Latest / Sleepy Facts About History / How Were Ancient Oracle Bones Recovered from History? - The Shang Dynasty Oracle Bones and the Origins of Chinese Writing | Sleepy Facts About History

Transcript

How Were Ancient Oracle Bones Recovered from History? - The Shang Dynasty Oracle Bones and the Origins of Chinese Writing | Sleepy Facts About History · Sleepy Facts About History

• 0:04
  Welcome to Sleepy Facts About History. Three
• 0:12
  thousand years ago, a ritual specialist pressed
• 0:16
  fire into a prepared bone, read the crack that
• 0:19
  appeared, and inscribed what would become the
• 0:22
  earliest substantial body of Chinese writing.
• 0:25
  This was not an effort to record history or compose
• 0:28
  literature, but a practical ritual driven by
• 0:31
  political power. The Shang kings needed to know
• 0:35
  if the harvest would hold. if military campaigns
• 0:38
  would succeed, and if their royal ancestors were
• 0:41
  pleased. The resulting oracle bone inscriptions
• 0:45
  provide a dense partial record of an ancient
• 0:47
  court obsessed with maintaining proper relations
• 0:50
  with the unseen world. This episode examines
• 0:54
  the structured institution of pyromanic divination
• 0:57
  at the late Shang capital of Anyang. It explores
• 1:01
  the physical process of heating turtle plastrons
• 1:04
  and cattle scapulae. the formulaic nature of
• 1:08
  the charges put to the spirits, and the specific
• 1:11
  concerns of the royal court, from the military
• 1:14
  campaigns of the consort Fu Hao to the interpretation
• 1:17
  of royal dreams. It also traces the modern decipherment
• 1:22
  of the oracle bone script, beginning with their
• 1:25
  accidental recognition in a Beijing pharmacy
• 1:28
  at the end of the 19th century. and explains
• 1:31
  how scholars use these ritual logbooks to understand
• 1:35
  Bronze Age China. I wanted to understand why
• 1:39
  this specific practice survived while so much
• 1:41
  else from the ancient world was lost. What emerges
• 1:45
  is a portrait of a writing system born not from
• 1:48
  a desire to chronicle human events, but from
• 1:51
  the immediate anxiety of political power seeking
• 1:54
  guidance from the dead. The bones were never
• 1:57
  meant for our eyes. Yet they remain our earliest
• 2:01
  substantial window into Chinese writing in the
• 2:03
  ritual life of the Shang court. Three thousand
• 2:09
  years ago, a ritual specialist pressed fire into
• 2:12
  bone, read the crack that appeared, and inscribed
• 2:16
  what would become the earliest substantial body
• 2:18
  of Chinese writing. He did not do this to tell
• 2:22
  us his story. He did it because his king needed
• 2:25
  to know if the harvest would hold, if the campaign
• 2:29
  would succeed. If the ancestors were pleased,
• 2:33
  the bones were never meant for our eyes. That
• 2:37
  they survived is accident. That we can read them
• 2:41
  at all is the patient work of modern scholarship.
• 2:45
  A diviner sits at a low table in the court at
• 2:48
  Anyang, sometime around 1200 years before the
• 2:52
  common era. Before him lies a turtle plastron,
• 2:56
  the flat underside of a shell. that has been
• 3:00
  scraped smooth and cleaned of flesh. On its back,
• 3:04
  in neat rows, small oval hollows have been carved
• 3:08
  into the bone. He takes a heated brand, presses
• 3:12
  it into one of these hollows, and listens. The
• 3:15
  bone cracks with a sharp sound. A fine line appears
• 3:20
  on the smooth inner surface, branching in a shape
• 3:23
  that will one day become the written character
• 3:25
  for divination itself. The king has asked whether
• 3:29
  the harvest will be good this year. The diviner
• 3:32
  reads the crack and pronounces his judgment.
