Bréard and Cook’s abstract makes the same long arc explicit. They review artifacts “inscribed… with a large number of records of numerical sequences” and conclude that “Dice and divination stalk use, either in combination or separately, appear in fact to have been underlying the rather stable numerical patterns in ancient China all the way back to the late Shang dynasty (1300–1046 BCE).” Their choice of “all the way back to the late Shang dynasty” and their phrase “structural links to the Book of Changes … are evident” directly back the claim that the Yijing’s number-driven hexagram system grows out of late-Shang cleromantic practice, not out of thin air.

 

On the basis of these quoted claims and their supporting material, the through-line is clear: late-Shang oracle-bone divination, with its binary logic, technical vocabulary, and six-step numerical gua, feeds directly into Western Zhou stalk-casting and the 64-hexagram framework. The Zhouyi is a codification and textual crystallization of divinatory techniques that were already in active use under the Shang.

 

 

Other Bronze Age Divination Systems

 

Bronze Age divination wasn't unique to China. Other cultures working at roughly the same time as late Shang and early Zhou developed their own highly structured systems for asking gods yes–no questions and reading patterned signs, often with a clear binary logic. The Hittite KIN oracle sits in that cluster and is especially useful for comparison with Shang and Yijing divination.

 

Mesopotamian diviners in Babylonia and Assyria relied heavily on extispicy and omen series. The National Museum of Aleppo’s description of a Mesopotamian clay liver model explains that after sacrificing an animal, “the priests would examine the dead creature’s liver, believing that the thoughts of the divinity to whom the animal had been offered were transferred to this organ,” and that “studying the signs in the sacrificed animal’s entrails was therefore likely to provide divine answers to questions about future events on earth.” (National Museum of Aleppo, “Model of a liver”). 

 

A survey of Near Eastern divination practices on TheTorah.com likewise defines extispicy as “the reading of entrails, i.e., finding the divine message by asking an oracular question before the sacrifice of an animal, usually a sheep; the answer is found in its internal organs, usually the liver, after it is slaughtered.” (Jonathan Ben-Dov, “The Practice of Divination in the Ancient Near East,” 2016).   

 

Scholarly overviews of Mesopotamian omen series note that the great Akkadian collections Enūma Anu Enlil and Šumma ālu ina mēlê šakin catalog celestial and terrestrial signs as codified answers, so that irregular events (eclipses, odd births, unusual animal behavior) could be matched to written predictions.

 

Francesca Rochberg’s work on celestial omens, summarized in a Brill chapter on divination, lists Enūma Anu Enlil and Šumma ālu as key series and stresses that they were copied, referenced, and treated as authoritative handbooks.   This is a divination world where the gods’ will is encoded in a stable repertoire of signs, and the specialist reads those signs off a model (liver, sky, or tablet) using a fixed corpus.

 

In Egypt, New Kingdom and later sources show a different but still binary kind of oracle practice built around cult statues. The entry “Oracle” in the Global Egyptian Museum’s glossary explains that in Egyptian temple oracles “the method of consultation demanded that questions be so formulated that they could be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’,” and that questions “were sometimes put verbally” to a god’s statue, which then responded in a way that could be interpreted as yes or no. A teaching page from the PredictionX project at Harvard notes that “the first representations of a sacred boat containing an oracular statue of the god Amun date to the early New Kingdom (reign of Amenhotep I, around 1525 BCE),” and that the statue of the god would be carried and “answer the request by moving or by making sounds.” In other words, Egyptian temple oracles in this period required yes–no questions and treated the physical movement of the god’s cult image as the sign. That is less combinatorial than hexagrams but rests on the same binary question–answer structure.

 

Hittite Anatolia developed one of the most varied oracle repertoires in the Late Bronze Age. A summary of Hittite divination methods by Livio Warbinek in Current Research in Cuneiform Palaeography states that “the oracles used by the Hittites included Extispicy, Augury, the ‘Bed’ Oracle, the ‘ḪURRI-bird’ Oracle, the ‘Snake’ Oracle, and the KIN Oracle,” and adds that “like other peoples of the ancient Near East, the Hittites considered any omen as a divine message.” (Livio Warbinek, “The KIN Oracle in the Hittite Divinatory System,” in Current Research in Cuneiform Palaeography 2).   

