Replica of an oracle bone -- turtle shell

Oracle bones (Chinese: ??; pinyin: ji?g?piàn) are pieces of bone or turtle shell that were heated and cracked during divination, chiefly during the late Sh?ng, and then typically^[1] inscribed with a record of the divination, in what is known as oracle bone script. The oracle bones are the earliest known significant^[2] corpus of ancient Chinese writing, and contain important historical information such as the complete royal genealogy of the Sh?ng dynasty^[3]. These records confirmed the existence of the Sh?ng dynasty, which some scholars had recently begun to doubt.

Dating

The vast majority of the inscribed oracle bones date to the last 230 or so years of the Sh?ng dynasty; oracle bones have been reliably dated to the fourth and subsequent reigns of the kings who ruled at at Y?n (modern ?nyáng)?from king W? D?ng (??) to Dì X?n (??).^[4] However, the dating of these bones varies from ca. the 14th -11th centuries BCE ^[5][6] to ca. 1200-1050 BCE^[7] because the end date of the Sh?ng dynasty is not a matter of consensus. The largest number date to the reign of king W? D?ng^[8] . Very few oracle bones date to the beginning of the subsequent Zh?u Dynasty, as divination using milfoil (yarrow) became more common at that time.

Discovery

A Shang Dynasty oracle bone from the Shanghai Museum

"No one can know how many oracle bones, prior to 1899, were ground up by traditional Chinese pharmacies and disappeared into peoples? stomachs."

It is not known how Wang and Liu actually came across these ?dragon bones?, but Wang is credited with being the first^[16] to recognize their significance, and his friend Liu was the first to publish a book on oracle bones^[17]. Word spread among collectors of antiquities, and the market for oracle bones exploded. Although scholars tried to find their source, antique dealers falsely claimed that the bones came from T?ngy?n (??) ^[18] in Hénán. Decades of uncontrolled digs^[19] followed to fuel the antiques trade, and many of these pieces eventually entered collections in Europe, the US, Canada and Japan^[20]. The first Western collector was the American Rev. Frank H. Chalfant^[21], while Presbyterian minister James Mellon Menzies (???) (1885-1957) of Canada bought the largest amount^[22]. 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 in 2004 a "Protected Treasure" and the James Mellon Menzies Memorial Museum for Oracle Bone Studies was established^[23][24][25]

Official excavations

By the time of the establishment of the Institute of History and Philology headed by Fù S?nián at the Academia Sinica in 1928, the source of the oracle bones had been traced back to modern Xi?otún (??) village at ?nyáng in Hénán Province. Official archaeological excavations in 1928-1937 led by L? Jì (??; 1896-1979), the father of Chinese archaeology^[26], 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^[27] . The inscriptions on the oracle bones, once deciphered, turned out to be the records of the divinations performed for or by the royal household. These, together with royal-sized tombs^[28], proved beyond a doubt for the first time the existence of the Sh?ng Dynasty, which had recently been doubted, and the location of its last capital, Y?n. Today, Xi?otún at ?nyáng is thus also known as the Ruins of Y?n, or Y?nx? (??).

Materials

In this Shang Dynasty oracle bone (which is incomplete), a diviner asks the Shang king if there would be misfortune over the next ten days; the king replied that he had consulted the ancestor Xiaojia in a worship ceremony.

The bones or shells were first sourced, and then prepared for use. Their sourcing is significant because some of them (especially many of the shells) are believed to have been presented as tribute to the Sh?ng, which is valuable information about diplomatic relations of the time. We know this because notations were often made on them recording their provenance (e.g. tribute of how many shells from where and on what date). For example, one notation records that ?Què (?) sent 250 (tortoise shells)?, identifying this as, perhaps, a statelet within the Sh?ng sphere of influence^[39]. These notations were generally made on the back of the shell's bridge (called bridge notations), the lower carapace, or the xiphiplastron (tail edge). Some shells may have been from locally raised tortoises, however.^[40] Scapula notations were near the socket or a lower edge. Some of these notations were not carved after being written with a brush, proving (along with other evidence) the use of the writing brush in Sh?ng times. Scapulae are assumed to have generally come from the Sh?ng?s own livestock, perhaps those used in ritual sacrifice, although there are records of cattle sent as tribute as well, including some recorded via marginal notations^[41].