• 3:35
  Then, with a sharp tool and perhaps red or black
• 3:39
  pigment, he begins to inscribe the exchange onto
• 3:43
  the bone. What he writes will survive for more
• 3:46
  than 3 ,000 years, preserved by accident in the
• 3:51
  rubble of a buried archive. This is how the earliest
• 3:55
  substantial body of Chinese writing began. It
• 3:59
  began not as literature, not as history, but
• 4:02
  as the record of a ritual question put to the
• 4:05
  unseen world by political power. To understand
• 4:09
  what these bones are and why they matter, we
• 4:12
  need to place them in their proper setting. The
• 4:15
  Shang Dynasty conventionally dated from around
• 4:18
  1600 to 1046 BCE. was a Bronze Age polity centered
• 4:24
  in the Yellow River Valley of northern China.
• 4:27
  Its late capital at Anyang, in what is now Henan
• 4:32
  province, was occupied during the final two centuries
• 4:35
  of Shang rule, approximately 1250 to 1046 BCE.
• 4:41
  It is from this period, and almost exclusively
• 4:43
  from this place, that our inscribed oracle bones
• 4:47
  come. The Shang king was not merely a political
• 4:51
  ruler. He was the chief ritual intermediary between
• 4:55
  the living and the dead, between his court and
• 4:58
  the forces that governed harvest, rain, war,
• 5:01
  and disease. The ancestors of the royal line,
• 5:05
  and occasionally a high deity known as Dai, were
• 5:08
  believed to influence the affairs of the living.
• 5:11
  To consult them, the king employed professional
• 5:14
  diviners. These were specialized ritual officials
• 5:18
  who prepared the bones, conducted the divination.
• 5:22
  and often recorded the results. The materials
• 5:25
  themselves were specific. Tertial plastrons were
• 5:29
  preferred for their flat, predictable surfaces
• 5:32
  and their reliable cracking behavior under heat.
• 5:36
  Cattle scapulae shoulder blades were also used,
• 5:40
  though they required more preparation to achieve
• 5:42
  a smooth, workable surface. Both materials were
• 5:47
  scraped, smoothed, and hollow. The hollows carved
• 5:51
  in rows on the back of the bone were the points
• 5:54
  where heat would be applied when a heated brand
• 5:58
  was pressed into a hollow the thermal stress
• 6:01
  produced a characteristic crack on the front
• 6:03
  surface it was a vertical line with a shorter
• 6:07
  branch angling off to one side this shape was
• 6:11
  so distinctive that it became the written character
• 6:13
  boo meaning to divine the diviner learned to
• 6:17
  read these patterns This was not random fortune
• 6:21
  -telling. It was a structured institution with
• 6:25
  fixed protocols, performed by trained specialists
• 6:28
  at the royal court. The questions were not idle
• 6:32
  curiosity. They were the concerns of power. Will
• 6:37
  the harvest succeed? Will it rain? Will the campaign
• 6:42
  against the Qiang succeed? Will the royal consort
• 6:46
  give birth safely? Does this dream carry a curse
• 6:50
  from an ancestor? Shall we sacrifice ten cattle
• 6:53
  to the spirit of King Jia? The inscriptions that
• 6:57
  record these questions follow a remarkably consistent
• 6:59
  pattern, though not every bone contains every
• 7:02
  element. Understanding this pattern is essential,
• 7:06
  because it reveals both the formulaic nature
• 7:09
  of the records and the limits of what they can
• 7:11
  tell us. A typical inscription begins with a
• 7:15
  date, expressed in the sexagenary cycle. This
• 7:19
  was the calendar by which the court organized
• 7:21
  its ritual and political life. The cycle worked
• 7:25
  by pairing 10 heavenly stems with 12 earthly
• 7:28
  branches in sequence. The first stem paired with
• 7:32
  the first branch, the second stem with the second
• 7:35
  branch, and so on, producing 60 unique combinations
• 7:39
  before the sequence repeated. A day might be
• 7:43
  named Jiazi, combining the first stem and first
• 7:47
  branch, or... Yichou, combining the second stem
• 7:51
  and second branch. After 60 days, the cycle returned
• 7:56
  to Jiazi and began again. This system allowed
• 8:00
  the court to date its consultations precisely.
