16 Facts About Oracle bones

Oracle bones are pieces of ox scapula and turtle plastron, which were used for pyromancy – a form of divination – in ancient China, mainly during the late Shang dynasty.

Pyromancy with Oracle bones continued in China into the Zhou dynasty, but the questions and prognostications were increasingly written with brushes and cinnabar ink, which degraded over time.

Oracle bones bear the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing, using an early form of Chinese characters.

Shang-dynasty oracle bones are thought to have been unearthed periodically by local farmers since as early as the Sui and Tang dynasties and perhaps starting as early as the Han dynasty, but local inhabitants did not realize what the bones were and generally reburied them.

News of the discovery of the oracle bones spread quickly throughout China and among foreign collectors and scholars, and the market for oracle bones exploded, though many collectors sought to keep the location of the bones' source a secret.

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Only a small number of dealers and collectors knew the location of the source of the oracle bones or visited it until they were found by Canadian missionary James Mellon Menzies, the first person to scientifically excavate, study, and decipher them.

Oracle bones was the first to conclude that the bones were records of divination from the Shang dynasty, and was the first to come up with a method of dating them.

In 1917 he published the first scientific study of the Oracle bones, including 2,369 drawings and inscriptions and thousands of ink rubbings.

Oracle bones insisted that his collection remain in China, though some were sent to Canada by colleagues who were worried that they would be either destroyed or stolen during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.

When deciphered, the inscriptions on the oracle bones turned out to be the records of the divinations performed for or by the royal household.

Oracle bones dated the reign of Wu Ding as approximately from 1200 to 1181 BCE.

Oracle bones are mostly tortoise plastrons and ox scapulae, although some are the carapace of tortoises, and a few are ox rib bones, scapulae of sheep, boars, horses and deer, and some other animal bones.

However, over time, the use of ox Oracle bones increased, and use of tortoise shells does not appear until early Shang culture.

Uninscribed divination is thought to have been brush-written with ink or cinnabar on the oracle bones or accompanying documents, as a few of the oracle bones found still bear their brush-written divinations without carving, while some have been found partially carved.

Four inscribed Oracle bones have been found at Zhengzhou in Henan: three with numbers 310,311 and 312 in the Hebu corpus, and one containing a single character which appears in late Shang inscriptions.

Oracle bones found in the 1970s have been dated to the Zhou dynasty, with some dating to the Spring and Autumn period.