Oracle bone script () is an ancient form of
Chinese characters
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...
that were engraved on
oracle bone
Oracle bones () are pieces of ox scapula and turtle plastron, which were used for pyromancy – a form of divination – in ancient China, mainly during the late Shang dynasty. ''Scapulimancy'' is the correct term if ox scapulae were used for th ...
sanimal bones or
turtle plastrons used in
pyromantic divination. Oracle bone script was used in the late 2nd millennium BC, and is the earliest known form of Chinese writing. The vast majority of oracle bone inscriptions, of which about 150,000 pieces have been discovered, were found at the
Yinxu
Yinxu (modern ; ) is the site of one of the ancient and major historical capitals of China. It is the source of the archeological discovery of oracle bones and oracle bone script, which resulted in the identification of the earliest known Chine ...
site located in Xiaotun Village,
Anyang
Anyang (; ) is a prefecture-level city in Henan province, China. The northernmost city in Henan, Anyang borders Puyang to the east, Hebi and Xinxiang to the south, and the provinces of Shanxi and Hebei to its west and north respectively.
It had a ...
,
Henan Province
Henan (; or ; ; alternatively Honan) is a landlocked province of China, in the central part of the country. Henan is often referred to as Zhongyuan or Zhongzhou (), which literally means "central plain" or "midland", although the name is al ...
. The latest significant discovery is the Huayuanzhuang storage of 1,608 pieces, 579 of which were inscribed, found near Xiaotun in 1993. They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the
Shang dynasty
The Shang dynasty (), also known as the Yin dynasty (), was a Chinese royal dynasty founded by Tang of Shang (Cheng Tang) that ruled in the Yellow River valley in the second millennium BC, traditionally succeeding the Xia dynasty and ...
, beginning with
Wu Ding
Wu Ding (); personal name Zi Zhao, was a king of the Shang dynasty who ruled China around 1200s BC. He is the earliest figure in Chinese history mentioned in contemporary records. The annals of the Shang dynasty compiled by later historians were o ...
, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BC or 1200 BC. Oracle bone inscriptions of Wu Ding's reign have been radiocarbon dated to 1254–1197 BC±10 years.
After the Shang were overthrown by the
Zhou dynasty
The Zhou dynasty ( ; Old Chinese ( B&S): *''tiw'') was a royal dynasty of China that followed the Shang dynasty. Having lasted 789 years, the Zhou dynasty was the longest dynastic regime in Chinese history. The military control of China by th ...
in c. 1046 BC, divining with
milfoil became more common, and a much smaller corpus of oracle bone writings date from the Western Zhou. Thus far, no Zhou sites have been found with a cache of inscriptions on the same scale as that at Yinxu, although inscribed oracle bones appear to be more widespread, being found near most major population centers of the time, and new sites have continued to be discovered since 2000.
The late Shang oracle bone writings, along with a few roughly contemporaneous inscriptions in a different style cast in bronzes, constitute the earliest significant corpus of Chinese writing. The script is essential for the study of Chinese
etymology
Etymology ()The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the Phonological chan ...
, as Shang writing is the oldest known member and ancestor of the
Chinese family of scripts
The Chinese family of scripts are writing systems descended from the Chinese oracle bone script and used for a variety of languages in East Asia. They include logosyllabic systems such as the Chinese script itself (or ''hanzi'', now in two forms, t ...
, preceding the
bronzeware script
Chinese bronze inscriptions, also commonly referred to as bronze script or bronzeware script, are writing in a variety of Chinese scripts on ritual bronzes such as ''zhōng'' bells and '' dǐng'' tripodal cauldrons from the Shang dynasty (2nd mi ...
. It is also the direct ancestor of over a dozen East Asian writing systems developed over the next three millennia, including the Chinese and
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
logographic
In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced '' hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, a ...
and
syllabaric scripts still in current use. In terms of content, the inscriptions, which range from under ten characters for incomplete prognostications to over 100 characters in rare cases (a few dozen being typical), deal with a wide range of topics, including war, ritual sacrifice, agriculture, as well as births, illnesses, and deaths in the royal family. Thus, they provide invaluable insight into late Shang dynasty civilization and society.
