The Oracle Bones of Anyang: Questions to the Ancestors

In Chinese pharmacies of the late nineteenth century one could buy "dragon bones", fragments of old bone and shell ground into medicine. In 1899 the scholar Wang Yirong noticed that some of them bore carved signs that looked like a very ancient form of Chinese writing. Collectors traced the bones to farmland near Anyang in Henan. From 1928 archaeologists excavating there found the royal capital of the late Shang dynasty, called Yinxu, "the ruins of Yin". They found the palaces and tombs of kings, and pits holding tens of thousands of inscribed turtle shells and cattle shoulder-blades. They are the earliest substantial body of Chinese writing, and they are almost all records of divination.

How divination worked

The interactive object above follows the steps:

1. A turtle plastron (the flat under-shell) or an ox scapula was cleaned, polished and cut with rows of hollows on the back.
2. The diviner spoke the charge, a statement put to the spirits, often in paired forms: "we will receive harvest" / "we may not receive harvest".
3. A hot brand was pressed into a hollow. The bone cracked on the front in a ⊢ shape, the origin of the character 卜 (bu), "to divine".
4. The king read the cracks.
5. Engravers carved the date, diviner's name and charge beside the crack, sometimes the king's prognostication, and occasionally the verification: what actually happened.

What the kings asked

Around 150,000 pieces are known, most from the reigns of about nine kings, especially Wu Ding (c. 1250–1192 BCE). They asked about:

• Sacrifices to the royal ancestors, and to the high god Di: which ancestor, how many cattle, sheep or human victims.
• Harvests, rain and weather.
• War, hunting and travel.
• Illness, dreams and childbirth, including dozens of divinations about the consort Fu Hao, whose unlooted tomb was found at Yinxu in 1976.

The world they reveal is one where the living king mediated between the people and powerful, sometimes dangerous ancestors, who had to be fed and consulted.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Writing born in ritual. The oracle bones show Chinese writing already developed, with thousands of distinct characters, used in a religious setting: communication with the spirits. Many characters can be traced directly to their modern forms.

The crack as answer. The spirits answered not in words but in cracks. The character 卜 draws the crack itself, and 占 (zhan, "to prognosticate") adds a mouth: speaking the reading of the crack.

Pairs and balance. Posing each question in positive and negative forms reflects a way of thinking in complementary pairs, sometimes compared with later yin–yang thought. That link is interpretive.

Connections

Early China (ch09) and Sacred Kingship (ch49), with Confucianism & Daoism (ch12) for later ancestor rites. Compare the Diamond Sutra (V30), from the same written tradition two thousand years later.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/oracle-bones-of-anyang.html