Misplaced Pages

#481518

80-428: Diviners would submit questions to deities regarding weather, crop planting, the fortunes of members of the royal family, military endeavors, and similar topics. These questions were carved onto the bone or shell in oracle bone script using a sharp tool. Intense heat was then applied with a metal rod until the bone or shell cracked due to thermal expansion . The diviner would then interpret the pattern of cracks and write

160-410: A Venetian blind turned 90 degrees, are present in oracle bone inscriptions. Since the ease of writing with a brush is even greater than that of writing with a stylus in wet clay, it is assumed that the style and structure of Shang graphs on bamboo were similar to those on bronzes, and also that the majority of writing occurred with a brush on such books. Additional support for this notion includes

240-419: A phono-semantic compound , and a rough meaning can be inferred based on the semantic component. For instance, an oracle bone character was recently found which consists of 礻 on the left and 升 on the right ([ 礻升 ] when converted from oracle bone forms to their modern printed equivalents). This character may reasonably be guessed to a compound with 示 'altar' as the semantic and 升 (modern reading sheng ) as

320-611: A different style—constitute the earliest corpus of Chinese writing, and are the direct ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts developed over the next three millennia. Their study is essential for the research of Chinese etymologies . It is also the direct ancestor of over a dozen East Asian writing systems. The length of inscriptions ranges from 10 to over 100 characters, but a few dozen is typical. The subjects of concern in inscriptions are broad, and include war, ritual sacrifice, and agriculture, as well as births, illnesses, and deaths in

400-525: A human skeleton). The targets and purposes of divination changed over time. During the reign of Wu Ding , diviners were likely to ask the powers or ancestors about things like the weather, success in battle, or building settlements. Offerings were promised if they would help with earthly affairs. Crack-making on jiazi (day 1) Zheng divined "In praying for harvest to the sun, (we) will cleave ten dappled cows, and pledge one hundred dappled cows." ( Heji 10116; Y530.2) Keightley explains that this divination

480-470: A number of lunar eclipses recorded in inscriptions by the Bīn group, who worked during the reign of Wu Ding, possibly extending into the reign of Zu Geng. Assuming that the 60-day cycle continued uninterrupted into the securely dated period, scholars have sought to match the recorded dates with calculated dates of eclipses. There is general agreement on four of these, spanning dates from 1198 to 1180 BCE. A fifth

560-523: A royal hunt. There are relatively few oracle bone inscriptions dating after the conquest of the Shang by the Zhou dynasty ( c.  1046 BC ). From their initial discovery during the 1950s, only a handful of examples from this later period had been uncovered, and those that did were fragments consisting of only one or two characters. In August 1977, a cache containing thousands of Zhou-era oracle bones

640-409: A small number of pottery, shell and bone, and jade and other stone items, and there is evidence that they also wrote on bamboo (or wooden) books just like those found from the late Zhou to Han periods, because the graphs for a writing brush ( 聿 yù , depicting a hand holding a writing brush ) and bamboo book ( 冊 cè , a book of thin bamboo and wooden slips bound with horizontal strings, like

720-431: A statelet within the Shang sphere of influence. These notations were generally made on the back of the shell's bridge (called bridge notations), the lower carapace, or the xiphiplastron (tail edge). Some shells may have been from locally raised tortoises, however. Scapula notations were near the socket or a lower edge. Some of these notations were not carved after being written with a brush, proving (along with other evidence)

800-573: A temple dedicated to the Duke of Zhou during the Tang dynasty , about 18 km (11 mi) west of Qijia. They mention the Duke of Zhou and other figures of the early Western Zhou. A handful of oracle bones have been found at other Western Zhou sites, including some from Beijing. After the founding of Zhou, the Shang practices of bronze casting, pyromancy, and writing continued. Oracle bones that were found in

