Oracle bone script

Oracle bone script refers to incised ancient Chinese characters found on oracle bones, which are animal bones or turtle shells used in divination in Bronze Age China. The vast majority record the divinations of the royal house of the late at the capital of Yīn ; dating of the Ānyáng examples of oracle bone script varies from ca. 14th -11th centuries BCE to ca. 1200 to ca. 1050 BCE. Very few oracle bone writings date to the beginning of the subsequent Zhou Dynasty, because pyromancy fell from favor and divining with milfoil became more common. The late Shāng oracle bone writings, along with a few contemporary characters in a different style cast in bronzes, constitute the earliest significant corpus of Chinese writing, which is essential for the study of Chinese etymology, as Shāng writing is directly ancestral to the modern Chinese script. It is also the oldest member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts.

Name

Because turtle shells as well as bones were used, the oracle bone script is also sometimes called ''shell and bone script''. As the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date to the late Shāng dynasty, ''oracle bone script'' essentially refers to a Shāng script.

Precursors

It is certain that Shāng-lineage writing underwent a period of development before the oracle bone script, because of its mature nature ; however, no significant quantity of clearly identifiable writing from before or during the early to middle Shāng cultural period has been discovered. The few which have been 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 Shāng oracle bone script.

Style

The oracle bone script of the late Shāng appears archaic and pictographic in flavor, as does its contemporary, the Shāng . The earliest oracle bone script appears even more so than examples from late in the period . Comparing oracle bone script to both Shāng and early period writing on bronzes, 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 from which the bronzes were cast. The more detailed and more pictorial style of the bronze graphs is thus thought to be more representative of typical Shāng writing than the oracle bone script forms, and it is this typical style which continued to evolve into the and then into the seal script of the in the late Zhōu period.

It is known that the Shāng 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, and there is evidence that they also wrote on bamboo books just like those which have been found from the late Zhōu to periods, because the graphs for a writing brush (聿 yù and bamboo book are present in the oracle bone script. Since the ease of writing with a brush is even greater than that of writing with a stylus in wet clay, it is assumed that the style and structure of Shāng 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. 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 Shāng 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

Despite the archaic and relatively pictorial appearance of the oracle bone script, it is in fact a fully functional and fairly mature writing system, i.e., able to record language 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 Shāng 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 graphs labelled graph A and graph B to the left and right. 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 notes, most of the oracle bone graphs are not depicted realistically enough for those who do not already know the script to recognized what they stand for; although pictographic ''in origin'' they are no longer pictographs ''in function''. Boltz instead calls them ''zodiographs'' , 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 Shāng oracle bone script, the graphs had already evolved into a variety of mostly non-pictographic functions, including all the 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..

Despite its status as a fully functional and fairly mature writing system, the oracle bone script is not actually 100% mature -- the form of a very few graphs changes depending on context, and on occasion the order of the graphs does not quite match that of the language. By the early Western Zhou 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. Not until the standardization carried out in the seal script did these irregularities end.

Oracle bone script characters may have components which differ in later characters, for instance the character for Autumn 秋 now appears with 禾 as one component and fire 火 as another component. From the oracle bone script, one sees that an ant-like creature is carved instead .

Of the thousands of characters found from all the bone fragments, the majority remain undeciphered. One good example is shown in the fragment shown below, labeled "oracle bone script for Spring". The top left character in this image has no known modern Chinese counterpart. One of the better known characters however is shown directly beneath it looking like an upright isosceles triangle with a line cutting through the upper portion. This is the oracle bone script character for 王 ''wáng'' .

Scholarship

Among the major Chinese scholars making significant contributions to the study of the oracle bone writings, especially early on, were: Wáng Yìróng , who in 1899 recognized the characters as being ancient Chinese writing; Liú È , who collected five thousand oracle bone fragments, published the first volume of examples and rubbings in 1903, and correctly identified thirty-four characters; Sūn Yíràng , the first serious researcher of oracle bones; Luó Zhènyù , who 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; Wáng Gúowéi , who demonstrated that the chronology of the Shang kings matched that in Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian; Dǒng Zuòbīn , who identified the diviners and established a chronology for the oracle bones as well as numerous other dating criteria; and Gūo Mòruò .

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. Zhou related inscriptions have been unearthed since the 1950's, 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.

The following is an example of a Zhou inscription.

Descendant writing systems

See Chinese family of scripts

Many scripts in East asia were descendants of the Oracle Bone script, such as Seal script, Clerical script, Standard Script, Semi-cursive script, Grass script, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Zhuyin, Kanji, the different Kana, Hanja, Hán t&, Ch&, Khitan script, Jurchen script, and Tangut script. Many of them are obsolete for writing their own languages like Hanja, Hán t&, Ch&, Khitan script, Jurchen script, and Tangut script, which are Korean, Vietnamese, Khitan, Juchen, and Tangut. Others still in use are Kanji, Kana, Zhuyin, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. Most of them are logographic, though Kana is syllabic, and Zhuyin a semi-syllabary.

Samples

Further reading

*Boltz, William G. . The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System. American Oriental Series, vol. 78. American Oriental Society, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. ISBN 0-940490-18-8
*Chén Zhāoróng 秦系文字研究 ﹕从漢字史的角度考察 Research on the Qín Lineage of Writing: An Examination from the Perspective of the History of Chinese Writing. 中央研究院歷史語言研究所專刊 Academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. ISBN 957-671-995-X.
*Gao Ming 中国古文字学通论 . 北京大学出版社 Beijing University Press. ISBN 7-301-02285-9
*Keightley, David N. . ''Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China''. University of California Press, Berkeley. Large format hardcover, ISBN 0520029690 ; A 1985 ppbk 2nd edition also printed, ISBN 0-520-05455-5.
*Keightley, David N. . ''The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China ''. China Research Monograph 53, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California – Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-070-9, ppbk.
*Liu Xiang et al. 商周古文字读本 Reader of Shang-Zhou Ancient Characters. 语文出版社 Yuwen Publishers. ISBN 7-80006-238-4
*Qiu Xigui ''Chinese Writing'' . Translation of 文字學概要 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. ISBN 1-55729-071-7.
*Thorp, Robert L. "The Date of Tomb 5 at Yinxu, Anyang: A Review Article," Artibus Asiae : 239–246.
*Woon, Wee Lee . ''Chinese Writing: Its Origin and Evolution'' , originally published by the University of East Asia, Macau .
*Zhào Chéng 甲骨文簡明詞典 – 卜辭分類讀本 jiǎgǔwén jiǎnmíng cídiǎn – bǔcí fēnlèi dúbĕn. 中華書局 Zhōnghúa Shūjú, ISBN 7-101-00254-4/H•22