Shang Oracle Bones and the Origins of Chinese Writing

Shang oracle bones are pieces of animal bone and turtle shell that the royal court of China’s Shang dynasty (roughly 1600–1046 BCE) used for divination, carving questions to the spirit world into the hard surface and reading the cracks that appeared when the material was heated. They represent the oldest known body of Chinese writing and one of the earliest substantial written archives from any civilization. More than 150,000 fragments have been recovered, mostly from the ruins of the Shang capital near modern Anyang in Henan Province, and together they paint a remarkably detailed portrait of a Bronze Age society’s politics, religion, agriculture, warfare, and even medical thinking.

How the Divination Process Worked

The bones used were primarily the shoulder blades (scapulae) of cattle and the flat underside (plastrons) of freshwater turtles. Preparation was careful and deliberate. Workers scraped the bone clean of tissue, polished it smooth, and then drilled rows of small pits or hollows into the back surface. These hollows thinned the bone at precise points, controlling where cracks would form.

When the king or a designated diviner wanted to consult the ancestors or the supreme deity, a question was inscribed on the bone’s front surface with a sharp stylus. Questions ranged from the mundane to the existential: Will it rain in the next ten days? Should we attack a neighboring state? Is the king’s toothache caused by an angry ancestor? A heated bronze rod or brand was then applied to the prepared hollows on the reverse side. The sudden, intense heat caused the bone to crack in a pattern roughly resembling the Chinese character for “to divine.” The diviner interpreted the direction, length, and branching of the cracks as the spirit world’s answer. In many cases, a follow-up notation was inscribed recording whether the predicted event actually came to pass, giving us the rare gift of Shang-era fact-checking.

What the Inscriptions Tell Us

The range of topics carved into oracle bones is strikingly broad. The inscriptions mention harvests and planting schedules, military campaigns against dozens of named groups, the construction of settlements, royal hunts (sometimes on a spectacular scale, recording hundreds of animals taken), astronomical events like eclipses, and requests for good weather. They also name Shang kings and their consorts, which has allowed historians to cross-reference and largely confirm the king-lists preserved in much later texts like the Records of the Grand Historian, written more than a thousand years after the Shang fell.

Because inscriptions were often dated by a cyclical sixty-day system, scholars can sometimes reconstruct sequences of events spanning weeks or months. One set of bones might track a single military campaign from the initial divination asking whether to attack, through questions about the weather en route, to a final record of victory or setback. This granularity is almost unheard-of for a period so remote.

Disease and the Spirit World

Among the most fascinating oracle bone texts are those dealing with illness. The Shang court clearly viewed royal health as a matter of spiritual as well as physical importance, and a significant number of inscriptions record questions about specific ailments: headaches, toothaches, eye problems, difficult pregnancies, and unspecified abdominal distress. The inscriptions name the diseases, speculate about their causes, and sometimes describe their progression.

The Shang understanding of why people got sick, as revealed by these texts, falls into a few broad categories. The most prominent is what scholars describe as spiritual disturbance. The supreme deity could send illness as punishment or warning. Deceased ancestors who had become powerful spirits could inflict disease on the living, often because sacrifices had been neglected or because some offense had been committed. Nightmares were also associated with illness, treated as spiritual visitations rather than mere bad dreams. Beyond the spirit world, the inscriptions mention harm from insects and curses as additional causes of sickness.

1Chinese Medicine and Culture. Origins of Etiological Thought in Traditional Chinese Medicine: Insights from Shang Oracle-bone Medical Inscriptions

What makes these medical inscriptions historically important is that they push the roots of Chinese medical thinking back far earlier than the classical medical texts compiled during the Han dynasty. The oracle bones show that the idea of disease having identifiable causes, even if those causes were supernatural, was already firmly embedded in elite Chinese culture more than three thousand years ago.

Color on the Bones

To the naked eye, many oracle bone inscriptions appear as bare grooves in pale bone. But a significant number were originally filled with vivid red or black pigment, making the characters stand out sharply. Modern spectroscopic analysis has identified exactly what those pigments were.

