A Royal Archive Written on Bone
At Yinxu, the last capital of the Shang Dynasty (c. 1300–1046 BCE), royal archives were not kept on paper or clay, but on the shoulder bones of oxen and the plastrons (or undershells) of turtles. These are the oracle bones, which comprise the earliest known significant body of Chinese writing. Over 150,000 inscribed fragments have been unearthed at this UNESCO World Heritage site since they were first recognized by scholars in 1899. Before their academic discovery, the fragments were being sold as "dragon bones" for use in traditional medicine.
The inscriptions record a form of divination called pyromancy. A question, or "charge," was carved onto the bone. A diviner, often the king himself, would then apply a hot metal rod to hollows drilled into the bone's reverse side. This intense heat caused the bone to crack. The resulting patterns were interpreted as answers from royal ancestors or a high deity about subjects ranging from military campaigns and harvest forecasts to the king's toothaches and the queen's pregnancies. Scribes would often record the question, the interpretation, and sometimes even the eventual outcome on the same bone, creating a detailed record of royal concerns.
The Ancestor of Modern Chinese
The oracle bone script is a fully developed and functional writing system, suggesting it had a period of development for several hundred years before the late Shang period. The script contains a large vocabulary, with more than 4,500 different characters identified. Of these, scholars can confidently link between 1,500 and 2,000 characters to their modern Chinese counterparts.
While the script appears pictographic, with early characters for "horse" or "sun" resembling the objects they represent, it is complex. Many characters had already been simplified and conventionalized by the time of the Shang Dynasty. This ancient script includes pictographs but also characters that represent abstract ideas and phonetic compounds, which are fundamental principles of modern Chinese writing. The structural principles of the oracle bone script are essentially identical to those of the Chinese script used today, it is the direct ancestor of one of the world's oldest continuously used writing systems. The texts provide direct evidence for the history of the Shang Dynasty, confirming traditional accounts and pushing back the date of verifiable Chinese history by nearly a millennium.