LANGUAGE × BELIEFS

Oracle Bones, the First Chinese Writing

~1250 BCE

History · Bronze Age · Holocene · Meghalayan

Oracle bones are the ox shoulder blades and turtle plastrons on which the diviners of the late Shang state recorded their questions, at Anyang in Henan, the dynasty's last capital. Experiment has reconstructed the procedure: hollows were drilled into the back of the bone, heat was applied to them, and the diviner read the cracks that opened on the other side; the record of the session was then written on the bone before being cut into it, and pigment was rubbed into the grooves. Since the first pieces were recognised in 1899, more than 150,000 inscribed fragments have come to light. They carry royal divinations about the health of the king, military success, the timing of sacrifices and the weather, addressed to the ancestral spirits, and run from about 1250 to 1046 BCE.

Why it matters

With these inscriptions the written record of East Asia begins: they hold the earliest evidence of the Chinese language and of the script that writes it, and that script runs in an unbroken line to the characters in use today, which makes Chinese the only independently invented writing system that has never fallen out of use. The script also arrives already finished. Boltz describes it as fully developed and capable in principle of writing the whole language, so what the bones show is not the birth of Chinese writing but a stage well past it.

Dating & uncertainty

The two published figures differ: about 1250 to 1046 BCE in one account, about 1200 to 1050 BCE in another, for the same corpus at Anyang. Both are given as approximate, and the date carried here, ~1250 BCE, takes the older of the two starts. What the choice moves is the length of the written record, two centuries or a century and a half; it changes nothing about the script, already mature on the oldest pieces, whose formation therefore lies before 1250 either way.

Sources

1. Kern (2010), The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature · Early Chinese literature, beginnings through Western Handoi:10.1017/chol9780521855587.003
2. Chang (1986), Early China · 12. An Experiment in Making Late Shang Oracle Bonesdoi:10.1017/s0362502800002996
3. Boltz (1986), World Archaeology · Early Chinese writingdoi:10.1080/00438243.1986.9979980
4. Dematte (2010), Cambridge Archaeological Journal · The Origins of Chinese Writing: the Neolithic Evidencedoi:10.1017/S0959774310000247

Our species’ history as one day

23:45:0814 min 51 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day