880-704: Is a systematic and scientific inquiry into the inherent laws of the oracle bone script itself and uses it as a basis for glimpsing the history, society, and customs of the ancient world. The oracle bones should not be confused with orthography. It is generally agreed that the tradition of writing represented by oracle bone script existed prior to the first known examples, due to the attested script's mature state. Many characters had already undergone extensive simplifications and linearizations, and techniques of semantic extension and phonetic loaning had also clearly been used by authors for some time, perhaps centuries. However, no clearly identifiable examples of writing dating prior to

SECTION 10

#1732773059482

960-468: Is also thought to be related to their ease of use as large, flat surfaces that needed minimal preparation. There is also speculation that only female tortoise shells were used, as these are significantly less concave. Pits or hollows were then drilled or chiseled partway through the bone or shell in an orderly series. At least one such drill has been unearthed at Erligang, exactly matching the pits in size and shape. The shape of these pits evolved over time, and

1040-432: Is an important indicator for dating the oracle bones within various sub-periods in the Shang dynasty. The shape and depth also helped determine the nature of the crack that would appear. The number of pits per bone or shell varied widely. Divinations were typically carried out for the Shang kings in the presence of a diviner. Very few oracle bones were used in divination by other members of the royal family or nobles close to

1120-574: Is applied to them as well. The bones or shells were first sourced and then prepared for use. Their sourcing is significant because some of them (especially many of the shells) are believed to have been presented as tribute to the Shang, which provides valuable information about diplomatic relations of the time. We know this because notations were often made on them recording their provenance (e.g., tribute of how many shells from where and on what date). For example, one notation records that " Què ( 雀 ) sent 250 (tortoise shells)", identifying this as, perhaps,

1200-542: Is assigned by some scholars to 1201 BCE. From this data, the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project , relying on the statement in the "Against Luxurious Ease" chapter of the Book of Documents that the reign of Wu Ding lasted 59 years, dated it from 1250 to 1192 BCE. American sinologist David Keightley argued that the "Against Luxurious Ease" chapter should not be treated as a historical text because it

1280-710: Is known as a "verification". A complete record of all the above elements is rare; most bones contain just the date, diviner and topic of divination, and many remained uninscribed after the divination. The uninscribed divination is thought to have been brush-written with ink or cinnabar on the oracle bones or accompanying documents, as a few of the oracle bones found still bear their brush-written divinations without carving, while some have been found partially carved. After use, shells and bones used ritually were buried in separate pits (some for shells only; others for scapulae only), in groups of up to hundreds or even thousands (one pit unearthed in 1936 contained over 17,000 pieces along with

1360-474: Is not known how Wang and Liu actually came across these specimens, but Wang is credited with being the first to recognize their significance. During the Boxer Rebellion , Wang reluctantly accepted a defense command, and killed himself in 1900 when allied troops entered Beijing. His son later sold the bones to Liu, who published the first book of rubbings of the oracle bone inscriptions in 1903. As news of

1440-543: Is the discipline for the study of oracle bones and the oracle bone script. Shang-era oracle bones are thought to have been unearthed occasionally by local farmers since as early as the Sui and Tang dynasties, and perhaps starting as early as the Han dynasty . In Sui and Tang era Anyang , which was at one time the capital of the Shang dynasty, oracle bones were exhumed during burial ceremonies, though grave diggers did not realize what

1520-506: Is the study of oracle bones and oracle bone script. It is a humanities discipline that focuses on the Chinese Upper Antiquity oracle characters. Oracle bone science can be divided into a narrow sense of oracle bone science and a broad sense of oracle bone science. In the narrow sense, the study of oracle bone script is limited to the study of oracle bone script itself, and it is a discipline of paleography . This includes

1600-434: Is unique in being addressed to the sun, but typical in that 10 cattle are being offered, with 100 more to follow if the harvest is good. Later divinations were more likely to be perfunctory, optimistic, made by the king himself, addressed to his ancestors, on a regular cycle, and unlikely to ask the ancestors to do anything. Keightley suggests that this reflects a change in ideas about what the powers and ancestors could do, and

