CHINA ARQUEOLOGIA golden-age-chinese-archayeolog

SHANG
ORACLE-BONE
INSCRIPTIONS
FROM ANYANG,
HENAN PROVINCE
As early as the fourth millennium BCE, the inhabitants of Neolithic China and its border
regions had sought to foretell the future by cracking animal bones — applying high heat to
the bones and interpreting the resulting stress cracks as lucky or unlucky. By the Late Shang
dynasty (c. 1200-1045 BCE) such pyromantic divination had become institutionalized to a
remarkable degree.
The Shang diviners prepared the shoulder blades of cattle or the shells of turtles by planing
away their rough surfaces and boring hollows into their backs; they then applied some
utensil such as a red-hot poker to the edge of the hollow so that the thinned bone cracked to
form a characteristic T-shaped crack on its front surface. (The modern Chinese character bu,
meaning "to divine/' is a picture of such a crack.) After the cracking had taken place, the diviners
numbered the cracks sequentially, and engravers then carved some or all of the following
information into the bone: the crack-number, a record of the date, the name of the presiding
diviner, the subject matter of the divination (referred to as the divination "charge"), and, sometimes,
the forecast itself and a record of what had eventually happened. Occasionally, red or
black pigment would be rubbed into the cracks and the inscriptions to enhance their visibility,
and, perhaps, their mantic potency. Modern scholars have identified the names of well over
a hundred Shang diviners (including the king himself) who presided over the rituals involved.
These oracle-bone inscriptions provide one striking example of archaeological discoveries
that have added much to our understanding of China's past. It was only at the very end of the
nineteenth century that Chinese scholars began to collect and decipher the "dragon bones"
that peasants from the village of Xiaotun (near present-day Anyang, in the northern Henan
panhandle) had been finding in their fields. The political and military upheavals that followed
the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 delayed the study and scientific excavation of these valuable
materials. With the reunification of China in 1927, a series of scientific excavations was conducted
at Anyang in the late 19208 and 19305, but the work was again disrupted by the start
of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and resumed only in 1950. The process of assembling and
deciphering the earliest Chinese writing has continued down to the present, and more than
forty-five thousand pieces of inscribed oracle bone — some large and complete, some badly
fragmented and incomplete — have to date been published. The recent publication in China of
a comprehensive thirteen-volume collection of oracle-bone rubbings indicates the importance
attached to these materials. 1
The inscriptions, together with the temple-palace foundations, bronze workshops, bronze
ritual vessels, ornamental jades, and impressive burials that modern scholars have excavated
near Anyang reveal that the site was the major cult center of the late Shang dynasty kings. This
was where they buried their royal ancestors, offered sacrifices to them, and performed the divinatory
rites that were thought to ensure the dynasty's success. The oracle-bone inscriptions
are particularly valuable to historians because the existence of the objects was unknown for
some three thousand years; for that reason, the information they record comes down to us
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