What! It turns out that in ancient times, it was not the zodiac, but the thirty-six zodiac?

As early as the Warring States period, people had already associated twelve kinds of animals with twelve branches, but they were not used for recording time, but for divination, called twelve birds or twelve beasts. What's more, the ancients separated three animals with similar attributes from these twelve animals to form thirty-six birds to expand the divination culture. Scholars once thought that twelve birds and thirty-six birds might have come from India with Buddhism. Later, with the excavation of Qin bamboo slips, its origin was greatly advanced. The Book of Songs? Xiaoya? The auspicious day recorded in "auspicious day" can also be regarded as evidence that there is contact with horses at noon.

▲ Six Dynasties copperplate recorded thirty-six birds.

The individual animals among the twelve birds in Qin bamboo slips are slightly different from the standards of later generations, but the overall difference is not big, and they have been completely finalized in the Eastern Han Dynasty. However, the popularity of Thirty-six Birds is not high, and it is not widely circulated among the people. There are only a few books recorded in ancient books, and more are differences and differences.

▲ Qin bamboo slips of Fangmatan

For a long time after the Warring States period, the twelve birds were only related to the earthly branch, which may be related to the date of the earthly branch in divination, but not to the date of the earthly branch. During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, people began to generally associate the year of the dry branch with the twelve birds as their own zodiac, also known as the zodiac.

Seven Books of the South? The Five Elements Chronicle records the zodiac signs of several famous people: Edwin Lachilda is a pig, Cui is a horse, Dong Hunhou (Xiao Baojuan) is a pig, and () is a dragon and a tiger. Among them, the birth years of Edwin Lachilda (427 Ding Mao) and Cui (438 Wu Yin) are too far away from their birth years, which may be a mistake. The birth and death years of Xiaobaojuan (483 Guihai), Xiao Yan (464 Chenjia) and Zhou Xiaoying (462 Renyin) are consistent with their birth and death years.

Book of the Week, Volume 11, Biography of the Jin Party, records a letter written to him by Yan, the mother of Yu Wenhu. The letter said, "I was born as a brother in Wuchuan Town, my eldest brother (Yu Fei) was a mouse, my second son (Yu) was a rabbit, and your body (Yu Wenhu) was a snake." Combined with other historical materials, it can be concluded that these three brothers were born in 508 (Wuzi), 51year (Xinmao) and 51year (Guisi) respectively. Maybe the chronology of the main branch is too abstract. When this chronology was introduced to Turkic, Sogdian, Qidan, Tubo and other ethnic groups, it was often chosen to use the zodiac instead of earthly branches, and to use five colors or five elements instead of heavenly stems, thus forming a chronology of the zodiac with national characteristics. In this way, in the secular life of all ethnic groups in China, the Zodiac Year is more influential than the Ganzhi Year, and the long-established divination method of twelve birds has been applied to the Zodiac Year, becoming a fortune-telling theory.

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