 

The Hethitologie Portal Mainz entry “Oracles and Omens: Hittite Divination” explains that, alongside liver readers and augurs, Hittite texts “regularly refer to a third specialist of divination, the ‘Wise Woman’ (Sumerian logogram: MUNUS.ŠU.GI ‘old woman’). Those oracles which the Hittites simply referred to as ‘action’ (Sumerian logogram: KIN) are her specialty.” The same description continues: “The Wise Woman interprets constellations of diverse symbolic objects, in other words, various lots. At least some of these lots are moveable, and can ‘act’ to a certain degree. We do not know how the Wise Woman caused these lots to move and what the individual symbols looked like; occasionally the names of the lots refer directly to the subject about which the enquiry is being made, but mostly an established inventory of symbols is employed.” (Hethitologie Portal Mainz, “Oracles and Omens: Hittite Divination,” section on KIN oracle).

 

The practitioners in charge of this KIN oracle were the Hittite “Old Women” or “Wise Women.” Hannah Marcuson’s dissertation “‘Word of the Old Woman’: Studies in Female Ritual Practice in Hittite Anatolia” describes these figures as a distinct professional class: “The Old Women are well-attested as religious functionaries in the Hittite texts. There is extensive evidence documenting their ritual and oracular practices, both in service to the royal family and in broader state cult.”

 

The abstract further notes that “The Old Women were the primary personnel in charge of counteracting sorcery and other negative supernatural forces directed against the Hittite king, and this dissertation serves as a comprehensive analysis of their function and method.” (Hannah L. Marcuson, PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2016).   Within that coherent system of “approaching metaphysical problems using physical methods” (Marcuson’s phrase), the KIN oracle is one of their main tools.

 

The most detailed modern treatment of the KIN oracle itself is Livio Warbinek’s monograph Il sistema mantico ittita KIN (Firenze University Press, 2020). The abstract, in Italian, describes the work as follows: “La presente monografia ha per oggetto l’oracolo KIN, una tecnica mantica simbolica prodotta dagli Ittiti nel II millennio a.C. e sviluppatasi esclusivamente nel milieu ittita.” (“The present monograph is concerned with the KIN oracle, a symbolic mantic technique produced by the Hittites in the second millennium BC and developed only in the Hittite milieu.”)   

 

A separate article by Warbinek titled “An ‘Economical’ Oracular Procedure: Evidence from the Hittite KIN Oracle” summarizes the same system in English as “a symbolic divination technique employed by the Hittites,” and emphasizes that this kind of oracle was “more convenient and affordable” than other methods, because it did not require expensive sacrifices and could be repeated quickly. (Livio Warbinek, “An ‘Economical’ Oracular Procedure: Evidence from the Hittite KIN Oracle,” conference paper).

 

From these descriptions, the core features of the KIN system are clear. It is a lot-based oracle: the Wise Woman “interprets constellations of diverse symbolic objects, in other words, various lots,” and “at least some of these lots are moveable, and can ‘act’ to a certain degree.” (Hethitologie Portal Mainz, “Oracles and Omens: Hittite Divination”). It is also binary in outcome. Warbinek’s discussion of KIN procedures in Il sistema mantico ittita KIN and in the palaeography article notes that Hittite oracles are framed as yes–no questions put to the gods, and that the result of the KIN rite is evaluated as favorable or unfavorable, just as results of liver and bird oracles are. Marcuson’s study of Old Women shows them running KIN oracles repeatedly on the same matter, sometimes multiple times in succession, until a consistent pattern emerges that can be reported to the king, much like the example letter where a KIN oracle is performed four times concerning the illness of a high official’s son and then checked by augury.

 

Seen against this Near Eastern background, the Yijing and Shang–Zhou divination system share several structural features with KIN and related oracles, even though the media differ.