1680-720: The Academia Sinica in 1928, the source of the oracle bones had been traced back to modern Xiaotun ( 小屯村 ) village at Anyang in Henan. Official archaeological excavations led by Li Ji , the father of Chinese archaeology, between 1928 and 1937 discovered 20,000 oracle bone pieces, which now form the bulk of the Academia Sinica's collection in Taiwan and constitute about 1/5 of the total discovered. The major archaeologically excavated pits of bones have been: When deciphered,

SECTION 20

#1732773059482

1760-503: The Eastern Zhou , Han, Tang , and Qing dynasty periods, and Keightley mentions its use in Taiwan as late as 1972. Oracle bone script Oracle bone script is the oldest attested form of written Chinese , dating to the late 2nd millennium BC. Inscriptions were made by carving characters into oracle bones , usually either the shoulder bones of oxen or the plastrons of turtles . The writings themselves mainly record

1840-710: The Japanese invasion of China in 1937. The Chinese still acknowledge the pioneering contribution of Menzies as "the foremost western scholar of Yin-Shang culture and oracle bone inscriptions". His former residence in Anyang was declared a "Protected Treasure" in 2004, and the James Mellon Menzies Memorial Museum for Oracle Bone Studies was established. By the time of the establishment of the Institute of History and Philology by Fu Sinian at

1920-556: The 13th century BC have been discovered. Sets of inscribed symbols on pottery, jade, and bone that have been discovered at a variety of Neolithic archeological sites across China have not been demonstrated to have any direct or indirect ancestry to the Shang oracle bone script at Anyang. Along with the contemporary bronzeware script , the oracle bone script of the Late Shang period appears pictographic. The earliest oracle bone script appears even more so than examples from late in

2000-533: The 1970s have been dated to the Zhou dynasty, with some dating to the Spring and Autumn period ; very few, however, were inscribed. It is thought that other methods of divination supplanted pyromancy, such as numerological divination using milfoil (yarrow) in connection with the hexagrams of the I Ching , leading to the decline of inscribed oracle bones. However, evidence for the continued use of plastromancy exists for

2080-603: The American missionary Frank H. Chalfant (1862–1914) in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing , which first appeared in Chinese books during the 1930s. In earlier decades, Chinese authors used a variety of names for the inscriptions based on the name of Yinxu , their purpose ( 卜 bǔ 'to divine'), or the method of inscription ( 契 qì 'to engrave'). A previously common term was 殷墟卜辭 ( Yīnxū bǔcí 'Yinxu divinatory texts'). Oraculology ( 甲骨学 ; 甲骨學 ; jiǎgǔxué )

2160-517: The Rénmín ( 人民 ) Park phase. Four inscribed bones have been found at Zhengzhou: three with numbers 310, 311, and 312 in the Hebu corpus, and one that has a single character ( ㄓ ), which also appears in late Shang inscriptions. HB 310, which contained two brief divinations, has been lost, but is recorded in a rubbing and two photographs. HB 311 and 312 each contain a pair of characters that are similar to

2240-718: The Shang culture sites. Ox scapulae and plastrons, both prepared for divination, were found at the Shang culture sites of Táixīcūn ( 台西村 ) in Hebei and Qiūwān ( 丘灣 ) in Jiangsu . One or more pitted scapulae were found at Lùsìcūn ( 鹿寺村 ) in Henan, while unpitted scapulae have been found at Erlitou in Henan, Cixian ( 磁縣 ) in Hebei, Níngchéng ( 寧城 ) in Liaoning, and Qijia ( 齊家 ) in Gansu . Plastrons do not become more numerous than scapulae until

2320-444: The Shang dynasty, most graphs were already conventionalized in such a simplified fashion that the meanings of many of the pictographs are not immediately apparent. Without careful research to compare these to later forms, one would probably not know that these represented 豕 'swine' and 犬 'dog' respectively. As William G. Boltz notes, most of the oracle bone graphs are not depicted realistically enough for those who do not already know

