Oracle bone
Oracle bones are pieces of ox scapula and turtle plastron which were used in pyromancya form of divinationduring the Late Shang period in ancient China. Scapulimancy is the specific term if ox scapulae were used for the divination, plastromancy if turtle plastrons were used. A recent count estimated that there were about 13,000 bones with a total of a little over 130,000 inscriptions in collections in China and some fourteen other countries.
Diviners would submit questions to deities regarding weather, crop planting, the fortunes of members of the royal family, military endeavors, and similar topics. These questions were carved onto the bone or shell in oracle bone script using a sharp tool. Intense heat was then applied with a metal rod until the bone or shell cracked due to thermal expansion. The diviner would then interpret the pattern of cracks and write the prognostication upon the piece as well. Pyromancy with bones continued in China into the Zhou dynasty, but the questions and prognostications were increasingly written with brushes and cinnabar ink, which degraded over time.
Oracle bones bear the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing, using an early form of Chinese characters. The inscriptions contain around 5,000 different characters, many of which are still being used today, though the total number of discrete characters is uncertain as some may be different versions of the same character. Specialists have agreed on the form, meanings, and sound of a little more than a quarter of the characters, roughly 1,200 with certainty, but several hundred more remain under discussion; these known characters comprise much of the core vocabulary of modern Chinese. They provide important information on the late Shang period, and scholars have reconstructed the Shang royal genealogy from the cycle of ancestral sacrifices recorded on oracle bones. When they were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century and deciphered in the early twentieth century, these records confirmed the existence of the Shang, whose historicity had been subject to scrutiny at the time by the Doubting Antiquity School.
Oraculology is the discipline for the study of oracle bones and the oracle bone script.
Discovery
Shang-era oracle bones are thought to have been unearthed occasionally by local farmers since as early as the Sui and Tang dynasties, and perhaps starting as early as the Han dynasty. In Sui and Tang era Anyang, which was at one time the capital of the Shang dynasty, oracle bones were exhumed during burial ceremonies, though grave diggers did not realize what the bones were and generally reinterred them. During the 19th century, villagers in the area who were digging in the fields discovered a number of bones, and used them as dragon bones, following the traditional Chinese medicine practice of grinding up Pleistocene fossils into tonics or poultices. The turtle shell fragments were prescribed for malaria, while the other animal bones were used in powdered form to treat knife wounds.In 1899, an antiques dealer from Shandong who was searching for Chinese bronzes in the area acquired a number of oracle bones from locals, and later sold several to Wang Yirong, the chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing. Wang was a knowledgeable collector of Chinese bronzes, and is believed to be the first person in modern times to recognize the oracle bones' markings as ancient Chinese writing similar to that on Zhou dynasty bronzes. A legendary tale relates that Wang was sick with malaria, and his scholar friend Liu E was visiting him and helped examine his medicine. They discovered that, before being ground into powder, the bones bore strange glyphs which, having studied the ancient bronze inscriptions, they recognized as ancient writing. Xu Yahui states that, "o one can know how many oracle bones, prior to 1899, were ground up by traditional Chinese pharmacies and disappeared into people's stomachs."
It is not known how Wang and Liu actually came across these specimens, but Wang is credited with being the first to recognize their significance. During the Boxer Rebellion, Wang reluctantly accepted a defense command, and killed himself in 1900 when allied troops entered Beijing. His son later sold the bones to Liu, who published the first book of rubbings of the oracle bone inscriptions in 1903. As news of the oracle bones' discovery spread throughout China and among foreign collectors and scholars the market for the bones exploded, though many collectors sought to keep the location of the bones' source a secret. Although scholars tried to find their source, antique dealers falsely claimed that the bones came from Tangyin in Henan. In 1908, scholar Luo Zhenyu discovered the source of the bones near Anyang and realized that the area was the site of the last Shang dynasty capital.
Decades of uncontrolled digs followed to fuel the antiques trade, and many of these pieces eventually entered collections in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan. The first Western collector was the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant. Chalfant called the script "inscriptions upon bone and tortoise shell" in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing. The Chinese equivalent 甲骨⽂ appeared in the following decades.
