This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
Look at the picture below: is it a work of calligraphy or a painting? Four large characters are written on the scroll with a brush, but to modern people these four characters look less like characters than like pictures. Some netizens suspected they were pictographs, but netizens in the know explained that these four characters are ancient Chinese script; modern people simply do not recognize them because they have no contact with such characters.
Netizens explained that the four characters, read from right to left, are 〝饮飨共舞〞 (“drinking, feasting and dancing together”). Of these, 饮 (yǐn, “to drink”) is in oracle-bone script, and the other three characters are in bronze script.
A netizen shared a scroll that stumped everyone: what characters were these? One netizen revealed that the four characters are 〝饮飨共舞〞. (Image from the web)
Everyone knows oracle-bone script. According to Wikipedia, bronze script, also called inscriptions or bell-and-cauldron script, began in the middle Shang dynasty and flourished in the Zhou dynasty; it is writing cast or carved on bronze vessels. Humanity currently knows a total of 3,005 bronze-script characters, of which 1,804 can be identified; for the others, today’s archaeologists and linguists cannot guess their pronunciation or meaning.