• 8:03
  It also allows modern scholars to place inscriptions
• 8:07
  in relative order, to identify which diviners
• 8:10
  worked in which periods, and to trace the rhythm
• 8:13
  of ritual life across months and years. Next
• 8:17
  comes the name of the Diviner. This was a specialized
• 8:21
  official who may appear across many inscriptions
• 8:24
  and whose name helps modern scholars group related
• 8:27
  records. The Diviner Bin. The Diviner Key. These
• 8:32
  names recur across dozens or hundreds of bones,
• 8:36
  creating clusters that scholars can associate
• 8:38
  with particular reigns in particular concerns.
• 8:42
  Then comes the charge itself. The question or
• 8:45
  statement put to the Oracle. The charge was often
• 8:48
  framed in paired positive and negative forms.
• 8:52
  It will rain, and it will not rain. The harvest
• 8:56
  will be good, and the harvest will not be good.
• 8:59
  This pairing was not a mechanical device, but
• 9:03
  a ritual convention, a way of presenting the
• 9:06
  full range of possibilities to the powers being
• 9:08
  consulted. After the charge, the inscription
• 9:11
  might record the prognostication. This was the
• 9:15
  diviner's reading of the crack. sometimes simply
• 9:18
  auspicious or inauspicious, sometimes more elaborate.
• 9:22
  And on a small minority of bones, a later note
• 9:25
  records whether the prediction came true. This
• 9:29
  is the verification. This five -part structure,
• 9:32
  date, diviner, charge, prognostication, verification,
• 9:37
  represents the complete ideal. But the archive
• 9:41
  is full of partial records, of bones with only
• 9:45
  the charge. were only the date in charge, or
• 9:48
  with no inscription at all. Uninscribed divination
• 9:52
  also occurred. The bones we have are not the
• 9:55
  totality of Shang divination practice, but a
• 9:58
  fraction of it, preserved through the accidents
• 10:00
  of archiving and burial. What emerges from this
• 10:04
  archive, when we read it carefully, is a portrait
• 10:07
  of the late Shang court at Anyang. It is not
• 10:11
  a complete portrait, not a transparent window,
• 10:15
  but a dense and partial record of elite concerns.
• 10:18
  The archive has internal structure and chronology.
• 10:22
  Scholars divide the Anyang oracle bones into
• 10:26
  periods associated with different kings. The
• 10:29
  earliest and most abundant of these is the period
• 10:32
  associated with Wu Ding, a king who reigned in
• 10:36
  the late 13th century BCE. The Wu -Ding period
• 10:40
  produced thousands of inscribed bones with a
• 10:44
  recognizable group of diviners, a distinctive
• 10:46
  calligraphic style and a particular range of
• 10:49
  concerns. Later periods show different diviner
• 10:53
  names, different formulas, different preoccupations.
• 10:57
  The bones are not a uniform mass labeled Shang.
• 11:01
  They are a sequence of phases, each with its
• 11:05
  own texture. The kings appear by name and their
• 11:09
  activities dominate the record. Royal women appear
• 11:13
  too, most notably Fu Hao, a consort and military
• 11:16
  leader, whose name recurs across inscriptions
• 11:19
  concerning childbirth, illness and campaigns.
• 11:22
  The bones ask whether Fu Hao will give birth
• 11:26
  safely, whether her illness will improve, whether
• 11:30
  she will succeed in campaign. Her tomb, discovered
• 11:34
  undisturbed in 1976 near the Anyang site, provides
• 11:38
  a rare material anchor for these textual references.
• 11:42
  Most Shang royal tombs were looted long ago,
• 11:45
  their contents scattered. Fu Hao's tomb, small
• 11:49
  by royal standards but intact, contained more
• 11:51
  than 400 bronze vessels, hundreds of jade objects,
• 11:55
  weapons, tools, and the remains of 16 human sacrifices.
