A pair of Chinese Shang oracle graphs Niu and Yang for certain livestock originate from a pair of Halaf pottery motifs bucrania and mouflons, which spread across prehistoric Old World.

Abstract Utilizing the multiple evidence of genetics, archaeology, iconography, graphemics and philology, this paper discovers two foreign elements Niu and Yang from the Fertile Crescent, in the Shang oracle inscriptions; as well as articulates the dispersal across Europe of the Halaf culture motif pair bucrania and mouflons. These discoveries provide a clue to investigate the relations of several pictograph type writing systems of the Bronze Age Old World. The connection among the Shang graph pair Niu and Yang, the European late Neolithic and Bronze Age abstract motif bucrania, and the Halaf pottery motif pair bucrania and mouflons is disclosed by the shared contents of their meaning: taurine cattle and sheep/goats from the Fertile Crescent. The second prototype of the Halaf motif pair, the back view of the whole body is distinguished from the head view by comparing the motifs with animal images and according to their placement in the evolutionary process. Owing to the same form, the same degree of abstraction, and the same characteristic feature (a pair of huge and curved horns), the Shang graph pair falls in the clusters of those abstract variants of the Halaf motif pair. This coincides with that the Shang graph pair stay outside the category of all the other four-legged animals’ Shang oracle graphs, not only because of the different view types, but also the Shang graph pair’s more abstract form implying their more ancient times.