Oracle Bones
Over 3,000 years ago, the Chinese used animal bones to help make important decisions. To use an
oracle bone, a diviner made two statements, one positive and one negative. Each oracle bone had
two halves, a positive one and a negative one, with holes bored in each half. When the holes were
heated with a burning stick, the bone cracked. The king would read the cracks to find the answers. No
one knows exactly how the cracks were interpreted. Afterwards, information about the oracle was
carved onto the bone.
The discovery of the oracle bones is credited to the scholar Wang Jung, from Peking. He was
prescribed a remedy containing "dragon bones" for his illness: "dragon bones" were widely used in
Chinese medicine and usually refer to fossils of dead animals. Wang Jung noticed some carvings that
looked like some kind of writing on the bones he acquired from the local pharmacy
They are mostly ox scapulae (shoulder blades) and turtle
shells or plastrons, after being heated (such as having a
heated rod inserted through the bone), they would crack, and
the priest in charge of the ceremony would read the cracks to
learn the answer to a question written on the bone. He looked
both for the presence of a crack or the absence of a crack to
assay the relative strength of one question's answer to
another, or to balance the weight between any two or more
questions. Often these ceremonies would be performed to
foretell the future.
The questions were often asked of ancestors, whom the
ancient Chinese revered and worshipped. Oracle bones offer
some of the earliest examples of Chinese writing. Their use as
a method of divination in China dates back to the middle of the
Shang Dynasty, probably in the reign of Pangeng, around
1350 BCE when the Shang capital was moved to Yin.
Oracle bones found in the 1970s have been dated to the Zhou
period, with some dating to the Spring and Autumn period of the later Zhou Dynasty.
They were also called dragon bones on account of their discovered use by Chinese scholar when
they were found being sold in Chinese medicinal centers either whole or crushed for the healing of
various ailments that Jung hoped to use to cure his then-mysterious malaria, which western doctors
could not diagnose.
Incised characters found on ox scapulae and tortoise plastrons (oracle bones) thought to be the
earliest Chinese characters. Oracle bone script is seen to develop over the several generations of
Shang kings, so there is no single defined form of each character.
The bones and script were used in the practice of scapulomancy/oracle bone interpreting: the diviner
would inscribe on the bone or shell his name, the current date of the sexagesimal 1 cycle and then
inscribe two possible outcomes on the shell. Depending on how the fired object cracked, diviners
would interpret the answer from them.
1
A number system based on counting in increments of 60.
For example:
"Test : Tomorrow it will rain"
"Test: Tomorrow it will not rain"
The outcome was then inscribed on the bone and saved. The inscriptions are known as jiaguwen (甲骨文) or
oracle bone inscriptions.