2400-451: The Zhou ritual centre known as the Zhōuyuán. Some of these are believed to be contemporaneous with the reign of Di Xin , the last Shang king, and others to date from the early Western Zhou. The inscriptions are distinguished from those of Anyang in the way the bones and shells were prepared and used, the smallness of the characters, the presence of unique vocabulary, and the use of the phases of

2480-416: The addition of the 禾 component. Some characters are only attested in the oracle bone script, dropping out of later usage and usually being replaced by newer characters. An example is a fragment bearing character for 'spring' that has no known modern counterpart. In such cases, available context may be used to determine the possible meaning of the character. In other cases, the character may be assumed to be

Oracle bone - Misplaced Pages Continue

2560-524: The area was the site of the last Shang dynasty capital. Decades of uncontrolled digs followed to fuel the antiques trade, and many of these pieces eventually entered collections in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan. The first Western collector was the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant (1862–1914). Chalfant also coined the term "oracle bone" in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing , which

2640-658: The areas oracle bones were discovered and thus it is theorized they were presented to the region as tribute. Neolithic diviners in China had long been heating the bones of deer, sheep, pigs, and cattle for similar purposes; evidence for this in Liaoning has been found dating to the late fourth millennium BCE. However, over time, the use of ox bones increased, and use of tortoise shells does not appear until early Shang culture. The earliest tortoise shells found that had been prepared for divinatory use (i.e., with chiseled pits) date to

2720-490: The bones were and generally reinterred them. During the 19th century, villagers in the area who were digging in the fields discovered a number of bones, and used them as dragon bones , following the traditional Chinese medicine practice of grinding up Pleistocene fossils into tonics or poultices . The turtle shell fragments were prescribed for malaria, while the other animal bones were used in powdered form to treat knife wounds. In 1899, an antiques dealer from Shandong who

2800-576: The center of the shell or bone, then moving toward the edge such that the two sides mirror one another. Despite the pictorial nature of the oracle bone script, it was a fully functional and mature writing system by the time of the Shang dynasty, meaning it was able to record the Old Chinese language, and not merely fragments of ideas or words. This level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred years. From their presumed origins as pictographs and signs, by

2880-403: The cracking. A number of cracks were typically made in one session, sometimes on more than one bone, and these were typically numbered. The diviner in charge of the ceremony read the cracks to learn the answer to the divination. How exactly the cracks were interpreted is not known. The topic of divination was raised multiple times, and often in different ways, such as in the negative, or by changing

2960-399: The date being divined about. One oracle bone might be used for one session or for many, and one session could be recorded on a number of bones. The divined answer was sometimes then marked either "auspicious" or "inauspicious", and the king occasionally added a "prognostication", his reading on the nature of the omen. On very rare occasions, the actual outcome was later added to the bone in what

3040-417: The difficulty in decipherment is that components of certain oracle bone script characters may differ in later script forms. Such differences may be accounted for by character simplification and/or by later generations misunderstanding the original graph, which had evolved beyond recognition. For instance, the standard character 秋 'autumn' now appears with the components 禾 'plant stalk' and 火 'fire', whereas

3120-483: The earliest Shang stratum at Erligang (modern Zhengzhou ). By the end of the Erligang, the plastrons were numerous, and at Anyang, scapulae and plastrons were used in roughly equal numbers. Due to the use of these shells in addition to bones, early references to the oracle bone script often used the term "shell and bone script", but since tortoise shells are actually a bony material, the more concise term "oracle bones"

3200-727: The extent to which the living could influence them. While the use of bones in divination has been practiced almost globally, divination involving fire or heat has generally been found only in Asia and the Asian-derived North American cultures. The use of heat to crack scapulae (pyro-scapulimancy) originated in ancient China, the earliest evidence of which extends back to the 4th millennium BCE with archaeological finds from Liaoning, though these were not inscribed. The scapulae of cattle, sheep, pigs, and deer used in pyromancy have been found at neolithic archeological sites, and