 

First, all of these systems rest on binary questioning. The Hethitologie Portal emphasizes that KIN oracles are “oracles of ‘action’” where the Wise Woman interprets whether the gods endorse or reject a proposed course, based on how the lots fall. Egyptian temple oracles, according to the Global Egyptian Museum, demanded “questions [that] be so formulated that they could be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”  Shang plastrons from Wu Ding’s time show charges split into “Ban will have misfortune” and “Ban will have no misfortune,” with 吉 (“auspicious”) written when the cracks favor one side.   

The Yijing reduces that constant yes–no framing to line-level yin and yang, and Bréard and Cook’s work on numerical gua shows that late Shang and Western Zhou diviners were already writing six-step sequences of even–odd numbers as structured outcomes.

 

Second, the KIN oracle and Yijing-style milfoil or coin divination both rely on cleromancy, that is, the use of randomized physical procedures to generate a coded pattern. Bréard and Cook’s abstract states that the numerical sequences on ancient Chinese artifacts can be explained by “cleromantic techniques” in which “dice and divination stalk use, either in combination or separately, appear in fact to have been underlying the rather stable numerical patterns in ancient China all the way back to the late Shang dynasty (1300–1046 BCE).” (Andrea Bréard and Constance A. Cook, “Cracking Bones and Numbers,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 74.4, 2020).   

 

Warbinek’s description of the KIN system as a “tecnica mantica simbolica” that uses “constellations of diverse symbolic objects,” interpreted as lots, shows the same type of random-pattern generation, even if the exact mechanism is lost. Both traditions therefore treat the fall or arrangement of objects as a divinely guided, yet mechanically random, way to select one structured outcome from a fixed space of possibilities.

 

Third, both KIN and Yijing hexagram practice are supported by specialist diviners with carefully defined ritual protocols. Marcuson’s “Old Women” are a class of ritual professionals whose oracles, including KIN, are part of a “coherent and cohesive system for approaching metaphysical problems using physical methods.”   Bréard and Cook’s reconstruction of Shang–Zhou cleromancy and Adler’s overview of pre-Han milfoil techniques show that early Chinese stalk divination likewise had fixed sequences of counting, division, and recording; the diviner’s job was to handle the process correctly and then read the resulting pattern against a known framework of gua and texts.   In both cases, ritual correctness is what makes the random outcome legible as a divine answer.

 

Finally, there is a shared sense that the outcome is part of a larger coded system, not a one-off omen. Mesopotamian diviners matched liver signs to lines in omen tablets like Šumma ālu; Hittite KIN specialists worked with an “established inventory of symbols” in their lots;   Zhou and later Chinese diviners mapped six-line patterns to one of sixty-four hexagrams with attached judgments. Bréard and Cook explicitly say that the numerical sequences on bones and artifacts have “structural links to the Book of Changes,” and Warbinek’s work frames KIN as a consistent “systema mantico” within the Hittite cult.

 

So when Shang and Zhou divination is set next to Mesopotamian omen series, Egyptian statue oracles, and the Hittite KIN system, it sits in a recognizable Bronze Age family. Extispicy and statue movement use different media, but they share with Shang–Yijing cleromancy and Hittite KIN oracles the core patterns that matter here: yes–no questions, binary or paired structures, random but rule-governed procedures, and a closed symbolic code that mediates between human questions and divine decisions.

 

Edited 11 hours ago by 心神 ~

[Nungali]

2 hours ago, Apech said:

It's completely irrelevant to the topic but relocation of defeated enemies to remote parts of one's empire is not without precedent.  The Persians did it.  So there may have been some ancient 'race' mixing I suppose.  But the I Ching is essentially Chinese whether or not some peoples moved from A to B in 1000BC or whatever.  After all the King James Bible is at the core of the English canon - but of course the Bible comes from the Middle East ... so ... what?

 

?  yeah but  ... 'we' all know it has a clear origin in Hebrew Scripture . 

 

Perhaps a better example is the influence Zoroastrianism had on Judaism  before the inception of Judaism ( and I dont mean Abraham )  ... some of us realize that but as well ( and I hope ; to your point )   that the Jewish Bible is  'Jewish ' and not 'Zoroastrianism ' 

 

' Influence ' is not ' origin '  .... is it ?     

 

Or even if some thin 'evidence' or 'influence' came into China from the 'western ' Steppes  ( 'IE Homeland ' )  'Yijing ' is essentially Chinese . 