Oraculology
(甲骨学) is a humanities discipline that focuses on the Chinese Upper Antiquity oracle characters. Oracle bone science can be divided into a narrow sense of oracle bone science and a broad sense of oracle bone science. In the narrow sense, t ...
is the discipline for the study of
oracle bone
Oracle bones () are pieces of ox scapula and turtle plastron, which were used for pyromancy – a form of divination – in ancient China, mainly during the late Shang dynasty. ''Scapulimancy'' is the correct term if ox scapulae were used for th ...
s and the oracle bone script.
Name
The common Chinese term for oracle bone script is ("shell and bone script"), which is an abbreviation of ("tortoise-shell and animal-bone script"). This term is a translation of the English phrase "inscriptions upon bone and tortoise shell", which was coined by the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant (1862–1914) in his 1906 book ''Early Chinese Writing'', and first appeared in Chinese books in the 1930s.
In earlier decades, Chinese authors used a variety of names for the inscriptions and the script, based on the place they were found (
Yinxu
Yinxu (modern ; ) is the site of one of the ancient and major historical capitals of China. It is the source of the archeological discovery of oracle bones and oracle bone script, which resulted in the identification of the earliest known Chine ...
), their purpose (''bǔ'' "to divine") or the method of writing (''qì'' "to engrave"), one common term being ("Yinxu divinatory texts").
As the majority of
oracle bones
Oracle bones () are pieces of ox scapula and turtle plastron, which were used for pyromancy – a form of divination – in ancient China, mainly during the late Shang dynasty. ''Scapulimancy'' is the correct term if ox scapulae were used for the ...
bearing writing date from the late Shang dynasty, ''oracle bone script'' essentially refers to a Shang script.
Precursors
It is certain that Shang-lineage writing underwent a period of development before the
Anyang
Anyang (; ) is a prefecture-level city in Henan province, China. The northernmost city in Henan, Anyang borders Puyang to the east, Hebi and Xinxiang to the south, and the provinces of Shanxi and Hebei to its west and north respectively.
It had a ...
oracle bone script because of its mature nature. For example, many characters had already undergone extensive simplification and linearization; the processes of semantic extension and phonetic loan had also clearly been at work for some time, at least hundreds of years and perhaps longer. However, no significant quantity of clearly identifiable writing from before or during the early to middle Shang cultural period has been discovered. The few Neolithic symbols found on pottery, jade, or bone at a variety of cultural sites in China are very controversial, and there is no consensus that any of them are directly related to the Shang oracle bone script.
Style
![Shang_Bronze_and_Oracle_Script](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Shang_Bronze_and_Oracle_Script.svg)
The oracle bone script of the late
Shang dynasty
The Shang dynasty (), also known as the Yin dynasty (), was a Chinese royal dynasty founded by Tang of Shang (Cheng Tang) that ruled in the Yellow River valley in the second millennium BC, traditionally succeeding the Xia dynasty and ...
appears pictographic, as does its contemporary, the Shang
writing on bronzes. The earliest oracle bone script appears even more so than examples from late in the period (thus some evolution did occur over the roughly 200-year period). Comparing the oracle bone script to both Shang and early
Western Zhou
The Western Zhou ( zh, c=, p=Xīzhōu; c. 1045 BC – 771 BC) was a royal dynasty of China and the first half of the Zhou dynasty. It began when King Wu of Zhou overthrew the Shang dynasty at the Battle of Muye and ended when the Quanrong noma ...
period writing on bronzes, the oracle bone script is clearly greatly simplified, and rounded forms are often converted to rectilinear ones; this is thought to be due to the difficulty of engraving the hard, bony surfaces, compared with the ease of writing them in the wet clay of the molds the bronzes were cast from. The more detailed and more pictorial style of the bronze graphs is thus thought to be more representative of typical Shang writing (as would have normally occurred on bamboo books) than the oracle bone script forms, and this typical style continued to evolve into the
Zhou period writing and then into the
seal script
Seal script, also sigillary script () is an ancient style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty bronze script. The Qin variant of seal ...
of the
Qin Qin may refer to:
Dynasties and states
* Qin (state) (秦), a major state during the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China
* Qin dynasty (秦), founded by the Qin state in 221 BC and ended in 206 BC
* Daqin (大秦), ancient Chinese name for the Roman Emp ...
in the late Zhou period.
