Oracle bone script

From Free net encyclopedia

Oracle bone script (Template:Zh-cpl) refers to incised (or, rarely, brush-written) ancient Chinese characters found on oracle bones, which are animal bones or turtle shells used in divination in ancient China. The vast majority are ox scapulae and tortoise plastrons which record the pyromantic divinations of the royal house of the late Shāng Dynasty, primarily at the capital of Yīn (modern Anyang, Henan Province), around the 14th to 11th centuries. A few are from Zhengzhou and date to earlier in the dynasty, around the 16th to 14th centuries BC, while a very few date to the beginning of the subsequent Zhōu dynasty.

The late Shāng oracle bone writings, along with a few contemporary characters cast in bronzes, constitute the earliest significant corpus of Chinese writing, but contrary to popular belief are not the earliest Chinese characters, being predated by a very few inscribed on pottery at the middle Shang site of Táixī, Gǎochĕng County, Hébĕi Province, and two pieces of bone with writing from the early Shang site of Èrlĭgāng in Zhèngzhoū (鄭州), Hénán Province. There are also a very few symbols cast in early Shang bronze vessels, and some inscribed on pottery from proto-Shang to early Shang sites, although whether the graphs on them qualify as writing or not is debated. Even earlier are a number of symbols on Neolithic-period pottery which are similarly controversial.

Because turtle shells as well as bones were used, the oracle bone script is also sometimes called shell and bone script. However, the term oracle bone script is by far more common and is appropriate for both, as turtle shells are actually a bony material. Bones and shells used in pyromancy have also been found dating back to the Neolithic, but most are not inscribed, and the symbols on those that are not widely recognized as writing. Thus, because the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date to the late Shang dynasty, oracle bone script essentially refers to the Shang script. More information on this form of divination and the material aspects of the bones and shells themselves is available at the oracle bones page.

Despite the archaic and relatively pictorial appearance of the oracle bone script, it is in fact a fully functional writing system, i.e., one fully capable of recording language, which clearly implies an earlier period of development. Unfortunately there are virtually no materials providing evidence from such a formative period. From their presumed origins as pictographs and signs, by the Shang, the graphs had already evolved into a variety of mostly non-pictographic functions, including all the major types of Chinese characters now in use. Phonetic loan graphs, semantic-phonetic compounds (形聲字 xíngshēngzì), and associative compounds (會意字 huìyìzì) were already common. Compared to graphs on bronzes from the middle Shang to early Western Zhou period, the oracle bone graphs appear simplified, which is thought to be the result of the difficulty of engraving characters on the hard bony materials, compared with the ease of writing them in the wet clay from which the bronzes were cast. We also know that the Shang people wrote on bamboo (or wooden) codices just like those of the late Zhou period, because the graphs for writing brush (聿 yù, precursor to 筆 bǐ, 'writing brush') and bamboo book (冊 cè, a book bound from thin slats, like a Venetian blind turned 90 degrees) are present in the oracle bone writings. Since the ease of writing with a brush is even greater than that of writing with a stylus in wet clay, it is assumed that the Shang graphs on bamboo were similar to those on bronzes, and also that the majority of writing occurred with a brush on such codices. Additional support for this notion includes the reorientation of some graphs as if to better fit on tall, narrow slats. The more detailed and more pictorial style of the bronze graphs is thus thought to be more representative of Shang writing in general than the oracle bone forms, and it is this style which continued to evolve into the Zhou period, eventually leading to the seal script.

Despite its status as a fully functional writing system, the oracle bone script is not fully mature -- the form of some graphs changes depending on context, and on occasion the order of the graphs does not quite match that of the language. By the early Western Zhou period, these traits had vanished, but in both periods, the script was not highly regular or standardized; variant forms of graphs abound, and the size and orientation of graphs is also irregular. A graph when inverted horizontally generally refers to the same word, and additional components are sometimes present without changing the meaning. Not until the standardization carried out in the Qín dynasty seal script did these irregularities end.

Image:OracleShell.JPG Image:OracleDivining.JPG
Image:OracleSun.JPG Image:Obi-rain.png
Image:OracleSpring.JPG Image:OracleAutumn.JPG Image:OracleWinter.JPG

Oracle bone characters may have components which differ in later characters, for instance the character for Autumn 秋 now appears with 禾 as one component and fire 火 as another component. From the Oracle script, one sees that an ant-like creature is carved instead.

Of the thousands of characters found from all the bone fragments, the majority remain undeciphered. One good example is shown in the fragment labeled "Oracle script for Spring". The top left character in this image has no known modern Chinese counterpart. One of the better known characters however is shown directly beneath it looking like an upright iscosceles triangle with a line cutting through the upper portion. This is the Oracle script character for 王 wáng ("king").

[edit]

References

Keightley, David N. (1978). Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. University of California Press, Berkeley. Large format hardcover, ISBN 0-520-02969 (out of print); A 1985 ppbk 2nd edition is still in print, 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. ISBN 1-55729-070-9, ppbk.

Qiú Xīguī (裘錫圭, 2000). Chinese Writing. Translation of his 文字學概論 (1988 PRC edition is in simplified Chinese; 1993 Taiwan edition is in traditional Chinese) by the late 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. ISBN 1-55729-071-7.

Woon, Wee Lee (1987). Chinese Writing: Its Origin and Evolution. Originally published by the Univ. of East Asia, Macau (no ISBN); now available through Joint Publishing, fax: 852-28104201; email: jpchk@jointpublishing.com. Chinese title info: 作者: 雲惟利， 書名: 漢字的原始和演變.

[edit]

See also

zh:甲骨文

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Oracle_bone_script"