6. Keightley, “Shih Cheng,” 69-69. Here, as in other quotes below, I have converted original Wade-Giles romanization to pinyin.

7. See, e.g., Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, no. 915a; Dobson, W.A.C.H., A Dictionary of the Chinese Particles (Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 1974), 823-24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. The equivalence of the two words is also suggested by their similar meanings. Yi as a verb meant “put the hand on, repress”; zhi meant “seize, hold, grasp, take,” and also, as a loan, “shut, obstruct” (Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, nos. 915a, 685a-e). I would also note that Luo Zhenyu had argued that yi and yin , “seal,” were originally the same word (p. 3 of Qiu's Chinese article). None of these meanings carry any interrogative sense.

9. David N. Keightley, “How the Charges were Read: The Existence of the Subcharge,” paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Toronto, 1978.

10. That subcharges were being employed is also suggested by Qiu's discussion of nearly all the Dui-group “weekly” inscriptions, which “contain only the one word ‘week’.” Qiu rejects the possibility that these were abbreviations for the full form of the charge, “In the ten-day week there will be no misfortune,” but I do not follow his logic. On the contrary, I would have thought it entirely natural that, particularly in the early period when the difficult practice of carving inscriptions on shell and bone was beginning, the engravers might well have sought to abbreviate their records, particularly when standard divinatory formulas were involved.

11. For example, I can find no evidence that the yi or zhi was associated with the right or left side of the plastron. In #23A, 23B, 25A, 25B, and 26A, 26B the same end word, yi, appears on both sides of the shell.

12. Some support for this “stopper” hypothesis may even be found in phonology. It is speculative, but plausible, to suppose that the *iək/yi and *tiəp/zhi , with their final k and p, might have been chosen because they were related to the sound made by the cracking (*puk/bu), so that the oral interjection of these stopper words, if intoned by the diviner, would have echoed, onomatopoeically, the process of divination itself.

13. See, e.g., #146A-B, Heji 19838, where the two charges on the right and left sides of the spine are separated by 5 cm of space; #148A-B, Heji 38122, where the two charges on this scapula fragment are separated vertically by 1 cm; and #152A-D, Heji 35931, where the charges recorded by this inadequate photograph again appear to be well separated.

14. See, e.g., #23A-B, Heji 20415, where the two sets of prefaces and charges are separated by a vertical boundary line carved into the bone; #25A-B, Tunnan 4310, a classic example of symmetry about the central spine of the plastron, in which the two sets of prefaces and charges were carved back-to-back about the central spine and even the graphs for the diviner's name and for the two yi particles were carved as mirror-images of each other; #26A-B, Heji 21768, reveals a similar separation about the central spine.

15. See, e.g., Shaughnessy, Edward L., “Recent Approaches to Oracle-Bone Peirodization: A Review,” Early China 8 (1982-83), 7-8 Google Scholar.

16. Qiu cites Shaughnessy, “The Composition of the Zhouyi,” 56,67. See also David N. Keightley, “Legitimation in Shang China,” paper delivered at the Conference on Legitimation of Chinese Imperial Regimes, Asilomar, CA, 1975,49-52; “The Late Shang State: When, Where, and What?” in The Origins of Chinese Civilization, ed. Keightley, David N. (Berkeley, U. of California Press, 1983), 555-556 Google Scholar; “Late Shang Divination: The Magico-Religious Legacy,” in Explorations in Early Chinese Cosmology, ed. Henry Rosemont, Jr., Journal of the American Academy of Religion Studies 50.2, 15-16, 19-20; “Shang Divination and Metaphysics,” Philosophy East and West 38.4 (1988), 378-383 Google Scholar.

17. Keightley, “Shih cheng,” 50; cf. Keightley, “Legitimation in Shang China,” 22.

18. David N. Keightley, “Shang Metaphysics,” paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, 1973, 37-38. As I noted in my footnote 79 to that paper, “I do not count wang since it frequently appears in formulaic endings such as wang tsai , “there will be no disaster,” or in prognostications, but is seldom used as the negative word in a complementary pair.” In footnote 80 I remarked: “The 1730 Period I Jimbun inscriptions contain 221 (= 12.8 percent) negatives; the 734 Period V Jimbun inscriptions contain 5 (= 0.68 percent) negatives. I am grateful to Inge Dietrich for making these counts. The Period I figures could be refined by a detailed count of the Bingbian pairs and negatives.” In footnote 81, I noted, with citations, that “I have found less than 20 positive-negative pairs for Period V …”

19. For other specific evidence that bears on the shift in Shang divinatory practices, see Keightley, David N., “Reports from the Shang: A Correction and Some Speculations,” Early China 9-10 (1983-85), 27, 33Google Scholar; Keightley, “Shang Divination and Metaphysics,” 392-393, nn. 37, 39, 42-45, 52.