Oracle bone

Oracle Bones were bones that the Chinese would carve or scratch their questions on. Then the priests would burn the oracle bone until it would crack. Then the priest read these cracks to the Chinese people for their answer. The Chinese people believed their answer to be from the gods. This was also known as the first stages of Chinese writing. These were very important to the Chinese. The oracle bones bear the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing, using an early form of Chinese characters.

Oracle Bone Media

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  Wang Yirong, Chinese politician and scholar, was the first to recognize the oracle bones as ancient writing.

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  Reconstruction of oracle bone pit YH127 at Yinxu

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  Ox scapula recording divinations by Template:Zhi Template:Zhi during the reign of king Wu Ding

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  Tortoise plastron with divination inscription

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  Holes drilled into an oracle bone

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  In this Shang-era oracle bone (which is incomplete), a diviner asks the Shang king if there would be misfortune over the next ten days; the king replied that he had consulted the ancestor Xiao Jia in a worship ceremony.