• 12:00
  The bronze weapons and the sheer quantity of
• 12:03
  ritual equipment confirm the status that the
• 12:05
  oracle bones had already suggested. Fu Hao was
• 12:09
  a woman who led troops, performed sacrifices,
• 12:13
  and occupied a central place in the court's military
• 12:16
  and ritual life. The tomb does not prove every
• 12:20
  detail of the inscriptions, but it gives us something
• 12:24
  almost as valuable. It gives us the physical
• 12:28
  space to associate with the name. a material
• 12:31
  context for interpreting the diviner's questions
• 12:34
  about her health and her wars. Enemies and allies
• 12:39
  appear as named polities. The Qiang to the west,
• 12:43
  the Gongfang, the Tufang. These were groups against
• 12:47
  whom the Shang king contemplated or conducted
• 12:50
  military action. Settlements, ritual schedules,
• 12:54
  sacrifices, hunting expeditions, agricultural
• 12:58
  concerns, weather. Illness dreams. All of these
• 13:03
  pass through the diviner's workshop and onto
• 13:06
  the bone. Consider a typical harvest divination.
• 13:10
  On Dejieza, diviner Bin asked whether this year
• 13:14
  the harvest will receive blessings. The second
• 13:18
  charge asked whether this year the harvest will
• 13:20
  not receive blessings. Or a military charge.
• 13:24
  The king will campaign against the Gongfang,
• 13:27
  and Di will confer assistance. Or a childbirth
• 13:31
  charge concerning Fu Hao. Fu Hao will give birth,
• 13:35
  and it will be good. Paired with Fu Hao will
• 13:39
  give birth, and it will not be good. Or a dream
• 13:43
  charge. The king dreamed of Ancestor Ding. Is
• 13:48
  there a curse? Each of these, multiplied across
• 13:52
  thousands of bones, builds a cumulative picture
• 13:55
  of what mattered to the ruling house. The ancestral
• 13:59
  cult was the framework within which all of this
• 14:02
  operated. Deceased kings and royal ancestors
• 14:06
  were believed to influence the living world,
• 14:08
  to send blessings or curses to require offerings
• 14:11
  and consultation. The high deity Dai appears
• 14:15
  less frequently than the ancestors. The exact
• 14:18
  nature of Dai, whether a supreme god above the
• 14:21
  ancestors or something more diffuse, remains
• 14:24
  debated among scholars. What is clear is that
• 14:28
  the divination system was fundamentally about
• 14:30
  maintaining proper relations with the dead. It
• 14:33
  was about ensuring that the king's actions aligned
• 14:36
  with the will of powers he could not see, but
• 14:39
  could, through ritual, consult. The bones record
• 14:43
  this consultation at the moment it occurred,
• 14:46
  preserving not the future, but the present anxiety
• 14:49
  of power. This is the central revelation of the
• 14:53
  archive. and it is also its central limitation.
• 14:57
  The oracle bones reveal the concerns of the late
• 15:01
  Shang court because they were produced by and
• 15:03
  for that court. They do not reveal the lives
• 15:07
  of farmers, craftsmen, or slaves. They do not
• 15:11
  reveal the religious practices of regions far
• 15:14
  from Anyang. They do not even reveal all aspects
• 15:18
  of court life, only those that pass through the
• 15:22
  divination institution. A king might make a decision
• 15:26
  without consulting the bones. We would not know.
• 15:30
  A concern might be too minor or too secret for
• 15:33
  ritual record. We would not know. The archive
• 15:38
  is elite, court -centered, geographically concentrated,
• 15:41
  and ritually selective. It is the closest thing
• 15:45
  we have to a contemporary written record from
• 15:47
  this period. But it's not a complete record,
• 15:50
  and it's not a neutral one. The formulaic nature
• 15:54
  of the inscriptions both enables and constrains
• 15:58
  interpretation. The repeated patterns of date,
• 16:01
  diviner, and charge tell us that this was a standardized
• 16:04
  institution, but they also mean that individual
• 16:08
  inscriptions rarely contain narrative detail
• 16:11
  or personal voice. The diviner Kui appears across
• 16:15
  many bones, but we do not know his thoughts,
• 16:19
  his doubts, his training. The king asks about
• 16:22
  the harvest, but we do not know what he did with
• 16:25
  the answer, or whether he believed it, or how
• 16:29
  often he ignored it. The bones preserve the question,
• 16:33
  not the response of the world. They preserve
• 16:36
  the moment of consultation, not the aftermath.
