A dialogue with deities
At Yinxu, the last capital of the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600-1046 BCE), royal diviners practiced a refined form of pyromancy, or divination by fire. They used the plastrons (flat undershells) of turtles and the scapulae (shoulder blades) of oxen to seek guidance from ancestors and deities. The process began with polishing the shells and bones. Then, diviners chiseled rows of hollows or pits into the reverse side. A question, or "charge," was addressed to the spirits. A heated bronze poker or other fiery brand was then inserted into the hollows. The intense heat produced sharp cracking sounds and a pattern of fissures on the polished front surface; the character for this process, bǔ (卜), resembles one of these cracks. The Shang king himself would often interpret the geometry of these cracks to receive an answer, typically "auspicious" or "inauspicious".
The questions posed reveal the daily anxieties of the Shang court. Rulers asked about military campaigns, harvest yields, upcoming weather patterns, the outcome of royal births, and even the source of the king's toothaches. After the ceremony, scribes would frequently carve the question, the date, the diviner's name, the king's interpretation, and occasionally the actual outcome onto the bone itself, creating a permanent archive of royal concerns.
The first Chinese library
The script carved onto these bones, known as jiǎgǔwén (甲骨文) or "shell-bone script," is the earliest known corpus of Chinese writing. It is a complex and functional writing system, not a set of pictographs. To date, more than 150,000 inscribed fragments have been unearthed from the area around Anyang. This massive collection contains a lexicon of over 4,500 distinct characters, though only about one-third of these have been definitively deciphered by modern scholars. Radiocarbon dating of bones from the reign of King Wu Ding places them between 1254 and 1197 BCE.
The inscriptions confirmed the historical existence of the Shang Dynasty, which had previously been known only from later texts. They provide direct evidence for the reigns of the last nine Shang kings. The bones are primary-source documents, detailing state affairs, religious beliefs, and the structure of Shang society. While the Shang people also wrote on bamboo or wood slats with brushes and ink, the oracle bones are the only records that have survived the intervening millennia.