3280-615: The inscriptions on the oracle bones were revealed to be records of the divinations performed for or by the royal household. These, together with royal-sized tombs, proved beyond a doubt for the first time the existence of the Shang dynasty, which had recently been doubted, and the location of its last capital, Yin. Today, Xiaotun at Anyang is thus also known as the Ruins of Yin, or Yinxu . Oracle bone inscriptions were published as they were discovered, in fascicles . Subsequently, many collections of inscriptions were also published. The following are

Oracle bone - Misplaced Pages Continue

3360-464: The integration of theories, research methods and materials from various disciplines, such as paleography, history, archaeology, historical culture, historical literature, and cultural anthropology, to thoroughly study the historical and cultural background of the oracle bones and some of the patterns of the oracle bone divination. It is a diversified and specialized discipline. In the early days of oracle bone discovery, oracle bones were called qiwen , and

3440-482: The king. By the latest periods, the Shang kings took over the role of diviner personally. During a divination session, the shell or bone was anointed with blood and, in an inscription section called the "preface", the date was recorded using the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches , along with the diviner's name. Next, the topic of divination (called the "charge") was posed, such as whether a particular ancestor

3520-468: The king. The extant inscriptions are not evenly distributed across these periods, with 55% coming from period I and 31% from periods III and IV. A few oracle bones date to the beginning of the subsequent Zhou dynasty . The earliest oracle bones (corresponding to the reigns of Wu Ding and Zu Geng) record dates using only the 60-day cycle of stems and branches , though sometimes the month was also given. Attempts to determine an absolute chronology focus on

3600-495: The late Shang period, and scholars have reconstructed the Shang royal genealogy from the cycle of ancestral sacrifices recorded on oracle bones. When they were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century and deciphered in the early twentieth century, these records confirmed the existence of the Shang, whose historicity had been subject to scrutiny at the time by the Doubting Antiquity School . Oraculology

3680-418: The late Shang script. HB 312 was found in an upper layer of the Erligang culture. The others were found accidentally in river management earthworks, and so lack archaeological context. Pei Mingxiang argued that they predated the Anyang site. Takashima, referring to character forms and syntax, argues that they were contemporaneous with the reign of Wu Ding. A turtle plastron bearing several short inscriptions

3760-461: The main collections. Observing that the citation of these different works was becoming unwieldy, historians Hu Houxuan and Guo Moruo began an effort to comprehensively publish all bones discovered by the mid-1950s. The result, the Jiaguwen Heji (1978–1982) was edited by Houxuan and Guo Moruo and, with its supplement (1999) edited by Peng Bangjiong, is the most comprehensive catalogue of

3840-481: The moon as a dating device. Four pieces (HB 1, 12, 13 and 15) have been particularly puzzling, because they refer to sacrifices in the temples of Shang ancestors, and also differ from the other bones in calligraphy and syntax. Scholars disagree on whether they were produced at Anyang or the Zhouyuan, and whether the diviners and scribes were Shang or Zhou. In 2003, around 600 inscribed bones were found at Zhougongmiao,

3920-461: The oracle bone characters found that they were 23% pictographs, 2% simple indicatives, 32% associative compounds, 11% phonetic loans, 27% phono-semantic compounds, and 6% undetermined. Although it was a fully functional writing system, the oracle bone script was not fully standardized. By the early Western Zhou period, these traits had vanished, but in both periods, the script was not highly regular or standardized; variant forms of graphs abound, and

4000-415: The oracle bone form depicts an insect-like figure with antennae – either a cricket or a locust – with a variant depicting fire [REDACTED] below said figure. In this case, the modern character is a simplification of an archaic variant 𪛁 (or 𥤚 ) which is closer to the oracle bone script form – albeit with the insect figure being confused with the similar-looking character for 龜 'turtle' and

4080-589: The oracle bone fragments. The 20 volumes contain reproductions of over 55,000 fragments. A separate work published in 1999 contains transcriptions of the inscriptions into standard characters. The vast majority of the inscribed oracle bones were found at the Yinxu site in modern Anyang and date to the reigns of the last nine Shang kings. The diviners named on the bones have been assigned to five periods by Dong Zuobin : The kings were involved in divination in all periods, with divinations in later periods done personally by