 

[   Aside : not many realize but there are other dynamics with this idea of 'deportation ' , in many cases people were bought from other parts of the Empire and put in place where people had been 'deported' from .  The Assyrians did this  in Israel  ( the old 'northern kingdom', that is ) and related area;  took Canaanites out of Israel and moved people from other places into Israel ... and in Judah , that happened later . 

[Nungali]

2 hours ago, Apech said:

Indo-European:  Hi there!

Chinese: Yo person with a funny hat, how are you.

I.E.: Fine, fine, sorry about that bit of an invasion by the way.

Ch.: That's ok, it's happened before, it'll happen again.

I.E.:  I feel quite assimilated now by the way.

Ch.: So...what you been up to?

I.E.: Well it's strange, I dropped some sticks on the floor this morning and when I looked at the pattern I saw that my heifer will bring forth a piebald calf in the three months.

Ch.: Cool, sounds a bit like the ancient traditions of divination we have going back thousands of years.

I.E.: Well that's nice of you but it's just a pile of yarrow stalks at the end of the day.

Ch.: Well do you mind if I take your method and turn it into the most sublime and sophisticated system of divination ever created by mankind?

I.E.: Not at all, knock yourself out!  I'd help out but I have a burial mound to build.

Ch.:  Cheers then and say hi to the Sky Father for me.

I.E.: Right!  Catch you later Chinese guy.

 

(sorry sometimes when I've been on DaoBums a while my mind just gets out of control).

 

 

 

 

Oh no ... there is a wave of it just starting about to rise in intensity .   Several people around me are talking incomprehensible rubbish , more than usual, the last few days ... and now its spreading to all  types of normally 'clear' people .  Including my gardener this morning ; explained a VERY simple job three times , with him nodding and making comments that seemed to indicate comprehension and then repeating back to me what he should do  .....  that wasnt what I explained  *   !   

 

Oh ... the cause of this 'wave '  ? 

 

https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/giant-sunspot-on-par-with-the-one-that-birthed-the-carrington-event-has-appeared-on-the-sun-and-its-pointed-right-at-earth

 

 

It happens every so often    

 

* 

 

 

[Nungali]

1 hour ago, 心神 ~ said:

...

So when Shang and Zhou divination is set next to Mesopotamian omen series, Egyptian statue oracles, and the Hittite KIN system, it sits in a recognizable Bronze Age family. Extispicy and statue movement use different media, but they share with Shang–Yijing cleromancy and Hittite KIN oracles the core patterns that matter here: yes–no questions,    (  1  )   

 

binary or paired structures,   (  2 )  random but rule-governed procedures, (  3  )   and a closed symbolic code that mediates between human questions and divine decisions. (  4  ) . 

 

 

 

But this might be the basis of ALL ancient divination  in that  ( 1 )    its basically easier , regardless of origin , to get an answer from a 'digital' 'binary question ( a yes or no answer )    than one that desires a complex 'story' answer .  

 

Ie.  it never worked like ;    ''  Oracle , how should I invade the western lands  ? '' 

 

Oracle ;  ''  Wait until winter , use cavalry initially and  cut off their left flank , while a rear action cuts their supply chain and Vulture Pass , then proceed to ....  '' 

 

Its more like '' Oracle should I invade the  western lands this winter  ?''    or even ; ''   Should I  invade the western lands by waiting until winter , use cavalry initially and  cut off their left flank , while a rear action cuts their supply chain and Vulture Pass , then proceed to ...''

 

and of course  ( 2 )  will follow on  from that ;  yes and no  answers  ARE  binary  or paired structures   (ie questions in sequence ) .  and from that would develop  ( 3 ) 

 

and regarding  ( 4  )  ummmmm     what ?    ALL divination or any type , by definition , IS  a  ''  a closed symbolic code that mediates between human questions and divine decisions. ''  . 

