Chinese oracle bone script
Escritura china sobre huesos oraculares
- Date
- c. 1250 BCE · confidence high
- Place
- Anyang (Yinxu), Henan, China
- Credited to
- Diviners of the Shang court (reign of Wu Ding)
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Questions to the oracle and their answers incised on tortoise plastrons and ox scapulae after interpreting the cracks from fire. With more than 4,000 graphs, it is an already mature logographic system, the direct ancestor of modern Chinese characters, the only Bronze Age script still in use.
Almost certainly an independent invention from Mesopotamia and Egypt; whether there were earlier forms on perishable supports (bamboo, silk) is debated, since the Anyang system appears fully formed.
What it led to
- Written continuity of Chinese civilisation for 3,300 years and the cultural unification of mutually unintelligible languages
- Records of eclipses and datable astronomical phenomena (Chinese astronomy)
- A bureaucracy of diviners and scribes serving the king as intermediary with the ancestors
- The source of the Shang king list confirmed by archaeology
Built on
- Jiahu symbolsc. 6600 BCE
- Chinese ritual bronze (piece-mould casting)c. 1600 BCE
- Yangshao and Dawenkou pottery marks (proto-writing symbols)
- Neolithic scapulimancy divination
Made possible
- Sexagenary cycle (ganzhi)c. 1250 BCE
- Identification of oracle bones and excavation of Yinxu1899 (identificación) / 1928 (excavación)
- Hanyu Pinyin1958
- Zhou bronze inscriptions
- Writing on bamboo strips
- Classical Chinese characters
- Kanji and hanja