Oracle bone script (甲骨文 pinyin: Jia3gu3wen2) are incised characters found on ox scapula 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 for each character.
The diviner would inscribe on the bone or shell his name, the current date of the sexigesimal cycle and then inscribe two possible outcomes on the shell. Depending on how the fired object cracked, diviners would interpret the answer from them. 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.
Replica of ancient Chinese script on an oracle turtle shell
Oracle script from a divining
Oracle script for Sun
Oracle script script inquiry about rain
Oracle script for Spring
Oracle script for Autumn
Oracle script for Winter
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 "wang2" or King.
Oracle bones (甲骨片 jiǎgǔpiàn) are pieces of bone or turtle shell used in royal divination in the mid Shāng to early Zhōu dynasties in ancient China, and often bearing written inscriptions in what is called oracle bone script.
The oracle bones are mostly ox scapulae (shoulder blades) and turtle shells, although some other animal bones, and even the skulls of deer and humans were sometimes used.
However, significant quantities of inscribed oracle bones date only to the middle of the Shāng Dynasty, probably in the reign of Pángēng, around 1350 BC when the Shāng capital was moved to Yīn at modern Ānyáng.
Oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文; pinyin: jiǎgǔwén; literally "shell bone writing") refers to incised (or, rarely, brush-written) ancient Chinese characters found on oracle bones, which are animal bones or turtle shells used in divination in ancient China.
Despite the archaic and relatively pictorial appearance of the oracle bone script, it is in fact a fully functional writing system, i.e., one fully capable of recording language, which clearly implies an earlier period of development.
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.
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