• 16:39
  The question of what the bones reveal connects
• 16:43
  directly to the question of what they are as
• 16:45
  writing. The script used on oracle bones is the
• 16:49
  earliest known substantial corpus of Chinese
• 16:51
  writing. But it is not modern Chinese, and it
• 16:55
  is not directly readable without specialized
• 16:57
  training. Many characters do have later descendants.
• 17:02
  The character for rain, for instance, appears
• 17:05
  on the bones as a pictograph of falling drops,
• 17:08
  and something like it survives in much altered
• 17:11
  form into the present. The character for cattle
• 17:14
  shows horns and a head. These visual continuities
• 17:18
  helped early 20th century scholars recognize
• 17:21
  the nature of what they were looking at. But
• 17:24
  forms changed, meanings shifted, vocabulary and
• 17:28
  grammar evolved. The decipherment of oracle bone
• 17:32
  script was a scholarly achievement, not a natural
• 17:35
  inheritance. The story of that decipherment illustrates
• 17:40
  how knowledge of the past is constructed. The
• 17:43
  bones came to scholarly attention in 1899. When
• 17:47
  a collector named Wang Yirong recognized that
• 17:50
  the strange markings on dragon bones sold in
• 17:53
  Beijing pharmacies were an ancient form of writing,
• 17:56
  before this moment, the bones had been ground
• 17:59
  into medicine for decades. Their inscriptions
• 18:03
  were destroyed by consumers seeking relief from
• 18:05
  fever and malaria. Wang Yirong's recognition
• 18:09
  was the first step. Then Liu Yi, another early
• 18:13
  collector, began to publish the inscriptions.
• 18:16
  and argue for their antiquity. The real breakthrough
• 18:20
  in method came with later scholars. They realized
• 18:24
  that the unknown characters on the bones could
• 18:27
  be compared with known characters on bronze vessels
• 18:29
  from slightly later periods. A scholar would
• 18:33
  take a character from a Zhou Dynasty bronze inscription,
• 18:36
  whose meaning was established, compare its form
• 18:39
  with a similar looking character on a Shang bone,
• 18:42
  and argue for a reading. This comparative method,
• 18:47
  using later bronze inscriptions and transmitted
• 18:50
  texts as anchors, became the foundation of oracle
• 18:54
  bone paleography. Luo Zhenyu contributed by identifying
• 18:58
  the geographical origin of the bones and connecting
• 19:01
  them with the Anyang site. Wang Guai used the
• 19:05
  inscriptions to reconstruct elements of Shang
• 19:08
  royal genealogy, demonstrating that the bones
• 19:11
  contained genuine historical information. rather
• 19:14
  than random markings. Systematic excavation at
• 19:19
  Anyang by the Academia Sinica, beginning in 1928,
• 19:23
  provided archaeological context and vastly expanded
• 19:26
  the corpus. Today, more than 150 inscribed fragments
• 19:32
  are known, compiled in standard collections like
• 19:35
  the 13 -volume Jaguanheji, published between
• 19:38
  1978 and 1982. Yet decipherment remains incomplete.
• 19:45
  Rare signs, proper names, and technical terms
• 19:48
  continue to resist confident reading. The script
• 19:52
  is ancestral to later Chinese writing, but the
• 19:55
  relationship is one of family resemblance, not
• 19:58
  identity. This matters because it shapes how
• 20:01
  we can use the bones as historical evidence.
• 20:04
  We cannot simply read them as transparent documents.
• 20:08
  We must work through the accumulated scholarship.
