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ancestral sacrifices, so that they offered sacrifices to Inscribed turtle plastron
Ancestress Yi on a yi day, to Ancestor Gui on a gui
3
5
Height 19.5 (7 / 8), width 12 (4 A)
day, and so on.
Shang Dynasty, twelfth century BCE
The purpose of divinations such as these was to
From Huayuanzhuang, Anyang, Henan Province
ensure that the various rituals and offerings would
be acceptable to the ancestral spirits. The inscrip- The Institute of Archaeology, CASS, Beijing
tions on this scapula are unusual in several respects:
the engravers have not recorded the day-date of the In October 1991 the Anyang Work Team of the Insti-
divinations or the name of the diviner, nor have tute of Archaeology excavated 1,583 oracle-bone
they numbered the cracks; the ancestors themselves fragments, found in layers, from a well-made stor-
do not appear to be the usual kings and consorts age pit in the eastern section of Huayuanzhuang,
who regularly received ancestral sacrifices. These located some three hundred meters south of the
features suggest that the divinations were per- village of Xiaotun. Of the fragments that bore writ-
formed by diviners other than those who normally ing, 574 were turtle plastrons (557 fragments) and
divined the king's affairs. The archaeological con- carapaces (17 fragments); 5 were bovid scapula frag-
text and the affinities with other diviner groups of ments. The onerous task of reconstituting some of
inscription style and content suggest that these the original bones — the turtle shells, in particular,
diviners were probably active during the reign of were badly fragmented — was completed in June
Wu Ding (d. c. 1189 BCE) or slightly later. DNK 1992. The main topics divined on the bones found
in this pit involved sacrifices, hunts, weather, and
1 Excavated in 1971; reported: Guo Moruo 1972, 2-11 (no. 12); sickness.
Guo Moruo 1978-1982, no. 31993; Zhongguo 19833, Fu
[supplement] 3. Eight divination charges are recorded on this
1
2 Zhongguo 19833,1161. plastron. The first (top right, to be read from the
3 In both charges translated, the final character for "pig" is, center out, then down) may be translated as follows:
unusually, repeated; perhaps two pigs were to be offered.
4 See Zhongguo 19833,1161. "Crack-making onyiyou [day 22 in the 6oday cycle]:
'Prince You [?] goes to the foothills of Xinnan [?]; if
he nets pigs, he will catch some.'" This charge,
expressed in the positive future tense, was paired
with a negative abbreviated charge inscribed on the
left side of the shell (reading from the center out,
then down): "Crack-making onyiyou: '[Prince You]
may not catch some.'" This balancing of positive
and negative charges, with the undesired charge
expressed more weakly than the desired charge, was
a common feature of divinations performed on
plastrons during the reign of Wu Ding; it presum-
ably reflected some early sense of yin-yang balance
that the Shang perceived in the workings of the
world. The symmetry of the turtle plastrons, which
permitted opposing divination charges to be carved
on either side of the central spine, encouraged
such balanced formulations. 2 In the present case,
the engravers numbered five cracks on the right
side of the plastron and five cracks on the left side,

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