Oracle bone

Oracle bone
A Shang dynasty oracle bone from the Shanghai Museum
Chinese	甲骨
Literal meaning	Shell and bone
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Jiǎgǔ Wade–Giles Chia3-ku3 IPA [tɕjǎ.kù] Wu Romanization Chiaʔ-kueʔ Hakka Romanization Gap5-gut5 Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Gaap-gwāt Jyutping Gaap3 gwat1 Southern Min Tâi-lô Kah-kut (col.) Kap-kut (lit.)

Oracle bones are pieces of ox scapula and turtle plastron which were used in pyromancy – a form of divination – during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – c. 1050 BCE) in ancient China. Scapulimancy is the specific term if ox scapulae were used for the divination, plastromancy if turtle plastrons were used. A recent count estimated that there were about 13,000 bones with a total of a little over 130,000 inscriptions in collections in China and some fourteen other countries.^[1]

Diviners would submit questions to deities regarding weather, crop planting, the fortunes of members of the royal family, military endeavors, and similar topics.^[2] These questions were carved onto the bone or shell in oracle bone script using a sharp tool. Intense heat was then applied with a metal rod until the bone or shell cracked due to thermal expansion. The diviner would then interpret the pattern of cracks and write the prognostication upon the piece as well.^[3] Pyromancy with 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.^[a] The inscriptions contain around 5,000 different characters, many of which are still being used today,^[6] though the total number of discrete characters is uncertain as some may be different versions of the same character. Specialists have agreed on the form, meanings, and sound of a little more than a quarter of the characters, roughly 1,200 with certainty, but several hundred more remain under discussion; these known characters comprise much of the core vocabulary of modern Chinese.^[10] They provide important information on the late Shang period, and scholars have reconstructed the Shang royal genealogy from the cycle of ancestral sacrifices recorded on oracle bones.^[11][b] When they were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century and deciphered in the early twentieth century,^[12] these records confirmed the existence of the Shang, whose historicity had been subject to scrutiny at the time by the Doubting Antiquity School.

Oraculology is the discipline for the study of oracle bones and the oracle bone script.^[13]

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