SECTION 50

#1732773059482

4160-429: The oracle bones' discovery spread throughout China and among foreign collectors and scholars the market for the bones exploded, though many collectors sought to keep the location of the bones' source a secret. Although scholars tried to find their source, antique dealers falsely claimed that the bones came from Tangyin in Henan. In 1908, scholar Luo Zhenyu discovered the source of the bones near Anyang and realized that

4240-612: The overthrow of the Shang by the Zhou dynasty in c.  1046 BC , divination using milfoil became more common; far fewer oracle bone inscriptions are dated to the Western Zhou. No Zhou-era sites with a comparable cache of inscriptions to Yinxu have been found; however, examples from this period appear to be more widespread, having been found near most major population centers. New sites have continued to be discovered since 2000. The oracle bone inscriptions—along with several roughly contemporaneous bronzeware inscriptions using

4320-413: The period (thus some evolution did occur over the roughly 200-year period). Comparing the oracle bone script to both Shang and early Western Zhou period writing on bronzes, the oracle bone script is clearly greatly simplified, and rounded forms are often converted to rectilinear ones; this is thought to be due to the difficulty of engraving the bone's hard surface, compared with the ease of writing them in

4400-464: The phonetic. Though no modern character consists of these two components, it likely refers to a type of Shang dynasty ritual with a name similar to the pronunciation of 升 in Old Chinese. In the same collection of fragments, the character ⟨阝心⟩ was surmised to be a place name, since the semantic component 阜 means 'mound', 'hill', and the divination concerned the king traveling for

4480-455: The practice appears to have become quite common by the end of the third millennium BCE. Scapulae were unearthed along with smaller numbers of pitless plastrons in the Nánguānwài ( 南關外 ) stage at Zhengzhou; scapulae as well as smaller numbers of plastrons with chiseled pits were also discovered in the lower and upper Erligang stages. Significant use of tortoise plastrons does not appear until

4560-474: The prognostication upon the piece as well. Pyromancy with bones continued in China into the Zhou dynasty , but the questions and prognostications were increasingly written with brushes and cinnabar ink, which degraded over time. Oracle bones bear the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing , using an early form of Chinese characters . The inscriptions contain around 5,000 different characters, many of which are still being used today, though

4640-407: The reorientation of some graphs, by rotating them 90 degrees, as if to better fit on tall, narrow slats. The style must have developed on books of bamboo or wood slats, and then carried over to the oracle bone script. Additionally, the layout of characters in columns from top to bottom is mostly carried over from bamboo books. In some instances, characters are instead written in rows in order to match

4720-453: The results of official divinations carried out on behalf of the Late Shang royal family. These divinations took the form of scapulimancy where the oracle bones were exposed to flames, creating patterns of cracks that were then subjected to interpretation. Both the prompt and interpretation were inscribed on the same piece of bone that had been used for the divination itself. Out of an estimated 150,000 inscriptions that have been uncovered,

4800-479: The royal family. As such, they provide invaluable insights into the character of late Shang society. The common Chinese term for oracle bone script is 甲骨文 ( jiǎgǔwén 'shell and bone script'), which is an abbreviation of 龜甲獸骨文字 ( guījiǎ shòugǔ wénzì 'turtle-shell and animal-bone script'). This term is a translation of the English phrase "inscriptions upon bone and tortoise shell", which had been coined by

4880-576: The script to recognize what they stand for; although pictographic in origin, they are no longer pictographs in function. Boltz instead calls them zodiographs , emphasizing their function as representing concepts exclusively through words. Similarly, Qiu labels them semantographs . By the late Shang, oracle bone graphs had already evolved into mostly non-pictographic forms, including all the major types of Chinese characters now in use. Loangraphs, phono-semantic compounds, and associative compounds were already common. One structural and functional analysis of

