Oracle Bone Script

Oracle bone script was carved or written on turtle shells and bones of oxen, sheep and other animals in Shang and Zhou times, mainly as records of divination by the late Shang royal house; it is also called “divination inscriptions,” “carved script” and “Yinxu script.” Shang kings divined when matters arose: small holes were bored in the back of a shell or bone and heated with fire, the cracks on the front were read for good or ill fortune, and the date, subject and result were carved on it. The contents concern sacrifices, war, farming, astronomy, illness, hunting and more, a precious source for Shang history. In 1899 Wang Yirong, Imperial Academy chancellor of the Qing, first recognized oracle bone script on “dragon bones” sold as Chinese medicine; afterwards large numbers of bones were found at Yinxu in Anyang, Henan, Zhouyuan in Shaanxi, Shandong and elsewhere. About 150,000 inscribed Shang bones have been found, with more than 4,400 distinct characters, of which about 1,500 have been deciphered. The script already used pictographic, indicative, associative, phonetic-compound and loan methods of forming characters; pictographs make up about 40%, and phonetic compounds had appeared, giving it the basic structure of Chinese characters, and the forms of many characters are still in use. It is the earliest known mature systematic writing of China and East Asia. Scholars such as Luo Zhenyu, Wang Guowei, Guo Moruo and Dong Zuobin contributed greatly to its study, forming the discipline of oracle bone studies. Its discovery confirmed the reliability of the Shang royal lineage in the Records of the Grand Historian and pushed back China's documented history to the Shang. In 2017 oracle bone script was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.