Oracle Bones

The bones (usually shoulder blades) of oxen or tortoise under-shells used in the Shang culture of northern China for divination. Used to divine messages from ancestors, they are inscribed with either the question, answer, and/or name of the diviner. Oracle bones ordinarily record a question addressed by the Shang king to his deceased ancestors, or the response to the question, or even the ultimate outcome of the matter divined. The subjects of divination comprise a limited range of royal concerns. The Anyang kings asked chiefly about war, hunting, rainfall, harvests, sickness, their consorts' childbearing, the fortune of the coming week and, above all, sacrifices. They originated in the Lung-Shun culture and have been discovered at the Chou site of Qishan and Shang site of Anyang, dating to the late 2nd millennium BC. Anyang was the last capital of the Shang dynasty; apart from the far more limited corpus of inscriptions on bronze ritual vessels, the oracle texts are the only documents left by the Shang civilization. The depressions were made in bone and then a heated point was applied to cause bone to crack. Divination by interpretation of these cracks. The inscriptions are the earliest examples of the fully developed form of Chinese characters. Those deciphered from Anyang have helped reconstruct the Shang kinship system and aspects of the culture. These inscriptions preserve the earliest known Chinese writing and sometimes, by naming kings and ancestors, confirm the historical basis of early legends. A few examples have been found at Neolithic sites as Kexingzhuang (Dadunzi). The divination practice is called 'scapulimancy' (scapulae are shoulder blades).

Animal scapulae or tortoise plastrons used in ancient China for divination. A few examples have been found at Neolithic sites like Kexingzhuang (see also dadunzi.) More important are the oracle bones of the 13th-11th centuries bc found in large numbers at Anyang, for these were often inscribed. The language of the Anyang oracle inscriptions is Chinese; their highly sophisticated script remains the earliest known form of the Chinese writing system, as pre-Anyang inscriptions, perhaps confined to more perishable materials, have not yet been found. The Anyang oracle bones were prepared for use by drilling cavities in one side; the oracle was somehow read from the crack that appeared in the other side when heat was applied to the cavity. The inscription was carved on the bone after the divination was performed and may have had some commemorative purpose. It ordinarily records a question addressed by the Shang king to his deceased ancestors, or the response to the question, or even the ultimate outcome of the matter divined about. The subjects of divination comprise a limited range of royal concerns and the inscriptions supply little of the practical or commercial information encountered at an early stage in Near Eastern texts. The Anyang kings enquired chiefly about war, hunting, rainfall, harvests, sickness, their consorts’ childbearing, the fortune of the coming week and, above all, sacrifices. From the names of kings mentioned as recipients of sacrifice, scholars have been able to reconstruct a genealogy of the Shang royal house almost identical to that given in much later historical texts, and it was this that secured the identification of the Anyang site as the last capital of the Shang dynasty. Apart from the far more limited corpus of inscriptions on bronze ritual vessels, the oracle texts are the only documents left by the Shang civilization. However, in Shang as in later times the ordinary form of writing is likely to have been brush-writing, of which a few examples survive; no doubt because of the different writing materials and techniques, the oracle texts and the bronze inscriptions differ in calligraphy from brush-writing and from each other. Until recently it was assumed that the practice of inscribing oracle bones was a monopoly of the Shang court. In 1977, however, excavation of a palace site at Qishan Fengchucun in Shaanxi province disclosed a large hoard of oracle bones, some of which carry inscriptions showing that divinations were performed at Qishan on behalf of a predynastic Zhou ruler who was at least a nominal vassal of the Shang king. After their conquest of Shang the Zhou apparently gave up scapulimancy in favour of divination using milfoil sticks and guided by the hexagrams of the Yi jing or Classic of Changes, a diviner’s handbook.