The Hieroglyphs

by Yan Balczewski, posted in Odd Ball, Photography

This is my entry to “CEE’S ODD BALL PHOTO CHALLENGE: 2015 WEEK 32”, and weekly photo challenge Ornate

驢皮剪紙

象形文字＿1 copy

I snapped couple of photos on the streets at my home town – Xi’an, China.  They are hieroglyphs inherited from ancient China, they are so complicated and I can’t even guess what they mean.

Enjoy!

7 thoughts on “The Hieroglyphs”

  4. Is it just the juxtapostion of the first photo, which seems to me to be the Vermillion Bird, one of the ancient four megaconstellations, with the “direction like” four quarters of the second picture? where these pictures even phsyically near each other?
    the pictures seem much too simple to be Seal Script ( an ancient script which predates modern chinese)… yet the picture in the top left seems quite similar to “bird” in ancient seal script… see http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Script/hanzi.html, scroll right down to the bird characters

    the middle character in number 638 at this link http://www.baldwin.co.uk/media/cms/auction-archive/auction-hkca53/Hong%20Kong%20Coin%20Auction%2053%20-%2005%20-%20Chinese%20Ancient%20Coins%20+%20Mirrors.pdf, a qing dynasty silver tael, also seems similiar to the top left character, but thats probably just a red herring.

    the characters on the engraving dont really seem like seal script, in some ways they seem like a modern day version of seal script or other ancient scripts….???

    Yan, what’s the second character? Han ( something) Tian Xia….. 汉人的 汉 。。。 “han” as in the “han people” and “tian xia” as under heaven…… is the second character an older version ot 唐 －唐朝???

    anyhow, I reckon it might have something to do with the four ancient megaconstellations, azure dragon, vermillion bird, black tortoise/snake and white tiger – but the other characters look nothing like that…

    so indeed, a big mystery. but i want to find out!!!!

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