• 20:12
  recognizing where consensus exists and where
• 20:15
  it does not. We must recognize that the formulaic
• 20:19
  nature of the inscriptions, the repeated patterns
• 20:21
  of date, diviner, charge, both enables and constrains
• 20:26
  interpretation. The formula tells us that this
• 20:30
  was a standardized institution, but it also means
• 20:33
  that individual inscriptions rarely contain narrative
• 20:36
  detail or personal voice. The diviner Kui appears
• 20:41
  across many bones, but we do not know his thoughts,
• 20:45
  his doubts, his training. The king asks about
• 20:49
  the harvest, but we do not know what he did with
• 20:52
  the answer, or whether he believed it, or how
• 20:55
  often he ignored it. The bones preserve the question,
• 20:59
  not the response of the world. The physicality
• 21:03
  of the process is worth holding on to. The diviner
• 21:06
  prepared the bone with his hands. carved the
• 21:09
  hollows, applied the heat, heard the crack, read
• 21:14
  the pattern, and then inscribed the record. The
• 21:18
  crack itself, that vertical line with its shorter
• 21:22
  branch, became the basis for the written character
• 21:25
  Ba, meaning to the vine. The material and the
• 21:29
  meaning were inseparable. The bones were then
• 21:33
  collected and stored in pits, sometimes in organized
• 21:36
  groups, sometimes in large deposits. Archaeologists
• 21:41
  excavating at Anyang found these pits filled
• 21:44
  with hundreds or thousands of fragments. Some
• 21:47
  carefully stacked, others jumbled together. This
• 21:52
  institutional practice of retention, not intentional
• 21:55
  preservation for posterity, is what allowed the
• 21:58
  bones to survive. The Shang court archived its
• 22:02
  ritual documents because the ritual system required
• 22:05
  it, or because the court needed a record. or
• 22:09
  because both purposes intertwined in ways we
• 22:12
  cannot fully recover. The purpose of recording
• 22:15
  remains an open question. Scholars debate whether
• 22:19
  the records served primarily ritual, administrative,
• 22:22
  or political functions, and whether these purposes
• 22:25
  were separable in practice. The bones were not
• 22:29
  intended as a historical record for posterity.
• 22:32
  They were ritual documents produced for immediate
• 22:35
  use within the cultic life of the court. preserved
• 22:39
  by the durability of bone and the institutional
• 22:42
  practice of archiving, and recovered only by
• 22:45
  modern archaeology. This accidental preservation
• 22:48
  is what makes the oracle bones precious. They
• 22:51
  were not written to teach us about the Shang.
• 22:54
  They were written to record a moment of consultation
• 22:57
  between the living king and the dead ancestors,
• 23:01
  a moment when political power sought guidance
• 23:04
  from the unseen world. The cracks, the words,
• 23:09
  the royal anxiety all of this was captured in
• 23:12
  a form that would outlast the dynasty itself
• 23:15
  it is worth pausing to consider how different
• 23:18
  this archive is from other ancient collections
• 23:21
  of writing cuneiform tablets from mesopotamia
• 23:25
  for instance were often administrative records
• 23:28
  receipts contracts letters they were produced
• 23:33
  by bureaucracies and preserved in palace or temple
• 23:36
  archives they were written to be kept to be referenced
• 23:40
  to serve ongoing institutional memory. The oracle
• 23:45
  bones, by contrast, were produced for ritual
• 23:48
  consultation. Their purpose was not to document
• 23:51
  a transaction, but to record a question put to
• 23:54
  the spirits. They were archived not because they
• 23:58
  needed to be consulted again, but because the
• 24:00
  ritual system generated them and the court retained
• 24:03
  them. This difference in origin matters for how
• 24:07
  we read them. We cannot treat the bones as a
• 24:10
  Shang bureaucracy's file cabinet, nor can we
• 24:13
  treat them as a personal diary. They are something
• 24:16
  more specific. They are a ritual logbook, a record
• 24:21
  of consultations performed and judgments rendered,
• 24:24
  produced within a worldview that modern observers
• 24:27
  must work to understand rather than judge. The
• 24:31
  Shang fell around 1046 BCE to the Zhou. The Inyang
• 24:37
  site was buried. The practice of oracle bone
• 24:40
  divination itself declined and transformed, but
• 24:44
  the bones remained, waiting in the earth, until
• 24:47
  scholars learned to read them again. What we
• 24:51
  find when we read them is not a complete civilization,
• 24:54
  but a specific institution, densely documented.
• 24:58
  We find a court obsessed with the proper performance
• 25:02
  of ritual, with the favor of ancestors, with
• 25:05
  the success of harvest and war. with the health
• 25:08
  of royal women and the interpretation of royal
• 25:11
  dreams we find a writing system in its earliest
• 25:15
  substantial form already capable of recording
• 25:18
  complex questions and institutional procedures
• 25:21
  but still distant from the literary and philosophical
• 25:24
  texts that would come later we find evidence
• 25:28
  of human anxiety and political calculation preserved
• 25:32
  in the moment before the future unfolded The
• 25:35
  limits of this evidence must be kept in view.
