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ABSTRACT: A wagon motif on the Bronocice pot, excavated in Poland in 1976, shows striking resemblance to the Chinese character nán ... "South" in the form of Oracle Bone inscriptions. The author attempts to explain their relationship based on the eastward migration of the Indo-Europeans. The original form of nán denotes a Kibitka-like wagon commonly depicted in Eurasian Steppe culture. Also, the meaning "wagon" of nán is attested in Oracle Bone inscriptions, referring to vehicles drawn by cattle and goat.
KEYWORDS: the Bronocice motif, Oracle Bone inscriptions, Indo-Europeans, Kibitka-like wagon
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The so-called Bronocice pot, excavated in 1976 at Bronocice, a village near Kraków, Poland, is a ceramic vase incised with the earliest known image of what may be a four-wheeled vehicle and a series of images showing the forms of a tree, water or a river and what may be fields (or a portion of textile material). The absolute radiocarbon date of this pot is circa 3637-3373 BCE, with the median calibrated to 3520 BCE (Bakker et al. 1999: 785-86).
As a student of Sinology, when I first saw the motif of a wagon, I remembered the Chinese character nán ... "South" in the Oracle Bone inscriptions, the earliest attested script of China.1 Here are several examples of the character nán in the Oracle Bone inscriptions:
Although the Oracle Bone inscriptions are the earliest attestation, it is certain that this linear writing underwent a period of development prior to this stage. Compared to the writing on bronze ware, oracle bone script is clearly simplified, and rounded forms are often converted to rectilinear ones; this is thought to be due to the difficulty of engraving the hard, bony surfaces, compared with the ease of writing them in the wet clay of the molds from which the bronzes were cast.
In the Oracle Bone inscriptions, the same character nán is written with different variants as shown in Figure 2. Examples h and i show the circle in the center as in the Bronocice motif, whereas other variants such as b, d, e, f, g and o, show this with a short vertical or horizontal stroke. Also in k and possibly n the circle is shown as a line....