Page 184 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

Bovid scapulas excavated in
1971 from Huayuanzhuang,
Anyang, Henan province;
Shang dynasty.

untouched by the hands of copyists and editors. The inscriptions reveal that divination was one
of the central institutions of the Shang state, for it demonstrated the king's contact with the
powers that ruled the Shang world. The king, known as "I, the one man," was usually the person
who interpreted the cracks, and his forecasts (the recorded outcomes carved into the bones
almost invariably proved him correct) served to legitimate his position and reassure his sup-
porters. A king such as Wu Ding (the twenty-first Shang king, who died c. 1189 BCE) divined
about most aspects of his life: harvests, rainfall, settlement building, his hunts and excursions,
the mobilization of conscripts, military campaigns and alliances, enemy invasions, the birth of
his children, his health, the meaning of his dreams, the good fortune of the coming ten-day
week and of the night to come, the harm caused by ancestors and other powers (usually in the
form of illness or crop damage), and the successful offering of reports, prayers, rituals, and

sacrifices to his ancestors. Many of the divinations end with the wish that there will be "no
disasters" or "no fault," others with the hope that the powers will provide spiritual assistance.
The oracle-bone inscriptions form the earliest body of writing yet found in eastern Asia.
The Shang engravers employed a repertoire of more than three thousand oracle-bone charac-
ters, many of which exemplify the traditional principles of logographic script and prefigure
specific Chinese characters in use to this day. Many of the Shang values and practices that the
inscriptions document — the concern with ancestor worship and with the powers of nature,
respect for senior generations and kinship ties, the keeping of bureaucratic records, the ability
to mobilize large numbers of workers in the service of the elites, and the close association be-
tween divination, spiritual insight, and worthy leadership — continued to play a strategic role
in later Chinese history. The Shang kings appear to have placed their oracle bones in storage
pits once their usefulness had been exhausted. But the divination inscriptions recorded on
them represent a remarkable legacy, providing us with an intimate sense of the Shang kings'
daily activities, their decision making, and their hopes and fears across a span of over three
thousand years. DNK

i Guo Moruo 1978 -1982.

183 SHANC ORACLE-BONE INSCRIPTIONS