Page 146 - Deydier UNDERSTANDING CHINESE ARCHAIC BRONZES

The Deer Motif 鹿紋
The deer’s elegant shape, the gracefulness of its movements and
especially the handsome set of antlers that grace the head of the male of
the species, together with the stag’s seemingly magical, uncanny ability
to shed these antlers in spring and grow a new set in replacement,
distinguished the deer from other wild animals and, for the ancient
Chinese, endowed the deer and especially its horns with a mystical,
supernatural character and made it a symbol of auspiciousness. The
sacredness, the otherworldliness, attached to the deer and its horns
may account for deer antlers being used, along with tortoise shells and
water buffalo bones, in oracle bone divinations 占卜. It may also be
the reason why the taotie 饕餮 masks on many Shang 商 and early
Western Zhou 西周 bronzes are embellished with deers’ antlers.

The fact that the Chinese character for deer lu 鹿 is pronounced exactly
the same as the character lu 祿 meaning ‘salary of a government official’,
‘an emolument’ also made the deer a symbol of political power, of a
high, respected position in the government together with the enviable
salary attached to such high office, one of the three prerequisites of an
ideal life, the others being ‘good fortune’ 福 and ‘longevity’ 壽.

The Water Buffalo Motif 水牛紋

As the Chinese writer and scholar Zhang Zhijie 張之杰 forcefully argues
in a recent article, in the ancient oracle bone inscriptions, jiaguwen
甲骨文, the earliest known form of Chinese writing, the character niu
牛, usually translated ‘cattle’ or ‘ox’ refers to the domesticated ‘water
buffalo’ and not to any form of wild cattle or other beast hunted by the

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Deer motif, Shang dynasty, Yinxu period (14 – 12 /11 centuries B.C.)
Royal tomb n° 1004, Anyang, Henan Province.
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