A Study On The Decorative Pattern Of "Head" In The Jade On The Shang Dynasty

Mu-shaped Eye is one of the most typical jade decorations in Shang dynasty,which was widely used in human and animal-shaped jades in this period. This paperregards Mu-shaped eye as its main research object, combined with related studies infour areas of oracle-bones inscriptions, bronzes, potteries and jades, trying to find thedevelopment rules of both Mu-shaped eye and other co-existed ornamentations.On the basis of the material and image data, the first chapter of this paper tried toanalyze all the pre-Mu-shaped eyes and Mu-shaped eyes in Shang period that hadbeen collected from three different kinds of artifacts, including the inscriptions onbones, the decorations on bronzes and the carved symbols on potteries, in order tobuild a reasonable sequence of Mu-shaped eye decoration in Shang dynasty.The second part tried to collect various Mu-shaped eyes on unearthed Jade fromdifferent districts and different periods of the Shang dynasty to supplement andsupport the sequence. Photos and Charts were also largely applied to find its generaldevelop sequence as well. It also made an attempt to analyze the co-existeddecorations on Jades in Shang period. As we could find out, being braided, sitting onhis knees, having the design of cloud scrolls on his clothes are the most typicalcharacters on human shaped jades of the Shang dynasty, while those dragon and tigershaped jades from the same period had bottled horn, jagged mouth, square foot andprehensile tail.What this paper wants to express is the general develop trend of Mu-shaped eyedecoration on jades from the pre-Shang period to the end of the Shang dynasty, and itclassified the most representative features on both human and animal shaped jade aswell, hoping to make some contribution in the process of distinguish and appraisaljades of the same kinds of Shang dynasty and, to some extent, to provide some usefulinformation for future researches.