Shang Dynasty Oracle Bones: The Earliest Chinese Writing

Shang dynasty oracle bones are pieces of turtle shell and cattle bone that the kings of the Shang dynasty used to communicate with their ancestors and other spirits, mostly between about 1250 and 1046 BC. Carved with questions and answers, they are the earliest substantial body of Chinese writing and the direct ancestor of the characters still used today. Their recognition in 1899 confirmed that the Shang dynasty, previously known only from much later texts, had truly existed.

What oracle bones were

The practice of divining with heated bones, called pyromancy, was older than the Shang. Unmarked bones with burn marks have been found at Neolithic sites in northern China dating back to the third millennium BC and earlier. What made the late Shang practice special was its scale, its organisation at the royal court, and the habit of writing down the results.

Two main materials were used: the flat lower shell of turtles, known as the plastron, and the shoulder blades, or scapulae, of cattle. Turtle shells were often brought from the south as tribute, and records carved on the edges of some shells note who supplied them. The most important material came from the late Shang capital at Yinxu, near Anyang, where the royal diviners worked.

Specialists first cleaned and smoothed the shell or bone. On the back they cut rows of oval hollows, each with a small round pit beside it. During the ritual a diviner applied a hot point or burning stick to a pit, and the heat produced a crack on the front of the bone shaped like the character 卜 (bu), which still means “to divine” in Chinese.

Preparing the shells was skilled, time-consuming work, and the royal court employed teams of diviners, scribes and craftsmen. Dozens of diviners are known by name from the inscriptions, and their names help scholars date individual pieces. A single question might be tested on several shells or several cracks, and pairs of inscriptions on the left and right sides of a plastron often mirror each other.

The diviner put a statement to the spirits, often in both a positive and a negative form, such as “it will rain” and “it might not rain”. The king, or sometimes a diviner, then read the cracks and declared whether the outcome was auspicious. Scribes carved the record into the bone with a knife, sometimes filling the characters with red or black pigment.

A complete inscription had up to four parts. The preface gave the date, using a cycle of sixty day names, and the name of the diviner. The charge stated the topic. The prognostication recorded the king’s reading of the cracks. Finally, the verification, added later, noted what actually happened.

What the Shang asked

The inscriptions show the concerns of a Bronze Age monarchy. Many deal with sacrifices: which ancestor to honour, on which day, and with how many cattle, sheep or human victims. Others ask about rain and harvests, military campaigns and the movements of enemies, royal hunts and journeys, illnesses, toothaches and dreams.

Some of the most vivid concern the royal family. King Wu Ding, the earliest king whose divinations survive, asked repeatedly about his consort Fu Hao, including whether she would succeed in war and whether her childbirth would be fortunate. One verification records that the birth was “not good” because the child was a girl. Her intact tomb at Anyang was found in 1976.

The inscriptions also reveal the Shang view of the spirit world. At its top stood Di, a high power that controlled rain, wind and victory, but who received no direct sacrifices. Royal ancestors, nature powers such as the Yellow River, and former ministers could all send blessings or curses. The king’s main duty was to keep these powers satisfied.

Rediscovery in 1899 and decipherment

For centuries farmers at Xiaotun village near Anyang had ploughed up pieces of bone, which they sold to pharmacies as “dragon bones”, a traditional medicine ground into powder. Many inscribed pieces were scraped clean or destroyed before anyone read them.

In 1899 Wang Yirong, a scholar of ancient inscriptions and head of the Imperial Academy in Beijing, recognised that the carvings on such bones were an archaic form of Chinese writing and began to collect them. A popular story says that he spotted the characters on medicine bought to treat his malaria, but this tale appeared later and is not well documented; it is more likely that dealers brought inscribed pieces to him as a known collector.

Wang died in 1900 during the foreign occupation of Beijing after the Boxer Uprising. His friend Liu E acquired much of his collection and in 1903 published Tieyun canggui, the first book of oracle bone rubbings. The scholar Luo Zhenyu then traced the source of the bones to Xiaotun in 1908 and identified it as the site of the late Shang capital.

The greatest early breakthrough came from Wang Guowei. In 1917 he showed that the names of kings and ancestors in the inscriptions matched, with only small differences, the list of Shang rulers recorded by Sima Qian in the Shiji around 100 BC. This demonstrated that the later historian had used reliable sources and that the Shang were a historical dynasty, not a legend.

Scientific excavation at Anyang began in 1928. In 1933 Dong Zuobin, one of the excavators, proposed dividing the inscriptions into five periods, from Wu Ding to the last kings, using criteria such as the names of diviners, calligraphy and the ancestors addressed. His scheme, refined since, is still the basis for dating the bones. In 1936 the excavators found pit YH127, containing some 17,000 inscribed pieces of turtle shell.

The script

The oracle bone script, called jiaguwen (“shell and bone writing”) in Chinese, is already a complete writing system. It records the Old Chinese language with characters that combine pictures, sound elements and meaning elements, the same basic principles as modern Chinese. Many characters, such as those for “person”, “sun”, “moon”, “horse” and “king”, can be traced directly to their modern forms.

Because the system is so developed, scholars agree that writing must have existed in China before Wu Ding, probably on bamboo or wood that has rotted away. The inscriptions themselves mention documents written on bamboo strips. Writing was not invented in China first, however: cuneiform in Mesopotamia and Egyptian hieroglyphs are older by more than a thousand years, and Chinese writing appears to have developed independently.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

A common myth is that the oracle bones are the world’s oldest writing. They are the oldest substantial Chinese writing, but Mesopotamian and Egyptian writing are much older. Another misconception is that all oracle bones are inscribed. In fact the great majority of divination bones from ancient China carry no writing at all; inscribed bones are largely a feature of the late Shang royal court.

It is also sometimes said that the bones were only used by kings. Most known inscriptions are royal, but excavations at Huayuanzhuang East in Anyang in 1991 uncovered about 1,500 pieces, many inscribed, from the divinations of a non-royal prince. Small numbers of inscribed oracle bones were also made under the early Zhou dynasty after the Zhou conquest of the Shang.

Legacy

The oracle bones are the main written source for the history of the late Shang. They record wars, alliances, rituals, place names and even astronomical events such as lunar eclipses, which scholars use to refine the chronology of the period. They have also shaped the study of Old Chinese and the history of the Chinese script.

Major collections are held in China, Taiwan, Japan, Britain, Canada and elsewhere. In 2017 the oracle bone inscriptions were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Decipherment continues, helped by digital databases and, more recently, by computational tools that compare character forms.

Timeline

• c. 1250 BC: Reign of Wu Ding begins; the earliest inscribed royal oracle bones date from his reign.
• c. 1046 BC: The Shang fall to the Zhou, ending the main period of royal inscriptions.
• 1899: Wang Yirong recognises the inscriptions as ancient writing.
• 1903: Liu E publishes Tieyun canggui, the first book of rubbings.
• 1908: Luo Zhenyu traces the bones to Xiaotun near Anyang.
• 1917: Wang Guowei shows the inscriptions confirm the Shang king list.
• 1928: Scientific excavations begin at Anyang.
• 1936: Pit YH127 yields about 17,000 inscribed shells.
• 1991: Non-royal divination records are found at Huayuanzhuang East.
• 2017: The inscriptions are added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Why it matters

The oracle bones turned the Shang from a dynasty of legend into one of history. They preserve the voices of Bronze Age kings asking about rain, war, illness and their families, and they mark the beginning of a writing tradition that has continued without a break for more than three thousand years.