Oracle Bones and the Origins of Chinese Writing and Civilization

The Origins of Chinese Civilization and the Shang Dynasty

According to ancient writings, the history of China dates back approximately 3,300 years. Studies by modern archaeologists provide evidence of ancient origins in a culture that was flourishing between 2500 and 2000 B.C. in an area that is now central China and the lower Huang He Valley in northern China. Through centuries of migration, amalgamation, and development, a distinctive system of writing, philosophy, art, and political organization emerged that is recognized as Chinese civilization — unique in world history for its continuity of over 4,000 years to the present day.

The Chinese culture developed a strong sense of its real and mythological origins and, from very early times, kept voluminous records, resulting in knowledge not only of China's ancient past but of its neighbors as well. As described in mythology, Chinese civilization began with Pangu, the creator of the universe; then, according to legend, a succession of sage-emperors and culture heroes taught the ancient Chinese to communicate and to find food, clothing, and shelter. Xia is said to be the first prehistoric dynasty, spanning the 21st through 16th centuries B.C.

Until 1928, when scientific excavations were made of early Bronze Age sites at Anyang, Henan Province, separating myth from reality had been difficult. However, by the 1960s and 1970s, archaeologists had uncovered urban sites, bronze implements, and tombs that pointed to the existence of Xia civilization just as described and in the same locations cited in ancient Chinese historical texts. This proved, at minimum, that the Xia period marked an evolutionary stage between the late Neolithic cultures and the typical Chinese urban centers of the Shang dynasty.

In the Huang He Valley, the cradle of Chinese civilization, thousands of archaeological finds have provided evidence about the Shang dynasty, which endured from around 1700 to 1027 B.C. The Shang dynasty was called the Yin dynasty in its later stages and is thought to have been founded by a rebel leader who overthrew the last Xia ruler. This civilization, largely based on agriculture, hunting, and animal husbandry, yielded an important development during this period: a writing system revealed in archaic Chinese inscriptions found on tortoise shells and flat cattle bones, called oracle bones.

Oracle Bones: Divination, Religion, and Social Structure

Oracle bones, along with inscriptions on bronze vessels, were records of divination and are the earliest form of Chinese writing. They are an important source for understanding the development of written Chinese and Shang society. Diviners would ask questions concerned with matters such as sacrifices, war, travel, weather, hunting, and luck; the bones were then heated to produce cracks from which yes-or-no answers were derived. A number of bones found during the late 19th century in the ruins of the Shang capital of Anyang were first sold as "dragon bones" to be ground up for Chinese medicinal compounds before being brought to the attention of scholars in the 1920s.

The religion of the Shang civilization was based on the worship of ancestral spirits and Shang Di, the supreme god. The ancestral temple was where important decisions were made through divination of the oracle bones.

Shang culture, a feudal system headed by a king, was extremely patriarchal and traditional. The oldest members of a family were considered closest to the ancestors, yet still inferior to them. If a woman was the oldest survivor of her generation in a powerful family, she could become a matriarch. According to oracle bones, one king had three wives, two had two wives, and twenty-six took only one wife.

Language, Writing, and the Evolution of Chinese Characters

The language and culture of the Chinese developed directly from the Shang era. The writing found on oracle bones and bronzes began with pictograms, then developed ideograms and phonograms. These inscriptions show that the information sought pertained to sacrifices, announcements to the spirits, diplomatic banquets, the coming ten-day week, how to avoid danger and calamity, and how to please God and the ancestral spirits. Evil was depicted as a snake attacking a person's foot, and human sacrifice — practiced by the Shang — was indicated by a character showing a person's head being chopped off.

Although the practice of human sacrifice decreased in the Zhou era, the king or lord held the power of life or death over those under him in Shang society. Slavery, drawn from those captured during war and battle, was also a common practice, and the word or character for "servant" indicates a cultural evolution: the character for captives, counted as heads and depicted as an eye, came to mean slave, servant, a retainer, and later a minister of state. Therefore, as writing developed and became more influential, advisors to the king became more literate and thus more powerful.

