The Chinese Cyclical Signs as Phonograms

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From the earliest times the Chinese have used a set of twenty-two signs, the ten Heavenly Stems (T'ien kan) and twelve Earthly Branches (Ti chih), as a means of enumeration, very much as we use the letters of the alphabet. We find them already on the oracle bones of the Shang dynasty (latter part of the second millennium B.C.) primarily as a method of naming days. By running the two series side by side, so that six cycles of the series of ten corresponded to five of the series of twelve, a longer series of sixty was formed. This ran continuously and was used to specify days independently of the months and years in which they fell. This usage continues in the Chinese lunar calendar to the present. At a later period the same system was applied to years, and it was also adapted for months and hours. The curious thing about these twenty-two signs is that neither the graphs nor the names attached to them have any separate meaning. Their meaning is simply the order in which they occur in the series to which they belong. It is true that a few of the characters are also used to write other homophonous words, but these are a small minority and such words have no apparent relation to the cyclical signs as such. From about the Han dynasty a series of twelve animal names became attached to the series of twelve Earthly Branches and these are still in common use. Neither the graphs nor the traditonal cyclical names, however, show any obvious relationship to the animal names which have been attached to them.