Oracle Bone Script

Oracle Bone Script

This article relates to An Oral History of Atlantis

One of the short stories in Ed Park's collection An Oral History of Atlantis involves a research group made entirely of Tinas trying to unravel the meaning of an ancient script found on a mysterious island. While much of the story is fantastical, the writing they are trying to interpret is quite real. Oracle bone script, in use from the fourteenth to eleventh centuries BCE, is China's oldest known system of writing, and the precursor to modern Chinese scripts.

The modern discovery of oracle bone script happened by chance in 1899. Ground bone is a component of some traditional Chinese medicines; Wang Yirong, a scholar, calligrapher, and director of the Chinese Imperial Academy, had obtained bone from a pharmacy for this purpose and noticed carved characters which he believed to be an archaic version of Chinese writing. He collected other examples of the script on animal bones and tortoiseshells, but his work was cut short by his suicide in 1900. His colleague, Liu E, continued the research Wang Yirong had started and published their findings in 1903.

The name of the script comes from one of its uses—the bones and shells on which it was written were used in divination during the Shang dynasty. The front of the bone or shell was polished, and then the hollows on the underside were carved out. The bone was then heated, and the uneven hollows would cause it to crack. The diviner interpreted these cracks to determine the answer to their questions. The script was then carved into the bones to record the results. The script was also used for other types of recordkeeping, providing researchers with invaluable glimpses into life in Bronze Age China.

Initially, these discoveries were controversial. Scholars were divided on whether the Shang dynasty ever even existed, despite stories of the era having been documented in traditional histories. This skepticism, combined with the fact that at this point the origins of many of the bones were uncertain, led many to dismiss them as forgeries. However, subsequent excavations and research proved this mistaken.

Four thousand six hundred distinct characters have been identified, but only around 1,000 have been deciphered. Many of the translated characters appear to be precursors to modern Chinese characters. It's most likely that the level of complexity developed gradually over time, suggesting that simpler forms of the script may have existed even earlier. Unfortunately, evidence of this earlier development either did not survive, or has yet to be found.

In 2024, researchers announced the creation of the HUST-OBC dataset, composed of more than 140,000 images of oracle bone characters both with and without translations. This dataset was developed in the hopes that advances in AI technology would help with future translation attempts and ultimately enhance understanding of the script.

Oracle bone script from divination that reads, "Today, will it rain?" Photo taken at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California courtesy of Kowloonese and Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This article relates to An Oral History of Atlantis. It first ran in the August 13, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.