Oracle bone inscriptions
Also known as "Yin Ruins inscriptions", "divination inscriptions" and "Yin Qi", they are inscriptions carved on tortoise shells and animal bones during the Yin and Shang Dynasties.
It was discovered at the end of the 19th century at the ruins of the capital of the Yin Dynasty, now Xiaotun, Anyang, Henan Province. It is the earliest sample of Chinese characters discovered so far.
There are more than 100,000 oracle bones with characters in total, including more than 5,000 different characters and graphics, of which about 1,000 characters have been identified.
Phonetic characters account for about 27% of the oracle bone inscriptions, which shows that the oracle bone inscriptions are already a quite mature writing system.
Characteristics of oracle bone inscriptions
Oracle bone inscriptions use knives as writing tools and tortoise shells and animal bones as carrier materials. They belong to the early stage of Chinese characters and therefore have the following characteristics:
1. The strokes are thin and thin, mostly straight. The folded pen is often carved into two knives with almost no bends;
2. The character shape is long and thin, and the straight pen is longer than the horizontal pen, which is consistent with holding the knife. It is related to the difficulty of exerting force on the hand;
3. The physical structure changes depending on the number of strokes, and the size is not uniform;
4. There are a large number of variant characters, especially among the pictographic characters, one character There are often multiple ways of writing;
5. The positions of the radicals in combined characters can be interchanged, indicating that the physical structure was not yet fixed at that time.
Because Chinese civilization has lasted continuously for thousands of years, the underground remains are very rich. Since modern archeology was introduced to China from the West in the 20th century, China has produced many significant archaeological discoveries.
In Anyang City, Henan Province, central China, there is a ruins of the capital city covering an area of ??about 24 square kilometers. This is the world-famous Yin Ruins. According to records, in the 14th century BC, Shang King Pan Geng moved the capital here from Qufu, Shandong. For nearly three hundred years, this place has been the political, cultural and economic center of the Shang Dynasty. In 1046 BC, King Wu of Zhou defeated King Zhou, the last emperor of the Shang Dynasty. The Shang Dynasty fell and the place fell into ruins. Since the Shang Dynasty was also called the Yin Dynasty, this place was called "Yin Ruins".
The discovery and excavation of the Yin Ruins was the most significant archaeological discovery in China in the 20th century. Since the first excavation in 1928, a large number of cultural relics including oracle bone inscriptions and bronze vessels have been unearthed here. The discovery of oracle bone inscriptions is one of the major events in the history of world archaeology.
Oracle bone inscriptions are ancient characters carved on tortoise shells and animal bones. In the Shang Dynasty, kings used divination before doing anything. Oracle bones are tools used for divination.
Before use, oracle bones must be processed. First, the flesh and blood on the oracle bones must be removed, and then they must be sawed and polished. Then, use a cutter to drill indentations on the inner surface of the tortoise shell or the back of the animal bone. The arrangement of these notches is orderly. The fortune teller, or wizard, would carve his or her name, the date of the divination, and the questions to be asked on the oracle bones, and then burn the indentations on the oracle bones with a stick of fire. These dents are heated and crack, and the cracks that appear are called "mega". The wizard analyzed the direction of these cracks, obtained the results of divination, and engraved whether the divination was effective or not on the oracle bones. After the divination was fulfilled, these oracle bones with inscriptions were preserved as official records.
Currently, more than 160,000 oracle bones have been unearthed in the Yin Ruins. Some of them are complete, and some are just fragments without written records. According to statistics, the total number of various characters on all these oracle bones is more than 4,000, of which about 3,000 have been verified and studied by scholars. Among these 3,000 characters, scholars have unanimously interpreted more than 1,000 characters. The rest are either uninterpretable or scholars are deeply divided. Despite this, through these more than a thousand words, people can already roughly understand the political, economic, cultural and other aspects of the Shang Dynasty.
The earliest monograph on the study of oracle bone inscriptions is Liu E's "Tie Yun Hidden Turtle" published in 1913.
The book "Research on Oracle Bone Inscriptions" published in 1929 by the famous historian and litterateur Guo Moruo is another important monograph. At present, the authorities on Chinese oracle bone inscriptions include Professor Qiu Xigui from Peking University and Professor Li Xueqin from the Institute of Chinese History.
In addition to the Shang Dynasty oracle bones discovered in the Yin Ruins, archeology in recent years has also discovered earlier Western Zhou Dynasty oracle bones. However, there is very little literature recorded on these oracle bones, so they are not as important as the Shang Dynasty oracle bones. The significance of the excavation of Yin Ruins is not limited to the discovery of oracle bone inscriptions.
Over the past 70 years, archaeologists have discovered more than 50 ruins of palaces and temples, 12 royal tombs, thousands of tombs of nobles and civilians, 1,000 sacrificial pits, 5 handicraft workshops, and chariot and horse pits in the Yin Ruins. More than 30 statues, as well as a large number of bronzes, jades, pottery, bone vessels, etc., all of which show people a three-dimensional image of ancient Chinese society
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