SECTION 60

#1732773059482

4960-672: The size and orientation of graphs is also irregular. A graph when inverted horizontally generally refers to the same word, and additional components are sometimes present without changing the meaning. These irregularities persisted until the standardization of the seal script during the Qin dynasty . There are over 30,000 distinct characters found from all the bone fragments so far, which may represent around 4,000 individual characters in their various forms. The majority of these still remain undeciphered, although scholars believe they can decipher between 1,500 and 2,000 of these characters. One reason for

5040-491: The study of oracle bones was called qiology . In 1931, Zhou Yitong proposed for the first time that "oracle bone science" was an independent discipline. Wang Yuxin emphasized that oracle bones are precious cultural relics and historical materials left over from the ancient period, but their value for archaeological and historical research lies in orthography beyond script interpretation, which has become increasingly recognized by scholars as orthography develops. Oracle bone science

5120-482: The text with divinatory cracks; in others, columns of text rotate 90 degrees mid-phrase. These are exceptions to the normal pattern of writing, and inscriptions were never read bottom to top. Columns of text in Chinese writing are traditionally laid out from right to left; this pattern is first found with the Shang-era bronze inscriptions. However, oracle bone inscriptions are often arranged with columns beginning near

5200-414: The total number of discrete characters is uncertain as some may be different versions of the same character. Specialists have agreed on the form, meanings, and sound of a little more than a quarter of the characters, roughly 1,200 with certainty, but several hundred more remain under discussion; these known characters comprise much of the core vocabulary of modern Chinese. They provide important information on

5280-780: The traditional date. Since divination was by heat or fire and most often on plastrons or scapulae, the terms pyromancy , plastromancy and scapulimancy are often used for this process. The oracle bones are mostly turtle plastrons , probably female and ox scapulae, although there are also examples of tortoise carapaces , ox rib bones, the scapulae of sheep, boars, horses, and deer, and other various animal bones. The skulls of deer, oxen, and humans have also been found with inscriptions on them, although these are very rare and appear to have been inscribed for record keeping or practice rather than for actual divination; in one case, inscribed deer antlers were reported, but Keightley reports that they are fake. Interestingly, tortoises are not native to

5360-459: The true individual ages. Period V inscriptions often identify numbered ritual cycles, making it easier to estimate the reign lengths of the last two kings. The start of this period is dated 1100–1090 BCE by Keightley and 1101 BCE by the Xia–Shang–Zhou project. Most scholars now agree that the Zhou conquest of the Shang took place close to 1046 or 1045 BCE, over a century later than

5440-461: The use of the writing brush in Shang times. Scapulae are assumed to have generally come from the Shang's own livestock, perhaps those used in ritual sacrifice, although there are records of cattle sent as tribute as well, including some recorded via marginal notations. The bones or shells were cleaned of meat and then prepared by sawing, scraping, smoothing, and even polishing to create flat surfaces. The predominance of scapulae, and later of plastrons,

5520-610: The vast majority were unearthed at Yinxu , the site of the final Shang capital (modern-day Anyang , Henan). The most recent major discovery was the Huayuanzhuang cache found near the site in 1993. Of the 1,608 Huayuanzhang pieces, 579 bear inscriptions. Each of the last nine Shang kings are named in the inscriptions beginning with Wu Ding , whose accession is variously dated between 1250 and 1200 BC. Oracle bone inscriptions corresponding to Wu Ding's reign have been radiocarbon dated to 1254–1197 BC (±10 years). Following

5600-482: The wet clay of the molds the bronzes were cast from. The more detailed and more pictorial style of the bronze graphs is thought to be more representative of typical Shang writing using bamboo books than the oracle bone forms; this typical style continued to evolve into writing styles of the Western Zhou period, and then into the seal script within the state of Qin . It is known that the Shang people also wrote with brush and ink, as brush-written graphs have been found on

5680-419: Was causing a king's toothache. The divination charges were often directed at ancestors, whom the ancient Chinese revered and worshiped, as well as natural powers and Dì ( 帝 ), the highest god in the Shang society. Anything of concern to the royal house of Shang served as possible topics for charges, from illness, birth and death, to weather, warfare, agriculture, tribute and so on. One of the most common topics