 

What is needed is a demonstrable IE system that is like and predates  China's 

 

( maybe that has been shown somewhwere in above posts and I missed it ? ) 

 

I did an AI search on the first IE divination systems , no, they dont seem similar to  Chinese  , so I asked AI for a summary on the issue ; 

 

''  There is no widely accepted evidence that ancient Indo-European divination systems directly influenced the Chinese I Ching. The I Ching (or Zhou Yi in its early form) is an indigenous Chinese text whose core methods and philosophy developed independently within ancient Chinese culture, primarily from the Shang and Zhou dynasties (c. 1200–750 BCE). 

 

 

Origins of the I Ching

The I Ching originated as a form of cleromancy (divination by lots), evolving from even older Chinese practices involving oracle bones and tortoise shells. The system is based on: 

• Oracle Bones/Tortoise Shells: The earliest known Chinese written records are divinations inscribed on bones and shells from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200–1050 BCE).

• Yarrow Stalks/Coins: The later I Ching text itself was a divination manual that used the manipulation of yarrow stalks (and later, coins) to generate random numbers (6, 7, 8, or 9), which were then converted into one of 64 hexagrams (six-line figures of solid or broken lines).
• Cosmology: The philosophical underpinnings of the I Ching are deeply rooted in Chinese concepts of yin and yang and the five elements (Wuxing), which developed over centuries and became central to both Confucianism and Taoism. 

 

Arguments for and Against Influence

Most historical linguists and sinologists maintain that Old Chinese is a language family separate from Indo-European, and the two traditions developed largely in isolation regarding these specific practices

However, one hypothesis, proposed by sinologist Victor H. Mair and others, suggests that some of the names of the eight I Ching trigrams and a few key terms might have Indo-European linguistic origins due to ancient cultural exchanges across Eurasia. This linguistic hypothesis is not universally accepted within academia and does not necessarily imply that the entire divination system or the underlying philosophy of the I Ching was an import; the practice of divination itself and the structure of the hexagrams remain distinctly Chinese in origin. 

In summary, while there may have been minor linguistic contact for some terms, the systems of divination themselves are considered to have independent origins and developed within their own distinct cultural and philosophical frameworks. ''

 

 

Note ; the thin linguistic comparisons relate only to some  Chinese words  for the trigrams and  a a 'few terms ' ... the evidence is far to thin to postulate an origin in the west . 

[ChiDragon]

1 hour ago, Nungali said:

Oh no ... there is a wave of it just starting about to rise in intensity .   Several people around me are talking incomprehensible rubbish , more than usual, the last few days ... and now its spreading to all  types of normally 'clear' people . 

Oh, I wish this OP was not initiated. 

 It is just a waste of time talking about it.

[心神 ~]

 

37 minutes ago, Nungali said:

But this might be the basis of ALL ancient divination

 

Maybe, but there are some classes of divination that don’t fit that pattern. Trance oracles, ecstatic prophecy, and temple dream oracles deliver long, open answers rather than yes/no verdicts. Full horoscopic astrology also doesn’t collapse into a binary outcome, since it builds a whole scenario by combining many factors. Text-lots that point to long oracle passages work similarly. Even in augury and extispicy, the raw signs aren't binary. Bird behavior and liver marks are open-ended, and the priestly tradition compresses those signs into a paired verdict for state use. 

 

Strictly talking about what survives in writing, the earliest divination we see in detail is binary, closed, and coded Mesopotamian liver omens, star omens, and then Shang cracks and later Yijing-style procedures. Those are some of the first known systems where we have tablets, models, and line-by-line rules. But if we're talking about human practice rather than written record, open-ended interpretation likely comes first. People were reading weather, birds, animal behavior, strange births, and dreams long before anybody made a clay liver model or wrote a huge omen series. 

 

Quote

What is needed is a demonstrable IE system that is like and predates  China's 

 

( maybe that has been shown somewhwere in above posts and I missed it ? ) 

 

I agree, and I'm not arguing for or against the connection to Proto-Indo-European influence. I'm just outlining historical timelines for context, placing the both the PIE Influence study and the Roman Legion article into their respective time periods, as well as providing scholarship that shows the Yijing is, at a minimum, rooted in and an evolution of a Shang dynasty oracle system, not a Warring Era creation. The Bronze Age divination methods are also for context, to see how other cultures developed divinatory systems, and to see what patterns can be observed or interpreted.

 

Edited 8 hours ago by 心神 ~