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Wang Yirong, Chinese politician and scholar, was the first to recognize the oracle bones as ancient writing. Shang-era oracle bones are thought to have been unearthed occasionally by local farmers [14] since as early as the Sui and Tang dynasties, and perhaps starting as early as the Han dynasty. [15]
Despite the pictorial nature of the oracle bone script, it was a fully functional and mature writing system by the time of the Shang dynasty, [19] meaning it was able to record the Old Chinese language, and not merely fragments of ideas or words. This level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred ...
Oracle bones serve as the primary source for studies of Shang religion. [2] They focused on the religious life of the king and the royal family. [3] A typical ritual would feature many key roles; David Keightley conjured such a ritual based on actual inscriptional records, attempting to reconstruct a ceremonial scene normally observed by the Shang court.
Under the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty (up to c. 1046 BC), pieces of bone, usually plastrons of tortoises or scapula of oxen, were used in pyromantic divination and then inscribed. The used oracle bones were deposited in pits at the Shang cult centre now known as Yinxu (near modern Anyang, Hebei) and forgotten for
A turtle shell used for divination during the Shang dynasty. The form of early Chinese divination was pyro-osteomancy (or pyromancy), denoting burning animal bones to seek answers to human inquiries. [116] Oracle bone divination with scapulae and turtle shells was a source of state power for the late Shang dynasty (c. 1250 – 1046 BCE).
Oracle bones before the Late Shang period are not of the same ordered style as Late Shang materials. A large amount of such bones appear in pre–Late Shang sites, suggesting the prevalence of divination, although it was also likely to be practised by the non-royal people together with those elites. [290]
Oracle bones were first recognised for their true nature in 1898, and scholars have been labouring to decipher them ever since. They circulated among collectors and antique dealers, and to this day some 200,000 oracle bone fragments from the Xiaotun site in Anyang have been counted.
Archaeological discoveries in the past century have centred around the Late Shang dynasty’s capital city in Henan, where many specimens were found. This period spanned from 1250 to 1046 BC, and is historically significant due to the emperor of the time, Di Xin of Shang , was the chief oracle diviner. [5]