The oracle bones of the Shang dynasty and the birth of Chinese writing
Ox scapulae and turtle plastrons inscribed at Yinxu, near Anyang: how the Shang kings questioned their ancestors and why these bones matter so much.
The oldest extensive evidence of Chinese writing consists neither of poems nor of laws, but of questions put to ancestors. They are carved on ox scapulae and turtle plastrons used in divination by the court of the late Shang dynasty, between the thirteenth and eleventh centuries BC. These oracle bones, called jiaguwen in Chinese, «writing on shells and bones», allow us to hear, almost first-hand, the concerns of a Bronze Age kingdom.
From «dragon bones» to the Anyang excavations
According to an often-repeated story, in 1899 the official and scholar Wang Yirong recognised signs of ancient writing on fragments sold in Beijing pharmacies as «dragon bones», an ingredient of traditional medicine. The episode may be partly anecdotal, but it is certain that in those very years scholars began to collect and decipher these finds.
Their origin was traced to the area of Anyang, in Henan province, where Yin, the last Shang capital, once stood, now known as Yinxu, «the ruins of Yin». Between 1928 and 1937 the Academia Sinica carried out systematic excavations there, and since then a great many fragments have been recovered, in the order of several tens of thousands, kept in museums and collections in various countries.
Fire and cracks
The technique, known to scholars as scapulimancy and plastromancy, relied on heat. Specialists prepared the bone or shell, carved small hollows into its back and applied a source of heat, producing T-shaped cracks on the opposite face. The Chinese character bu, meaning «to divine», seems to reproduce the very shape of those fissures.
After the consultation, the date, the name of the diviner, the question and sometimes the king's reading of the response were often carved onto the bone, and in some cases even the actual outcome. Divination with burnt bones is attested in China before the Shang too, but without inscriptions: it is the writing that makes the Anyang material exceptional.
What the kings asked
The questions concern rain and harvest, military campaigns, hunting, the sacrifices to be offered to ancestors, illnesses, dreams and the childbirths of queens. Many inscriptions date from the reign of Wu Ding, one of the best-documented Shang rulers, and also mention his consort Fu Hao, whose tomb, discovered intact in 1976, yielded bronzes, jades and weapons.
For historians these bones are a source of immense value. They have made it possible to confirm much of the list of Shang kings handed down by the historian Sima Qian and to study the language, religion and administration of one of China's first urban civilisations. Many of the carved characters can be recognised as direct ancestors of modern ones, while others remain undeciphered and continue to occupy palaeographers.
The oracle bones remind us that Chinese writing, at least in the earliest forms that have reached us, was born in close connection with the sacred. Every crack was an awaited answer, every inscription an attempt to fix the dialogue between the ruler and the world of the ancestors. In 2017 UNESCO added the oracle-bone inscriptions to its Memory of the World Register.