It is known that the Shang people also wrote with brush and ink, as brush-written graphs have been found on a small number of pottery, shell and bone, and jade and other stone items,
[Qiu 2000, p.63] and there is evidence that they also wrote on bamboo (or wooden) books just like those found from the late Zhou to
Hàn periods, because the graphs for a writing brush (聿 ''yù'', depicting a hand holding a writing brush) and bamboo book (冊 ''cè'', a book of
thin vertical slats or slips with horizontal string binding, like a closed
Venetian blind
A window blind is a type of window covering. There are many different kinds of window blinds which use a variety of control systems. A typical window blind is made up of several long horizontal or vertical slats of various types of hard mater ...
turned 90 degrees) are present in the oracle bone script.
[Xu Yahui, p.12] Since the ease of writing with a brush is even greater than that of writing with a
stylus
A stylus (plural styli or styluses) is a writing utensil or a small tool for some other form of marking or shaping, for example, in pottery. It can also be a computer accessory that is used to assist in navigating or providing more precision w ...
in wet clay, it is assumed that the style and structure of Shang graphs on bamboo were similar to those on bronzes, and also that the majority
of writing occurred with a brush on such books. Additional support for this notion includes the reorientation of some graphs, by turning them 90 degrees as if to better fit on tall, narrow slats; this style must have developed on bamboo or wood slat books and then carried over to the oracle bone script. Additionally, the writing of characters in vertical columns, from top to bottom, is for the most part carried over from the bamboo books to oracle bone inscriptions.
[Keightley 1978, p.50] In some instances lines are written horizontally so as to match the text to divinatory cracks, or columns of text rotate 90 degrees in mid stream, but these are exceptions to the normal pattern of writing, and inscriptions were never read bottom to top. The vertical columns of text in Chinese writing are traditionally ordered from right to left; this pattern is found on bronze inscriptions from the Shang dynasty onward. Oracle bone inscriptions, however, are often arranged so that the columns begin near the centerline of the shell or bone, and move toward the edge, such that the two sides are ordered in mirror-image fashion.
Structure and function
![Chinese character Shang oracle 犬 quan3 dog](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Chinese_character_Shang_oracle_%E7%8A%AC_quan3_dog.svg)
Despite the pictorial nature of the oracle bone script, it was a fully functional and mature writing system by the time of the Shang dynasty, i.e., able to record the
Old Chinese language
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 ...
in its entirety and not just isolated kinds of meaning. This level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred years. From their presumed origins as pictographs and signs, by the Shang dynasty, most graphs were already conventionalized in such a simplified fashion that the meanings of many of the pictographs are not immediately apparent. Compare, for instance, the pictographs at the left. Without careful research to compare these to later forms, one would probably not know that these represented 豕 ''shĭ'' "swine" and 犬 ''quǎn'' "dog" respectively. As Boltz (1994 & 2003 p. 31–33) notes, most of the oracle bone graphs are not depicted realistically enough for those who do not already know the script to recognize what they stand for; although pictographic ''in origin'' they are no longer pictographs ''in function''. Boltz instead calls them ''zodiographs'' (p. 33), reminding us that functionally they represent ''words'', and only through the words do they represent concepts, while for similar reasons Qiu labels them ''semantographs''.
By the late Shang oracle bone script, 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, and associative compounds were already common. One structural and functional analysis of the oracle bone characters found that they were 23% pictographs, 2% simple indicatives, 32% associative compounds, 11% phonetic loans, 27% phonetic-semantic compounds, and 6% uncertain.