Preparation and usage

The bones or shells were cleaned of meat, and then prepared by sawing, scraping, smoothing and even polishing to create convenient, flat surfaces.^[42][43] The predominance of scapulae and later of plastrons is also thought to be related to their convenience as large, flat surfaces needing minimal preparation. There is also speculation that only female tortoise shells were used, as these are significantly less concave^[44]. Pits or hollows were then drilled or chiseled partway through the bone or shell in orderly series. At least one such drill has been unearthed at Èrl?g?ng, exactly matching the pits in size and shape^[45]. The shape of these pits evolved over time, and is an important indicator for dating the oracle bones within various sub-periods in the Sh?ng dynasty. The shape and depth also helped determine the nature of the crack which would appear. The number of pits per bone or shell varied widely.

Divination

Replica of an oracle bone -- ox scapula

During a divination session, the shell or bone was anointed with blood ^[48], and in an inscription section called the 'preface', the date was recorded using the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, and the diviner name was noted. Next, the topic of divination (called the 'charge') was posed^[49], such as whether a particular ancestor was causing a king's toothache. The divination charges were often directed at ancestors, whom the ancient Chinese revered and worshiped, as well as natural powers and Dì (?), the highest god in the Sh?ng society. A wide variety of topics were asked, essentially anything of concern to the royal house of Sh?ng, from illness, birth and death, to weather, warfare, agriculture, tribute and so on. One of the most common topics was whether performing rituals in a certain manner would be satisfactory.^[50]

An intense heat source^[51] was then inserted in a pit until it cracked. Due to the shape of the pit, the front side of the bone cracked in a rough ? shape. The character ? (pinyin: b? or p?; Old Chinese: *puk; "to divine") may be a pictogram of such a crack; the reading of the character may also be an onomatopoeia for the cracking. A number of cracks were typically made in one session, sometimes on more than one bone, and these were typically numbered. The diviner in charge of the ceremony read the cracks to learn the answer to the divination. How exactly the cracks were interpreted is not known. The topic of divination was raised multiple times, and often in different ways, such as in the negative, or by changing the date being divined about. One oracle bone might be used for one session, or for many^[52], and one session could be recorded on a number of bones. The divined answer was sometimes then marked either "auspicious" or "inauspicious," and the king occasionally^[53] added a ?prognostication?, his reading on the nature of the omen. On very rare^[54] occasions, the actual outcome was later added to the bone in what is known as a ?verification?. A complete record of all the above elements is rare; most bones contain just the date, diviner and topic of divination,^[55] and many remained uninscribed after the divination^[56].

This record is thought to have been brush-written on the oracle bones or accompanying documents, later to be carved in a workshop. As evidence of this, a few of the oracle bones found still bear their brush-written records^[57], without carving, while some have been found partially carved. After use, the shells and bones which had seen ritual use^[58] were buried in separate pits (some for shells only; others for scapulae only), in groups of up to hundreds or even thousands (one pit unearthed in 1936 contained over 17,000 pieces along with a human skeleton)^[59].

Mythical origins of pyromancy

A mythical account published in the Míng dynasty credits the mythical Fú X? with the invention of plastromancy, while a Sòng dynasty account tells of tribute of a divine tortoise shell from what is now Vietnam, sent to the court of the mythical emperor Yáo^[60].

