Oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文; pinyin: jiǎgǔwén; lit. 'shell bone writing') refers to incised (or, rarely, brush-written) ancient Chinese characters found on animal bones or turtle shells, generallyox scapulae and tortoise plastrons (oracle bones), which record pyromantic divinations. The vast majority date to the late Shang dynasty, around the 14th to 11th centuries BC. These late-Shang writings constitute the earliest significant corpus of Chinese characters, but contrary to popular belief are not the earliest Chinese characters, being predated by a very few characters inscribed on pottery at the middle Shang site of Táixī, Gǎochĕng County, Hébĕi Province, and two pieces of bone with writing from the pre-Shang site of Èrlĭgāng in Zhèngzhoū (鄭州), Hénán Province. There are also a very few symbols cast in early Shang bronze vessels, and some inscribed on pottery from proto-Shang to early Shang sites, although whether the graphs on them qualify as writing or not is debated. Even earlier are a number of symbols on Neolithic-period pottery which are similarly controversial.
Because turtle shells as well as bones were used, the oracle bone script is also sometimes called shell and bone script. However, the term oracle bone script is by far more common and is appropriate for both, as turtle shells are actually a bony material. A very few similar bones have been found dating to the early Zhou period, but most are not inscribed. Bones and shells used in pyromancy have also been found dating back to the Neolithic, but most are not inscribed, and the symbols on those that are not widely recognized as writing. Thus, because the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date to the late Shang dynasty, oracle bone script essentially refers to the late Shang script. More information on this form of divination and the material aspects of the bones and shells themselves is available at the oracle bones page.
Despite the archaic and relatively pictorial appearance of the oracle bone script, it is in fact a mature writing system fully capable of recording language, which clearly implies an earlier period of development. Unfortunately there are virtually no materials providing evidence from such a formative period. From their presumed origins as pictographs and signs, by the mid to late Shang, the graphs had already evolved into a variety of mostly non-pictographic functions, including all the major types of Chinese characters now in use. Phonetic loan graphs, semantic-phonetic compounds (形聲字 xíngshēngzì), and associative compounds (會意字 huìyìzì) were already common. Compared to graphs on bronzes from the middle Shang to early Western Zhou period, the oracle bone graphs appear simplified, which is thought to be the result of the difficulty of engraving characters on the hard bony materials, compared with the ease of writing them in the wet clay from which the bronzes were cast. We also know that the Shang people wrote on bamboo or wooden codices just like those of the late Zhou period, because the graphs for brush and bamboo book are present in the oracle bone writings. Since the ease of writing with a brush is even greater than that of writing with a stylus in wet clay, it is assumed that the Shang graphs on bamboo were similar to those on bronzes. The more detailed and more pictorial style of the bronze graphs is thus thought to be more representative of Shang writing in general than the oracle bone forms, and it is this style which continued to evolve into the Zhou period, eventually leading to the seal script.
Oracle bone script is seen to develop over the several generations of Shang kings, so there is no single defined form of for each character.
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Oracle bone characters may have components which differ in later characters, for instance the character for Autumn 秋 now appears with 禾 as one component and fire 火 as another component. From the Oracle script, one sees that an ant-like creature is carved instead.
Of the thousands of characters found from all the bone fragments, the majority remain undeciphered. One good example is shown in fragment labeled "Oracle script for Spring". The top left character in this image has no modern Chinese character counterpart to date. One of the better known characters however is shown directly beneath it looking like an upright iscosceles triangle with a line cutting through the upper portion. This is the Oracle script character for 王 "wáng" or King.
See also
- Bronzeware script
- I Ching
- Seal script
- Mojikyo - Software developed by Mojikyo researchers that includes a set of oracle bone characters.
- Chinese characters