Although it was a fully functional writing system, the oracle bone script was not fully standardized. By the early
Western Zhou
The Western Zhou ( zh, c=, p=Xīzhōu; c. 1045 BC – 771 BC) was a royal dynasty of China and the first half of the Zhou dynasty. It began when King Wu of Zhou overthrew the Shang dynasty at the Battle of Muye and ended when the Quanrong noma ...
period, these traits had vanished, but in both periods, the script was not highly regular or standardized; variant forms of graphs abound, and the size and orientation of graphs is also irregular. A graph when inverted horizontally generally refers to the same word, and additional components are sometimes present without changing the meaning. These irregularities persisted until the standardization of the
seal script
Seal script, also sigillary script () is an ancient style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty bronze script. The Qin variant of seal ...
in the
Qin dynasty
The Qin dynasty ( ; zh, c=秦朝, p=Qín cháo, w=), or Ch'in dynasty in Wade–Giles romanization ( zh, c=, p=, w=Ch'in ch'ao), was the first Dynasties in Chinese history, dynasty of Imperial China. Named for its heartland in Qin (state), ...
.
![Comparison of Chinese characters for autumn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Comparison_of_Chinese_characters_for_autumn.svg)
There are over 30,000 distinct characters found from all the bone fragments so far, which may represent around 4,000 individual characters in their various forms. The majority of these still remain undeciphered, although scholars believe they can decipher between 1,500 and 2,000 of these characters. One reason for the difficulty in decipherment is that components of certain oracle bone script characters may differ in later script forms. Such differences may be accounted for by character simplification and/or by later generations misunderstanding the original graph, which had evolved beyond recognition. For instance, the standard character for ‘autumn’ (秋) now appears with 禾 ('plant stalk') as one component and 火 ('fire') as another component, whereas the oracle bone script form of the character depicts an insect-like figure with
antennae - either a
cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by striki ...
or a
locust
Locusts (derived from the Vulgar Latin ''locusta'', meaning grasshopper) are various species of short-horned grasshoppers in the family Acrididae that have a swarming phase. These insects are usually solitary, but under certain circumstanc ...
- with a variant depicting fire
![火-oracle](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/%E7%81%AB-oracle.svg)
below said figure. In this case, the modern character is a simplification of an archaic variant 𪛁 (or 𥤚) which is closer to the oracle bone script form - albeit with the insect figure being confused with the similar-looking character for 'turtle' (龜) and the addition of the 禾 component. (Another rarer simplification of 𪛁 is 龝, with 龜 instead of 火).
![OracleSpring](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/OracleSpring.jpg)
Another reason is that some characters exist ''only'' in the oracle bone script, dropping out of later usage (usually being replaced in their duties by other, newer characters). One good example is shown in the fragment labeled "Oracle script for Spring". The top left character in this image has no known modern Chinese counterpart. In such cases, context - when available - may be used to determine the possible meaning of the character. In other cases, the character may be assumed to be a
phonosemantic compound
In linguistics, sound symbolism is the resemblance between sound and meaning. It is a form of linguistic iconicity. For example, the English word ''ding'' may sound similar to the actual sound of a bell. Linguistic sound may be perceived as simil ...
, and its rough meaning can be inferred based on the semantic component. For instance, an oracle bone character was recently found which consists of 礻 on the left and 升 on the right (
升when converted from oracle bone forms to their modern printed equivalents). This character may reasonably be guessed to a compound with 示 ('altar') as the semantic and 升 (modern reading 'sheng') as the phonetic. Though no modern character consists of these two components, it likely refers to a type of Shang dynasty ritual with a name similar to the pronunciation of 升 in Old Chinese. In the same collection of fragments, the character
心was surmised to be a place name, since the semantic component 阜 means 'mound; hill', and the divination concerned the king traveling for a royal hunt.
