Pictographic Chinese Calligraphy (21) Chinese Zodiac －十二生肖

There are twelve animals in Chinese Zodiac, they are in the following order:

Mouse, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig

People see the characters in most popular Song type scripts as follows

鼠，牛，虎，兔，龙，蛇，马，羊，猴，鸡，狗，猪。

You don't relate them to the pictures of the animals because they are not like the animals at all.

However, the original old shell bone, or big seal scripts are just like the pictures of the animals.  But few people including Chinese know what they look like. Let me show you one by one.

1, Mouse (big seal script)

2, Ox (shell bone script)

3, Tiger (shell bone script)

which is a vertical tiger picture.

4, Rabbit (shell bone script)

5, Dragon (shell bone script)

6, Snake (big seal script)

7, Horse (shell bone script)

which is a vertical horse picture too.

8, Sheep (shell bone script)

9, Monkey (big seal script)

Actually it is not a pictography character. The left is an animal, the right top is a hanger, under which is an arrow. The arrow targets the animal on the hanger. The reason why ancient Chinese used this picture to mean Monkey is not clear.

10,  Rooster

11, Dog

which is a vertical dog picture.

12, Pig

which is a vertical pig picture.

Why did ancient Chinese draw vertical pictures, instead of horizontal ones? Because people wrote on bamboo or wood slips, which is narrow and long, difficult to write horizontally, but easy to write vertically.

You may ask why people don't write the shell bone and big seal scripts for the Zodiac? I don't know. But what I can do is to write all the twelve animals in shell bone, big seal script. To compare, I also wrote them in small seal scripts.

The top line are shell bone scripts and big seal scripts as I showed above. The bottom line are all small seal scripts.

From right to left are Mouse, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig.

The order for the bottom line is same for the top line. You can see some very similar, like Mouse, Ox, Sheep, others are not similar, or totally different.

I wrote them in another way, the size of each character is proportional to the animal size.

The above is shell bone script only.

The above is small seal script only.

Now you know the most pictographic Chinese Zodiac. You may find that many Chinese don't know these old scripts.