Archaeological evidence of pre-Anyang pyromancy

While the use of bones in divination has been practiced almost globally, such divination involving fire or heat has generally been found in Asia and the Asian-derived North American cultures^[61]. The use of heat to crack scapulae (pyro-scapulimancy) originated in ancient China, the earliest^[62] evidence of which extends back to the 4th millennium BCE, with archaeological finds from Liáoníng, but these were not inscribed. In Neolithic China at a variety of sites, the scapulae of cattle, sheep, pigs and deer used in pyromancy have been found^[63], and the practice appears to have become quite common by the end of the third millennium BCE. Scapulae were unearthed along with smaller numbers of pitless plastrons in the Nángu?nwài (???) stage at Zhèngzho?, Hénán; scapulae as well as smaller numbers of plastrons with chiseled pits were also discovered in the Lower and Upper Èrl?g?ng stages^[64].

Significant use of tortoise plastrons does not appear until the Sh?ng culture sites.^[65] Ox scapulae and plastrons, both prepared for divination, were found at the Sh?ng culture sites of Táix?c?n (???) in Héb?i, and Qi?w?n (??) in Ji?ngs?^[66]. One or more pitted scapulae were found at Lùsìc?n (???) in Hénán, while unpitted scapulae have been found at Èrl?tóu in Hénán, Cíxiàn (??) in Héb?i, Níngchéng (??) in Liáoníng, and Qíji? (??) in G?nsù ^[67]. Plastrons do not become more numerous than scapulae until the Rénmín (??) Park phase^[68].

As for pyromantic shells or bones with inscriptions, the earliest date back to the site of Èrl?g?ng in Zhèngzho?, Hénán, where burned scapula of oxen, sheep and pigs were found, and one bone fragment from a pre-Sh?ng layer was inscribed with a graph (?) corresponding to Sh?ng oracle bone script. Another piece found at the site bears ten or more characters which are similar in form to the Sh?ng script but different in their pattern of use, and it is not clear what layer the piece came from^[69].

Post-Sh?ng oracle bones

After the Zh?u conquest, the Sh?ng practices of bronze casting, pyromancy and writing continued. Oracle bones found in the 1970s have been dated to the Zh?u dynasty, with some dating to the Spring and Autumn period. However, very few of those were inscribed; these very early inscribed Zh?u oracle bones are also known as the Zh?uyuán oracle bones. It is thought that other methods of divination supplanted pyromancy, such as numerological divination using milfoil (yarrow) in connection with the hexagrams of the I Ching, leading to the decline in inscribed oracle bones. However, evidence for the continued use of plastromancy exists for the Eastern Zh?u, Hàn, Táng^[70] and Q?ng^[71] dynasty periods, and Keightley (1978, p.9) mentions use in Taiwan today^[72].

References

References

• Boltz, William G. (1994). The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System. American Oriental Series, vol. 78. American Oriental Society, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. ISBN 0-940490-18-8
• Fairbank, John King and Merle Goldman (1992). China: A New History; Second Enlarged Edition (2006). Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01828-1.
• Keightley, David N. (1978). Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 0-520-02969-0; Paperback 2nd edition (1985) ISBN 0-520-05455-5.
• Keightley, David N. (2000). The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200 ? 1045 B.C.). China Research Monograph 53, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-070-9.
• Qiu Xigui (???) (2000). Chinese Writing. Translation of ????? by Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman. Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4. The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7.
• Woon, Wee Lee ??? (1987). ?Chinese Writing: Its Origin and Evolution? (in English; Chinese title????????). Originally published by the Univ. of East Asia, Macau; now by Joint Publishing, Hong Kong.
• X? Y?huì (??? Hsu Ya-huei) (2002). Ancient Chinese Writing, Oracle Bone Inscriptions from the Ruins of Yin. Illustrated guide to the Special Exhibition of Oracle Bone Inscriptions from the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. English translation by Mark Caltonhill and Jeff Moser. National Palace Museum, Taipei. Govt. Publ. No. 1009100250.
• Zh?u Hóngxiáng (???, wg Chou Hung-hsiang) (1976). ?Oracle Bone Collections in the United States?. University of California Press, Berkeley ? Los Angeles ? London. ISBN 0-520-09534-0.

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