Oracle bone inscription
| Oracle bone script |
|
|---|---|
 |
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| Type | |
| Languages | Old Chinese |
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Time period
|
Bronze Age China |
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Child systems
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Chinese characters |
| Oracle bone script | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chinese | 甲骨文 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Literal meaning | "Shell-and-bone script" | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Jiǎgǔ wén |
| Wade–Giles | Chia3-ku3 wen2 |
| IPA | [tɕjàkù wə̌n] |
| Wu | |
| Romanization | Chiaʔ-kueʔ ven |
| Hakka | |
| Romanization | Gap5-gut5 vun2 |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | Gaap-gwāt mùhn |
| Jyutping | Gaap3-gwat1 mun4 |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | Kah-kut bûn |
Oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文) was the form of Chinese characters used on oracle bones—animal bones or turtle plastrons used in pyromantic divination—in the late 2nd millennium BCE, and is the earliest known form of Chinese writing and the earliest writing in East Asia. The vast majority were found at the Yinxu site (in modern Anyang, Henan Province). They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BCE or 1200 BCE. After the Shang were overthrown by the Zhou dynasty in c. 1046 BCE, divining with milfoil became more common, and very few oracle bone writings date from the early Zhou.
The late Shang 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 Shang writing is directly ancestral to the modern Chinese script. It is also the oldest known member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts, preceding the bronzeware script.
The term "oracle bone" was first coined by the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant (1862–1914) in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing, and was borrowed into Chinese as "jiǎgǔ 甲骨" in the 1930s. 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 Shang dynasty, oracle bone script essentially refers to a Shang script.
It is certain that Shang-lineage writing underwent a period of development before the Anyang oracle bone script, because of its mature nature. 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.
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Wikipedia