Oracle Bone Inscriptions
甲骨文 (Jiaguwen)
Every consequential decision of state, from harvest timing to war to childbirth, must be tested through cracked bone and shell against the will of royal ancestors and nature spirits before a Shang king can safely act on it.
- divination as state technology
- ancestor worship underwriting royal legitimacy
- earliest attested Chinese writing system
- primary source for Shang political geography
The oldest substantial corpus of Chinese writing, tens of thousands of inscribed turtle plastrons and ox scapulae recovered since 1899 from the last Shang capital near modern Anyang. Diviners applied heat to a prepared surface, read the resulting crack, and a scribe recorded the question put to royal ancestors or nature spirits (about weather, harvests, warfare, hunts, childbirth, illness, and the king's itinerary), sometimes the answer, and occasionally the outcome. The script already shows a fully developed writing system, structurally continuous with later Chinese characters, and the corpus is the primary source for reconstructing Shang royal genealogy, geography, and religion, since almost no other Shang-era texts survive.
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