Oracle bone
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Template:Cleanup-date Image:OracleShell.JPG Image:OracleBone.JPG Oracle bones (甲骨片 jiǎgǔpiàn) are pieces of bone or turtle shell used in royal divination in the mid Shāng to early Zhoū dynasties in ancient China, and often bearing written inscriptions in what is called oracle bone script.
The Shāng oracle bones were unearthed in 19th century China, and were sold as dragon bones in the traditional Chinese medicine markets, used either whole or crushed for the healing of various ailments, including knife wounds. They were not recognized as bearing ancient Chinese writing until 1899, when they fell into the hands of two scholars, Wáng Yìróng (王懿榮 Wang I-jung, 1845-1900), who according to tradition was sick with malaria, and his friend Liú È (劉鶚), who was visiting and helped examine his medicine. They discovered, before it was ground into powder, that it bore strange glyphs, which they recognized as ancient writing. Word spread among collectors of antiquities, and the market for oracle bones exploded. Decades of uncontrolled digs followed, and many of these pieces eventually entered collections in Europe, the US and Japan.
Upon the establishment of the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica in 1928, the source of the oracle bones was traced back to modern Xiǎotún (小屯 Hsiao-t’un) village near Ānyáng in Hénán Province. Official archaeological excavations in 1928-1937 led by led by Lĭ Jì (李濟 Lee Chi) discovered twenty thousand oracle bone pieces, which now form the bulk of the Academia Sinica's collection in Taiwan. Along with the oracle bones were discovered eleven royal-sized tombs. Traditional history recorded that twelve Shang kings ruled at Yīn (殷), the last of the Shang capitals. Since the last king died in the Zhou conquest and would not have received a normal royal burial, this was strong evidence that Xiaotun was indeed the site of Yīn Xū (殷墟 Yin Hsu), the Ruins of Yīn. 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 proved beyond a doubt for the first time the existence of the Shang dynasty and the location of its last capital. The writing on them is also the earliest significant corpus of Chinese writing, and is essential for the study of Chinese etymology, as it is directly ancestral to the modern script.
The oracle bones are mostly ox scapulae (shoulder blades) and turtle shells, although some other animal bones, and even the skulls of deer and humans were sometimes used. Both the dorsal or back shell (carapace) and ventral or belly shell (plastron) of turtles were used, and since these are actually a bony material, the term oracle bones is applied to them as well.
After preparation involving sawing or splitting, and drilling pits partway through the bone, a topic was divined upon during a ceremony, and a heated rod was inserted into one of the pits until the bone cracked at that point. Due to the shape of the pit, the front side of the bone cracked in a rough 卜 shape; the character 卜 bǔ or pǔ (meaning "to divine") is a pictogram of such a crack. A number of cracks were typically made in one session, and the diviner in charge of the ceremony, who was sometimes the Shang king himself, then read the crack to learn the answer to the divination. It is not known exactly how the cracks were interpreted, however. 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, and one session could be recorded on a number of bones.
The inscriptions are fairly formulaic, generally "(on) AB date (using the sexagenary cycle), divination was performed by person C regarding (topic)". Additional inscriptions include notations as to provenance of the bones or shells, numbering of the cracks made, annotations as to their auspiciousness, proclamations as to the conclusion of the divination session, and sometimes verifications of whether a future event indeed came to pass. The topics, and sometimes the answers, are then thought to have been brush-written on the oracle bones or accompanying documents, to later be carved in a workshop. A few of the oracle bones found still bear their brush-written records, without carving, while some have been found partially carved.
This kind of divination, involving the application of heat or fire, is called pyromancy; when applied to a scapula or plastron, it is also termed scapulomancy or plastromancy respectively. The divination questions or topics were often directed at ancestors, whom the ancient Chinese revered and worshipped, as well as natural powers and Dì (帝 Ti), the Shang high god. A wide variety of topics were asked, essentially anything of concern to the royal house of Shang, 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.
Evidence of pyromancy and scapulomancy in ancient China extends back to the 4th millennium BC, with finds from Liáoníng Province (遼寧), but these were not inscribed. Evidence of scapulomancy with inscriptions may date back to the pre-Shang site of Èrlĭgāng (二里崗) in Zhèngzhoū (鄭州), Hénán, where burned scapula of oxen, sheep and pigs were found, and one bone fragment from a pre-Shang layer is inscribed with a graph (ㄓ) corresponding to Shang script. By the mid Zhèngzhoū period, the shells of turtles were in use as well.
However, significant quantities of inscribed oracle bones date only to the middle of the Shāng Dynasty, probably in the reign of Pángēng, around 1350 BC when the Shāng capital was moved to Yīn at modern Ānyáng. The vast majority date to around the 13th to 11th centuries BCE, or late Shāng. The oracle bones are not the earliest writing in China. A few Shāng bronzes with extremely short inscriptions predate them. However, the oracle bones are considered the earliest significant body of writing, due to the length of the inscriptions, the vast amount of vocabulary (very roughly 4000 graphs), and the sheer quantity of pieces found (now well over 100,000). There are also graphs found inscribed or brush-written on Neolithic period pottery shards, but whether or not these constitute writing or are ancestral to the Shāng writing system is currently a matter of great academic controversy.
After the Zhou conquest, the Shang practices of bronze casting, pyromancy and writing continued. Oracle bones found in the 1970s have been dated to the Zhōu dynasty, with some dating to the Spring and Autumn period. However, very few of those were inscribed. It is thought that other methods of divination supplanted pyromancy, such as numerological divination using milfoil (yarrow) in connection with the hexagrams of the Yijing (I Ching).
See also
References
- Keightley, David N. (1978). Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. University of California Press, Berkeley. Hardcover, ISBN 0-520-02969 (out of print); Paperback 2nd edition (1985) ISBN 0520054555.
- 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. Paperback, ISBN 1-55729-070-9.
- Qiú Xīguī (裘錫圭, 2000). Chinese Writing. Translation of 文字學概論 by Gilbert L. Mattos (Chairman, Dept. of Asian Studies, Seton Hall University) and Jerry Norman (Professor Emeritus, Asian Languages & Literature Dept., Univ. of Washington). Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Hardcover, ISBN 1-55729-071-7..
- Xǔ Yǎhùi (許雅惠 Hsu Ya-huei). Ancient Chinese Writing, Oracle Bone Inscriptions from the Ruins of Yin, 2002. 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.de:Orakelknochen
es:Huesos oraculares no:Orakelben ja:甲骨文字 sv:Orakelben zh:甲骨文