Writing on oracle bones

The story

The “dragon bones” from the pharmacy

In 1899, in Beijing, a high official and scholar of antiquities, Wang Yirong, was ill with malaria. According to the best-known story, his doctor prescribed a medicine made from “dragon bones”, pieces of fossil bone that pharmacies sold by weight and that patients ground into powder to cure themselves. As he looked at the pieces that had been brought to him, Wang noticed marks carved on the surface: they were not scratches, they were very ancient characters. He asked for every piece the pharmacist had and bought them all. It was the beginning of the discovery of the oracle bones.

Historians doubt some details of this story (for example, whether Wang was really ill), but all agree on the general lines: the discovery came from the trade in “dragon bones” and from an attentive collector. Where did those bones come from? For some years the sellers kept it secret. In 1908 the scholar Luo Zhenyu found out that they came from a village near Anyang, in Henan, where farmers, ploughing their fields, brought up fragments of bones and shells. There stood the ancient Shang capital, Yin. Those farmers had for years been selling the oldest history of China for a few coins.

How the future was “questioned”

The Shang kings always wanted to know the opinion of their ancestors and spirits before any important decision. This is how it was done. The diviners prepared a turtle shell (the lower part, the plastron) or an ox shoulder blade, cleaning and smoothing it. On the back they hollowed out small pits. Then the king or the diviner put the question to the ancestors, aloud, and a heated rod of bronze or wood was brought up to the pit. The heat made the shell crackle and split, forming T-shaped cracks, like the Chinese character bu, which means “to divine”. The diviner read the cracks and gave the answer: favourable or unfavourable.

Afterwards, the scribes carved on the shell, with a pointed tool, the question, sometimes the answer and sometimes, a few days later, the outcome too: whether the prediction had come true. The shells were then piled up in special pits, like an archive. It is a wonderful way of preserving something, and that is why the bones have reached us.

What they asked

The questions open a window on life three thousand years ago. “Will it rain tomorrow?” “Will the harvest be good?” “Should I fight a battle against the enemies in the west?” “Will the king recover from his toothache?” “Will Lady Hao have a baby? Will it be a good day?” “Which ancestor sent this illness?” They also asked about hunts, journeys, dreams, sacrifices and eclipses. Some texts concern an eclipse of the Moon that astronomers are able to date, and that helps fix the chronology of that time. The king did nothing without asking.

More than one hundred and fifty thousand fragments have been found: the oldest go back to the reign of Wu Ding, around 1250 BC (the traditional date), and run up to the fall of the dynasty, in 1046 BC. In a single pit at Anyang, discovered in 1936, archaeologists found about seventeen thousand carved turtle shells, still in order.

The first Chinese writing

The characters carved on the bones are the oldest form of Chinese writing to have reached us. About four thousand different ones have been counted, but only between a third and a half can be read with certainty. Some are still recognisable: the character for “sun” is a circle with a dot, the one for “moon” a crescent, the one for “man” a figure with arms, the one for “horse” an animal with a mane. Others join one element that gives the meaning to one that gives the sound, as still happens today in most Chinese characters.

The fact that the writing is already so complete makes scholars think it began much earlier. The first stages have been lost, probably because they were written on perishable materials such as bamboo and silk, which do not survive. The Shang bronze vessels also carry short clan inscriptions. But from the bones one can even read the grammar: the language, indeed, is an ancestor of Chinese.

A doubt: writing and invention

As with hieroglyphs and cuneiform, people have asked whether Chinese writing was invented on its own or inspired by others. The answer, for now, is that it seems an independent invention: there are no signs of links with Mesopotamia or Egypt, and the system is different. But we cannot be sure.