Zhou dynasty oracle bones
The numbers of oracle bones with inscriptions contemporaneous with the end of Shang and the beginning of Zhou is relatively few in number compared with the entire corpus of Shang inscriptions. Until 1977, only a few inscribed shell and bone artifacts were known. Zhou related inscriptions have been unearthed since the 1950s, with find fragments having only one or two characters. In August 1977, a large hoard of several thousand pieces was discovered in an area closely related to the heartland of the ancient Zhou. Of these, only two or three hundred items were inscribed.
Scholarship
![Wang Yirong](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Wang_Yirong.jpg)
Among the major scholars making significant contributions to the study of the oracle bone writings, especially early on, were:
*
Wang Yirong
Wang Yirong (; 1845–1900) was a director of the Chinese Guozijian, Imperial Academy, best known as the first to recognize that the symbols inscribed on oracle bones were an early form of Chinese writing. His work on the oracle bone script was c ...
recognized the characters as being ancient Chinese writing in 1899.
*
Liu E collected five thousand oracle bone fragments, published the first collection of 1,058 rubbings entitled ''Tieyun Canggui'' (鐵雲藏龜, Tie Yun's
.e., Liu ERepository of Turtles) in 1903, and correctly identified thirty-four characters.
*
Sun Yirang
Sun Yirang (; 1848–1908) was a Qing dynasty Chinese philologist. A native of Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, he retired from official employment early in his life to devote himself to scholarship. His most important works are ''Mozi Jiangu'' (墨 ...
was the first serious researcher of oracle bones.
*
Luo Zhenyu
Luo Zhenyu or Lo Chen-yü (August 8, 1866 – May 14, 1940), courtesy name Shuyun (叔蘊), was a Chinese classical scholar, philologist, epigrapher, antiquarian and Qing loyalist.
Biography
A native of Huai'an, Luo began to publish works ...
collected over 30,000 oracle bones and published several volumes, identified the names of the Shang kings, and thus positively identified the oracle bones as being artifacts from the Shang reign.
*
Wang Guowei
Wang Guowei (; 2 December 18772 June 1927) or Wang Kuo-wei, courtesy name Jing'an () or Boyu (), was a Chinese historian and poet. A versatile and original scholar, he made important contributions to the studies of ancient history, epigraphy, ph ...
demonstrated that the commemorative cycle of the Shang kings matched the list of kings in
Sima Qian
Sima Qian (; ; ) was a Chinese historian of the early Han dynasty (206AD220). He is considered the father of Chinese historiography for his ''Records of the Grand Historian'', a general history of China covering more than two thousand years b ...
's ''
Records of the Historian''.
*
Dong Zuobin
Dong Zuobin or Tung Tso-pin (1895–1963) was a Chinese archaeologist. He was a leading authority on the oracle bone and turtle shell inscriptions of the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BC). In 1928, Dong supervised the first archaeological dig of An ...
identified the diviners and established a chronology for the oracle bones as well as numerous other dating criteria.
*
Guo Moruo
Guo Moruo (; November 16, 1892 – June 12, 1978), courtesy name Dingtang (), was a Chinese author, poet, historian, archaeologist, and government official.
Biography
Family history
Guo Moruo, originally named Guo Kaizhen, was born on November ...
editor of the ''Heji'', the largest published collection of oracle bones.
*
Ken-ichi Takashima, first scholar to systematically treat the language of the oracle bones from the perspective of modern linguistics.
Computer encoding
A proposal to include the oracle bone script in
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
is being prepared.
Codepoint
In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but ...
s U+35400 through U+36BFF in Unicode Plane 3 (the Tertiary Ideographic Plane) have been tentatively allocated.
Samples
File:CMOC Treasures of Ancient China exhibit - oracle bone inscription.jpg, An oracle bone (incomplete) with a diviner asking the Shang king if there would be misfortune over the next ten days
File:Shang dynasty inscribed tortoise plastron.jpg, Tortoise plastron with divination inscription dating to the reign of King Wu Ding
Wu Ding (); personal name Zi Zhao, was a king of the Shang dynasty who ruled China around 1200s BC. He is the earliest figure in Chinese history mentioned in contemporary records. The annals of the Shang dynasty compiled by later historians were o ...
