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.

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