In a study that examined 86 individual carved characters using Raman spectroscopy, researchers found that the red coloring came from two mineral pigments: cinnabar (mercury sulfide) accounted for roughly 85 percent of the red fills, while hematite (iron oxide) made up the remaining 15 percent. A small number of characters contained both. The black pigment was almost entirely carbon black, the soot-based ink familiar across many ancient cultures, with a single instance of graphite.

2Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Micro-Raman spectroscopy of Shang oracle bone inscriptions

Cinnabar was a prestige material in ancient China, associated with ritual power and later with alchemical pursuits. Its dominant presence on the oracle bones suggests that filling inscriptions with color was not casual decoration but a deliberate, meaningful part of the divinatory process. The choice between red and black pigment may have had ritual significance, though the exact rules, if any, remain debated.

From Oracle Bone Script to Modern Chinese Characters

Oracle bone script is the earliest verified stage of Chinese writing. The characters are largely pictographic and often recognizable even to a modern reader: the character for “sun” looks like a circle with a dot in the center, “mountain” resembles peaked ridges, “rain” shows droplets falling from a cloud. But the script is far from primitive. It includes hundreds of characters representing abstract concepts, grammatical particles, and proper names, all evidence of a writing system that was already mature when the surviving oracle bones were carved.

Chinese characters evolved through several major stages after the oracle bone period. The next stage, bronze inscriptions, appeared on ritual vessels cast during the late Shang and especially the Western Zhou period. Comparative studies have found that oracle bone characters and bronze inscription characters share a relatively high degree of visual similarity, which makes sense since the two forms overlapped historically. The script then passed through seal script, clerical script, and eventually regular script, the form used in printed Chinese today.

3PLOS ONE. Study on the evolution of Chinese characters based on few-shot learning: From oracle bone inscriptions to regular script

Computational studies tracking character similarity across these stages have found that the biggest visual jump occurred during the transition from seal script to clerical script, when characters shifted from rounded, pictographic forms to the angular, stroke-based style that defines written Chinese today. By contrast, the transition from clerical script to regular script preserved most structural features, which is why classical and modern printed characters look so similar. Datasets used for this research span six historical stages, from oracle bone characters in the fifteenth century BCE through clerical script in the Han dynasty.

4arXiv. An open dataset for the evolution of oracle bone characters: EVOBC

About 4,500 distinct oracle bone characters have been cataloged. Scholars have confidently deciphered roughly a third of them. Another third are partially understood from context, and the remaining third are still unidentified, a puzzle that has occupied epigraphers for more than a century.

Classifying the Bones by Period

Not all oracle bones come from the same era, and their characteristics shifted over time. The pioneering scholar Dong Zuobin, working in the 1930s, was the first to recognize that the style of the characters themselves could be used to date the inscriptions.

5Journal of Chinese Writing Systems. A study on the relationship between the period of oracle bone inscriptions and the development of character forms

Dong proposed a five-period classification system based on which king was reigning when the bones were inscribed. The earliest period features large, bold characters carved with confident strokes. Middle periods show smaller, more standardized writing, suggesting an increasingly bureaucratic approach to record-keeping. Later periods sometimes display hasty or compressed script, which may reflect political instability in the dynasty’s final decades. This periodization remains the backbone of oracle bone studies, though it has been refined and complicated as more bones have been unearthed and new diviners’ handwriting styles have been identified.

The ability to date inscriptions by style has practical consequences for historians. When a new cache of bones is discovered, paleographic analysis can place them within a few reigns even before radiocarbon dating is performed, helping scholars map political and ritual changes across the dynasty’s roughly five-century span.

Not Just the Shang Dynasty

For decades after oracle bones first entered scholarly awareness, it was assumed that the practice of inscribing divination records on bone and shell was unique to the Shang. That assumption was wrong. Excavations at several sites in Shaanxi Province, including Sipanmo, Fangdui village, and most conclusively Fengxi in 1956, produced inscribed oracle bones that could be attributed to the Western Zhou dynasty, which overthrew and succeeded the Shang around 1046 BCE.