File:OracleDivining.jpg, Oracle script from a divining
File:OracleSun.jpg, Oracle script inquiry about rain: "Today, will it rain?"
File:Obi-rain.png, Oracle script inquiry about rain (annotated)
File:OracleSpring.jpg, Oracle script for Spring
File:OracleAutumn.jpg, Oracle script for Autumn
File:OracleWinter.jpg, Oracle script for Winter
File:Shang numerals.jpg, Shang oracle bone numerals of 14th century B.C.[The Shorter Science & Civilisation in China Vol 2, An abridgement by Colin Ronan of Joseph Needham's original text, Table 20, p. 6, Cambridge University Press ]
See also
*
Mojikyo – Software developed by Mojikyo researchers that includes a set of oracle bone characters.
*
Chinese family of scripts
The Chinese family of scripts are writing systems descended from the Chinese oracle bone script and used for a variety of languages in East Asia. They include logosyllabic systems such as the Chinese script itself (or ''hanzi'', now in two forms, t ...
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
*Boltz, William G. (1994; revised 2003). ''The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System''. American Oriental Series, vol. 78. American Oriental Society, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
*Chen Zhaorong 陳昭容. (2003) ''Qinxi wenzi yanjiu: Cong hanzi-shi de jiaodu kaocha'' 秦系文字研究 ﹕从漢字史的角度考察 (Research on the Qin (Ch'in) Lineage of Writing: An Examination from the Perspective of the History of Chinese Writing). Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. .
*Gao Ming 高明 (1996). ''Zhongguo Guwenzi Xuetonglun'' 中国古文字学通论. Beijing: Beijing University Press.
*
Keightley, David N. (1978). ''Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China''. University of California Press, Berkeley. Large format hardcover, (out of print); A 1985 ppbk 2nd edition also printed, .
*Keightley, David N. (2000). ''The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200–1045 B.C.)''. China Research Monograph 53, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California – Berkeley. , ppbk.
*Liu Xiang 刘翔 et al., (1989, 3rd reprint 1996). ''Shang-zhou guwenzi duben'' 商周古文字读本 (Reader of Shang-Zhou Ancient Characters). Yuwen Publishers.
*
Qiu Xigui
Qiu Xigui (; born 13July 1935) is a Chinese historian, palaeographer, and professor of Fudan University. His book ''Chinese Writing'' is considered the "single most influential study of Chinese palaeography".
Early life and education
Qiu Xigui ...
''Chinese Writing'' (2000). Translation by Gilbert L. Mattos and
Jerry Norman. Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. .
*Shen, Chen. (2002). ''Anyang and Sanxingdui: Unveiling the Mysteries of Ancient Chinese Civilizations''. Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
*Thorp, Robert L. "The Date of Tomb 5 at Yinxu, Anyang: A Review Article," Artibus Asiae (Volume 43, Number 3, 1981): 239–246.
*
*Xu Yahui 許雅惠 (2002). ''Ancient Chinese Writing, Oracle Bone Inscriptions from the Ruins of Yin''. Illustrated guide to the Special Exhibition of Oracle Bone Inscriptions from the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. English translation by
Mark Caltonhill
Mark Caltonhill is a British translator and writer. He is the author of "Private Prayers and Public Parades - Exploring the Religious Life of Taipei".
Career
Caltonhill, who studied first botany and later Chinese, both at the University of Edinb ...
and Jeff Moser. National Palace Museum, Taipei. Govt. Publ. No. 1009100250.
*Zhao Cheng 趙誠 (1988). ''Jiǎgǔwén Jiǎnmíng Cídiǎn – Bǔcí Fēnlèi Dúbĕn'' 甲骨文簡明詞典 – 卜辭分類讀本. Beijing: Zhōnghúa Shūjú, /H•22
External links
More on Oracle Bone Script at BeyondCalligraphy.com
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Oracle Bone Script
Divination
History of the Chinese script
Shang dynasty
Obsolete writing systems
Oraculology
Yinxu