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Oracle bone script is the oldest attested form of written Chinese, dating to the late 2nd millennium BC.Inscriptions were made by carving characters into oracle bones, usually either the shoulder bones of oxen or the plastrons of turtles.
Oracle bones bear the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing, using an early form of Chinese characters. [ a ] The inscriptions contain around 5,000 different characters, many of which are still being used today, [ 6 ] though the total number of discrete characters is uncertain as some may be different versions of the same ...
The used oracle bones were deposited in pits at the Shang cult centre now known as Yinxu (near modern Anyang, Hebei) and forgotten for millennia. After Wang Yirong discovered in 1899 that ancient bone fragments on sale for medicinal purposes bore an early form of Chinese characters, there was great interest in
Oracle bone script is the direct ancestor of modern written Chinese, and is already a mature writing system in its earliest attestation. Roughly one-quarter of oracle bone script characters are pictographs, with rest either being phono-semantic compounds or compound ideographs.
An example of Chinese bronze inscriptions on a bronze vessel – early Western Zhou (11th century BC). The earliest known examples of Chinese writing are oracle bone inscriptions made c. 1200 BC at Yin (near modern Anyang), the site of the final capital of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 – c. 1046 BC).
These developments were already present in the oracle bone script, [69] possibly implying a significant period of development prior to the extant inscriptions. [55] This may have involved writing on perishable materials, as suggested by the appearance on oracle bones of the character 冊 cè 'records'. The character is thought to depict bamboo ...
[60] [61] A minority of bones feature characters that were inked with a brush before their strokes were incised; the evidence of this also shows that the conventional stroke orders used by later calligraphers had already been established for many characters by this point. [62] Oracle bone script is the direct ancestor of later forms of written ...
Oracle bone fragment, Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BC) Oracle bone script was an early form of Chinese characters written on animals' bones. Written on oracle bones—animal bones or turtle plastrons—it is the earliest known form of Chinese writing. The bones were believed to have prophecies written on them.