According to ancient texts such as the Xunzi and the Lüshi Chunqiu, one Cangjie, who lived during the time of the Yellow Emperor around 3000 B.C., was the inventor of Chinese characters. However, numerous inscriptions found on oracle bones associated with the Shang site of Yinxu — and a highly developed writing system consisting of some five thousand characters — indicate that the evolution of Chinese writing must have begun much earlier. In fact, the accepted six rules of Chinese character formation are already evident in the Shang writing system.

Oracle bones from the Shang sites of the Erligang Period are consistently found polished, burned, and drilled — a treatment common to the area and era, generally associated with the Chinese elite. There is no exact counterpart to these polished and drilled oracle bones in the Central Plain until later in history. As with other late Neolithic sites from the same period that used oracle bones, it is possible that this activity was developed outside the Central Plain.

Social factors had a major impact on early writing systems, and those writing systems in turn had an impact on societies; thus, a writing system allows insights into a specific culture. Oracle bones found by archaeologists at a site in Henan Province date to approximately 6500–5500 B.C. Each piece was inscribed with characters found in later Chinese writing, leading many to believe these oracle bones to be the earliest writing. However, most scholars believe that true first writing began sometime around 2500 B.C.

Astronomical and Geological Discoveries from Oracle Bone Records

Oracle bones were also used to record astronomical events. About thirteen years before the time of writing, a group of scientists proved there was once a shorter day by reading an oracle bone with the inscription: "Three flames ate the sun… big stars seen." This cryptic phrase in Chinese characters was found on an ancient piece of tortoise shell and records a total solar eclipse in which the sun's corona and its streamers were visible and stars appeared in the sky. Moreover, it provides a way of determining Earth's rotation rate thousands of years ago.

Kevin D. Pang of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was able to pinpoint the date of the eclipse as June 5, 1302 B.C., and then deduced that a day is now 0.047 seconds longer. By studying one particular oracle bone eclipse record and using computers to calculate the dates and paths of solar eclipses visible in China during a certain period of the Shang dynasty, Pang and his colleagues found two candidates that fit the oracle bone data. They then reviewed records of five lunar eclipses during the same era and, after establishing that the Chinese day as recorded on the oracle bone started at approximately 3 a.m., found a pattern of lunar-eclipse dates that fit the date of one solar eclipse but not the other. Since any changes in Earth's rotation rate would shift an eclipse's path from where it occurred, Pang determined how much the length of the day had changed. According to Pang, this gives scientists a better idea of how much Earth's rotation rate varied in antiquity — and it was all possible from calculations based on the oracle bone.

Today, geologists learn about Earth's history mainly from clues left by forces that have sculpted the planet's surface, such as volcanoes and earthquakes. Scientists are often able to reconstruct geological events that occurred millions of years ago by reading geological records — from layers of sediment containing ancient fossils to the geochemistry of lavas. However, for a number of phenomena that occurred during the last three or four thousand years, there exists another source of information: written records left by ancient cultures.

Because the majority of reports of these events were written long after 1120 B.C., Kevin Pang of JPL and Hung Hsiang Chou, a professor of Chinese language and culture, turned to the only written record from that time — the oracle bones. Chou sifted through over 100,000 pieces of oracle bones, noting all questions potentially relevant to volcanoes. Many of the oracle bones dated to around 1120 B.C. and alluded to a year without harvest in which the seedlings died and the Chi, the sacrificial ceremony, was performed throughout the country. Pang believes the sacrifices were made to appease the gods during bad weather and, on the basis of this archaeological evidence, concluded that the radiocarbon date of the eruption should be refined to 1100 B.C., which is more in keeping with the ice-core data. The oracle bones thus helped researchers pinpoint a more precise date and both verify and quantify ancient eruptions.

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