5760-541: Was composed much later, presents reign lengths as moral judgements, and gives other reign lengths that are contradicted by oracle bone evidence. Estimating an average reign length of 20 years based on dated Zhou reigns, Keightley proposed that Wu Ding's reign started around 1200  BCE or earlier. Ken-ichi Takashima dates the earliest oracle bone inscriptions to 1230 BCE. 26 oracle bones throughout Wu Ding's reign have been radiocarbon dated to 1254–1197 BCE (±10 years) with an estimated 80-90% probability of containing

5840-675: Was discovered at a site closely linked to the ancient Zhou heartland. Among thousands of pieces, 200–300 bore inscriptions. Among the major scholars making significant contributions to the study of the oracle bone writings, especially early on, were: A proposal to include the oracle bone script in Unicode is being prepared. Code points U+35400–U+36BFF in Unicode Plane 3 (the Tertiary Ideographic Plane) have been tentatively allocated. 丁未卜，王[礻升]叀父戊？ This

5920-539: Was found at Daxinzhuang in Shandong on the floor of a semi-subterranean house dating from the Late Shang period. The style of characters is close to that used by particular diviner groups active at Anyang during the reign of Wu Ding, though it shows some variations. Nearly 300 inscribed oracle bones (HB 1–290) were found in 1977 in two pits dug into a building foundation at Qijia, Fufeng County , Shaanxi , part of

6000-565: Was searching for Chinese bronzes in the area acquired a number of oracle bones from locals, and later sold several to Wang Yirong , the chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing. Wang was a knowledgeable collector of Chinese bronzes, and is believed to be the first person in modern times to recognize the oracle bones' markings as ancient Chinese writing similar to that on Zhou dynasty bronzes. A legendary tale relates that Wang

6080-455: Was sick with malaria, and his scholar friend Liu E was visiting him and helped examine his medicine. They discovered that, before being ground into powder, the bones bore strange glyphs which, having studied the ancient bronze inscriptions , they recognized as ancient writing. Xu Yahui states that, "[n]o one can know how many oracle bones, prior to 1899, were ground up by traditional Chinese pharmacies and disappeared into people's stomachs." It

6160-558: Was the first time that the graph ⟨ 礻升 ⟩ had been attested attested in oracle bone inscriptions. Wang translated the sentence as: "Prognostication on the day dingwei : if the king performs the sheng sacrifice, will it benefit Ancestor Wu?" The newly found graph was tentatively assigned the same modern reading as the phonetic component 升 . Tangyin Tangyin County ( simplified Chinese : 汤阴县 ; traditional Chinese : 湯陰縣 ; pinyin : Tāngyīn Xiàn )

6240-550: Was the first to come up with a method of dating them (in order to avoid being fooled by fakes). In 1917 he published the first scientific study of the bones, including 2,369 drawings and inscriptions and thousands of ink rubbings. Through the donation of local people and his own archaeological excavations, he acquired the largest private collection in the world, over 35,000 pieces. He insisted that his collection remain in China, though some were sent to Canada by colleagues who were worried that they would be either destroyed or stolen during

6320-404: Was then calqued into Chinese as jiǎgǔ 甲骨 in the 1930s. Only a small number of dealers and collectors knew the location of the source of the oracle bones until they were found by Canadian missionary James Mellon Menzies , the first person to scientifically excavate, study, and decipher them. He was the first to conclude that the bones were records of divination from the Shang dynasty, and

6400-403: Was whether performing rituals in a certain manner would be satisfactory. An intense heat source was then inserted in a pit until it cracked. Due to the shape of the pit, the front side of the bone cracked in a rough 卜 shape. The character 卜 ( bǔ or pǔ ; Old Chinese : *puk ; 'to divine') may be a pictogram of such a crack; the reading of the character may also be an onomatopoeia for

#481518