• 25:39
  The archive comes almost entirely from Anyang,
• 25:42
  from a limited period, from royal and elite contexts.
• 25:47
  Uninscribed divination occurred. Many bones were
• 25:51
  not preserved. The record is not complete. The
• 25:56
  script has descendants in later Chinese writing,
• 25:59
  but forms and meanings changed. Decipherment
• 26:02
  remains incomplete. The divination system was
• 26:06
  structured and institutional, not random or superstitious
• 26:10
  in the dismissive sense. But it was also deeply
• 26:13
  embedded in a worldview that modern observers
• 26:15
  must work to understand rather than judge. The
• 26:20
  Shang king consulted his ancestors because he
• 26:22
  believed they could influence the living world.
• 26:25
  He recorded these consultations because the ritual
• 26:28
  required it. or because the court needed a record,
• 26:31
  or because both purposes intertwined in ways
• 26:34
  we cannot fully recover. What remains certain
• 26:37
  is that this practice, repeated thousands of
• 26:40
  times across more than two centuries at Anyang,
• 26:43
  produced the earliest substantial body of Chinese
• 26:45
  writing. The bones are not mystical objects.
• 26:49
  They are material remains of a specific institution,
• 26:53
  produced by specific people for specific purposes,
• 26:57
  preserved by accident. and recovered by patient
• 27:00
  scholarship. They allow us to hear, across more
• 27:04
  than three millennia, the questions that political
• 27:07
  power asked of the unseen world. Will the harvest
• 27:11
  succeed? Will the child be born safely? Will
• 27:16
  the campaign prosper? Does the ancestor favor
• 27:20
  this sacrifice? These are not universal human
• 27:23
  questions in the abstract. They are the particular
• 27:27
  concerns of a particular court. recorded in a
• 27:30
  particular ritual language, at the moment when
• 27:33
  the bone cracked and the diviner pronounced his
• 27:36
  reading. The oracle bones do not give us the
• 27:39
  origin of Chinese writing in a simple sense.
• 27:42
  They do not prove that writing was invented for
• 27:45
  divination, or that all later Chinese writing
• 27:49
  descends directly from this practice. What they
• 27:52
  give us is something more specific and more valuable.
• 27:55
  They give us a substantial, dateable, readable
• 27:59
  corpus from the earliest period of chinese writing
• 28:02
  preserved through the intersection of ritual
• 28:05
  practice and material durability they allow us
• 28:08
  to see how a court organized its concerns how
• 28:12
  it consulted the dead how it recorded and archived
• 28:15
  its rituals they allow us to trace with appropriate
• 28:19
  caution the development of characters and script
• 28:22
  forms across three thousand years and they remind
• 28:25
  us that writing in its earliest forms He's often
• 28:29
  not literature or history in the modern sense.
• 28:32
  It is a practical tool embedded in specific institutions,
• 28:37
  serving specific purposes, and preserved or lost
• 28:40
  through the accidents of time. The diviner at
• 28:44
  Anyang, pressing his heated brand into the prepared
• 28:47
  bone, could not have known that his record would
• 28:50
  survive. He was performing a ritual, serving
• 28:54
  his king, maintaining the proper relations between
• 28:57
  the living and the dead. The crack appeared,
• 29:00
  he read it, he inscribed the charge, and the
• 29:03
  bone was archived. Thousands of such moments,
• 29:07
  accumulated across generations, became an archive.
• 29:11
  That archive, recovered and deciphered across
• 29:13
  the 20th century, became our earliest substantial
• 29:17
  window into Chinese writing and Shang court life.
• 29:21
  It is a partial window, an elite window, a ritual
• 29:25
  window. But it is a window that remains open.
• 29:29
  still yielding new readings new questions and
• 29:32
  new understandings of how political power once
• 29:35
  sought answers from the unseen world and how
• 29:38
  those answers were preserved in bone and ink
• 29:41
  for us to examine