Only a small number of dealers and collectors knew the location of the source of the oracle bones until they were found by Canadian missionary James Mellon Menzies, the first person to scientifically excavate, study, and decipher them. He was the first to conclude that the bones were records of divination from the Shang dynasty, and was the first to come up with a method of dating them. In 1917 he published the first scientific study of the bones, including 2,369 drawings and inscriptions and thousands of ink rubbings. Through the donation of local people and his own archaeological excavations, he acquired the largest private collection in the world, over 35,000 pieces. He insisted that his collection remain in China, though some were sent to Canada by colleagues who were worried that they would be either destroyed or stolen during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. The Chinese still acknowledge the pioneering contribution of Menzies as "the foremost western scholar of Yin-Shang culture and oracle bone inscriptions". His former residence in Anyang was declared a "Protected Treasure" in 2004, and the James Mellon Menzies Memorial Museum for Oracle Bone Studies was established.
Official excavations
By the time of the establishment of the Institute of History and Philology by Fu Sinian at the Academia Sinica in 1928, the source of the oracle bones had been traced back to modern Xiaotun village at Anyang in Henan. Official archaeological excavations led by Li Ji, the father of Chinese archaeology, between 1928 and 1937 discovered 20,000 oracle bone pieces, which now form the bulk of the Academia Sinica's collection in Taiwan and constitute about 1/5 of the total discovered. The major archaeologically excavated pits of bones have been:- Pit YH127 in Xiaotun North, with over 17,000 inscribed pieces.
- Xiaotun South, with 4,612 inscribed pieces.
- Huayuangzhuang East, with 561 inscribed pieces.
Publication
Oracle bone inscriptions were published as they were discovered, in fascicles. Subsequently, many collections of inscriptions were also published. The following are the main collections.Dating
The vast majority of the inscribed oracle bones were found at the Yinxu site in modern Anyang and date to the reigns of the last nine Shang kings. The diviners named on the bones have been assigned to five periods by Dong Zuobin:| Period | Kings | Common diviners |
| I | Wu Ding | , , , |
| II | Zu Geng, Zu Jia | , , , , , |
| III | Lin Xin, Kang Ding | |
| IV | Wu Yi, Wen Wu Ding | |
| V | Di Yi, Di Xin |
The kings were involved in divination in all periods, with divinations in later periods done personally by the king. The extant inscriptions are not evenly distributed across these periods, with 55% coming from period I and 31% from periods III and IV. A few oracle bones date to the beginning of the subsequent Zhou dynasty.
The earliest oracle bones record dates using only the 60-day cycle of stems and branches, though sometimes the month was also given. Attempts to determine an absolute chronology focus on a number of lunar eclipses recorded in inscriptions by the Bīn group, who worked during the reign of Wu Ding, possibly extending into the reign of Zu Geng. Assuming that the 60-day cycle continued uninterrupted into the securely dated period, scholars have sought to match the recorded dates with calculated dates of eclipses. There is general agreement on four of these, spanning dates from 1198 to 1180 BCE. A fifth is assigned by some scholars to 1201 BCE. From this data, the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project, relying on the statement in the "Against Luxurious Ease" chapter of the Book of Documents that the reign of Wu Ding lasted 59 years, dated it from 1250 to 1192 BCE. American sinologist David Keightley argued that the "Against Luxurious Ease" chapter should not be treated as a historical text because it was composed much later, presents reign lengths as moral judgements, and gives other reign lengths that are contradicted by oracle bone evidence. Estimating an average reign length of 20 years based on dated Zhou reigns, Keightley proposed that Wu Ding's reign started around 1200 BCE or earlier. Ken-ichi Takashima dates the earliest oracle bone inscriptions to 1230 BCE. 26 oracle bones throughout Wu Ding's reign have been radiocarbon dated to 1254–1197 BCE with an estimated 80-90% probability of containing the true individual ages.
Period V inscriptions often identify numbered ritual cycles, making it easier to estimate the reign lengths of the last two kings. The start of this period is dated 1100–1090 BCE by Keightley and 1101 BCE by the Xia–Shang–Zhou project. Most scholars now agree that the Zhou conquest of the Shang took place close to 1046 or 1045 BCE, over a century later than the traditional date.