Ancient Chinese – Oracle Bones
Oracle Bone Script (甲骨文)
“The oldest inscriptions that are recognised unequivocally as Chinese date from about 1200 BC and were
found in Anyang, the capital of the Shang Dynasty (商朝 - 1600-1046 BC) in 1895. They consist of short
texts inscribed on ox scapulae and turtle plastrons and are known as oracle bones (甲骨 - jiǎgǔ), and the
script is known as the oracle script (甲骨文 - jiǎgǔwén) or "shell bone script".
The oracle bones were used for divination, a process which involved inscribing a question with a bronze
pin, then heating the bones and inspecting the resulting cracks to divine answers to one's questions. Most
of the questions involved hunting, warfare, the weather and the selection of auspicious days for
ceremonies.
The Oracle Bone Script was used between about about 1300 and 1100 BC according to some sources,
and between 1500 and 1000 BC according to others.
Some 400,000 fragments with inscriptions in the Oracle Bone Script have been found. Several thousand
bones and plastrons have been reconstructed and many thousands of texts have been studied. The texts
contain over 30,000 distinct characters, which are thought to be variant forms of around 4,000 individual
characters, and scholars believe that they can understand between 1,500 and 2,000 of these characters.
There may be 5,000 or so individual characters used on the Oracle Bones, not including variant forms,
and possibly twice as many were used in everyday life.
Structural the Oracle Bone characters resemble modern Chinese characters in that some of them are
combinations of two or more characters, and there is a high degree of abstraction in the characters. This
suggests that the script was invented long before the Shang Dynasty.”
http://www.omniglot.com/chinese/jiaguwen.htm
Some examples of Oracle Bone characters
Sample text in the Oracle Bone Script
Source: http://www.art-virtue.com/introduction/2-general.htm