6Early China. Once Again on the New Period of Western Zhou Oracle-Bone Research With a Brief Description of the Zhouyuan Sacrifice Inscriptions

The Western Zhou oracle bones are fewer in number and generally less elaborate than their Shang predecessors, but their existence reshaped the field in two ways. First, it showed that bone divination was not a Shang peculiarity but a broader practice that the conquering Zhou adopted and continued. Second, it expanded the geographic range of oracle bone studies well beyond the Anyang heartland into the Wei River valley, where the Zhou had their original power base. Additional uninscribed oracle bones have turned up at even earlier Neolithic and early Bronze Age sites across northern China, indicating that the practice of heating bone to produce cracks for divination is far older than the Shang. What the Shang contributed was the revolutionary step of writing the questions and answers down.

The Modern Discovery Story

The tale of how oracle bones re-entered human awareness is one of the more colorful episodes in the history of archaeology. In 1899, a scholar and antiquarian named Wang Yirong was ill and had been prescribed traditional medicine that included “dragon bones,” which were fragments of ancient bone sold at Chinese pharmacies and ground into powder. Wang noticed that some of the fragments bore what appeared to be carved characters. Recognizing them as potentially very old writing, he began purchasing all the dragon bones he could find and tracing them to dealers in Anyang.

Wang died during the Boxer Uprising in 1900, but his friend Liu E continued collecting and published the first catalog of oracle bone inscriptions in 1903. Systematic archaeological excavation at Yinxu, the site near Anyang where most oracle bones originate, began in 1928 under the newly founded Academia Sinica. Those digs unearthed thousands of inscribed pieces, including a single pit in 1936 that contained over 17,000 fragments, many of them nearly complete. The site has produced oracle bones intermittently ever since, and Yinxu was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006.

It is sobering to consider how many inscribed bones were ground into medicine over the centuries before their significance was recognized. Anyang-area farmers had been turning up “dragon bones” for generations, and traditional pharmacies across northern China had been selling and consuming them as remedies. The scholarly consensus is that an unknowable but likely substantial number of inscriptions were destroyed in this way.

Preserving the Bones Digitally

Oracle bones are fragile. Many have been broken, handled, rubbed with ink for rubbings, or simply degraded over the past century of study. Increasingly, research institutions are turning to high-resolution 3D scanning to create permanent digital records. Recent work on physical oracle bone artifacts has demonstrated that photogrammetric mesh reconstruction can achieve a mean geometric error of about 0.075 millimeters, fine enough to capture individual chisel strokes within the carved characters.

7PubMed Central. Efficient Mesh Reconstruction and Texturing of Oracle Bones

Digital models serve multiple purposes beyond simple preservation. They allow scholars on different continents to study the same artifact without handling it. They enable computational analysis of character shapes, stroke order, and carving depth, which feeds into the decipherment of still-unread characters. And they open the door to machine-learning approaches that can search for patterns across tens of thousands of fragments simultaneously, looking for joins between broken pieces or identifying the handwriting of individual diviners across different bones. Several Chinese universities and the National Library of China have launched digitization projects, and open-access datasets of oracle bone character images are now available for researchers worldwide.

What Remains Undeciphered

The roughly two-thirds of oracle bone characters that have not been securely identified represent one of the great unsolved puzzles in epigraphy. Some of these unknown characters appear only once or twice across the entire corpus, making it nearly impossible to deduce their meaning from context. Others seem to be variant forms of known characters, written differently by different diviners or in different periods, but linking them to their standard counterparts requires painstaking comparison.

Progress has been slow but steady. New decipherments typically arrive one character at a time, often from a scholar who identifies a convincing phonetic or semantic link between an oracle bone form and a later bronze inscription character. The Chinese government has at times offered bounties for confirmed new readings, reflecting the cultural weight attached to the project. Machine-learning tools have begun to assist by clustering visually similar characters and suggesting possible evolutionary links to later script stages, but the final judgment still depends on human expertise in Shang-era grammar, ritual vocabulary, and historical context. It is a field where a single convincing reading can take years to establish and can reshape the interpretation of dozens of other inscriptions that share the same character.

The undeciphered portion is not just a technical curiosity. Many of the unread characters appear in the context of place names, personal names, ritual terms, and natural phenomena. Cracking them could reveal the names of forgotten states, lost religious concepts, or even astronomical observations that would help calibrate the Shang calendar. The oracle bones still have secrets to give up, and the slow work of reading them continues more than a century after Wang Yirong first noticed scratches on his medicine.