Mystical systems
Oracle Bones
Direct answer
Oracle Bones: Oracle bones are pieces of ox shoulder blade and turtle shell that diviners of the Chinese Shang court heated until they cracked, reading the cracks as answers.
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At a glance
- Also called
- oracle bone divination, oracle bone script
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- I Ching, Pyromancy, Divination, Omen
Oracle bones are pieces of ox shoulder blade and turtle shell that diviners of the Chinese Shang court heated until they cracked, reading the cracks as answers.
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What are oracle bones?
The oracle bones come from the last capital of the Shang dynasty, near modern Anyang, and date from about 1250 to 1050 BCE. A diviner prepared a cattle shoulder blade or the flat under-shell of a turtle by boring rows of hollows in the back. A question was put, a hot point was pressed into a hollow, and the bone split with a crack on its face. The king or his diviner judged the crack favourable or not.
Afterwards the question, and sometimes what in fact happened, was cut into the bone. The topics are those of a ruling house: harvests, rain, hunts, campaigns, sacrifices, a royal birth, a toothache. These inscriptions are the oldest substantial body of Chinese writing known, and the characters are direct ancestors of the modern script.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Tarot, runes, I Ching.
What sets Oracle Bones apart
The oracle bones are a divination that kept its own minutes. A full inscription can have four parts: the date and the diviner's name, the question, the king's reading of the cracks, and a later note on what happened. Questions were often put as a matched pair, one worded positively and one negatively, on the left and right halves of a shell. Because of this habit, historians can read not only what the Shang believed but how often the recorded outcome was allowed to stand against the king.
- Period: late Shang dynasty, about 1250 to 1050 BCE
- Place: Yinxu, the Shang capital near Anyang in Henan
- Materials: ox shoulder blades and the lower shells of turtles
- Method: heat applied to bored hollows until the surface cracked
- Recognised as writing: 1899, credited to the scholar Wang Yirong
- Excavated: systematically from 1928
Often mistaken for something else: The I Ching is consulted by counting stalks or coins and reading a set text; oracle bone divination read the shape of a fresh crack and had no book of answers.
The story behind Oracle Bones
For centuries farmers at Anyang dug up the bones and sold them as dragon bones to be ground for medicine. In 1899 the scholar Wang Yirong is credited with recognising that the scratches on them were ancient writing. Scientific excavation at Anyang began in 1928, and well over a hundred thousand inscribed pieces are now known. Many come from the reign of King Wu Ding, and the records confirmed a list of Shang kings that some historians had taken for legend.
Why Oracle Bones matters
They are both the earliest Chinese divination that can be read in its own words and the earliest Chinese history written by those who lived it.
How to read Oracle Bones
Historians read them as a court archive, and writers on divination point to them as the background from which the I Ching later grew.
Oracle Bones in practice: an example
One pair of inscriptions asks whether the coming ten days hold misfortune, put once in the positive and once in the negative on the two sides of the same shell.
Where readings of Oracle Bones go wrong
The bones show what the Shang court asked and believed. They are evidence of a practice, not of its accuracy.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- oracle bone divination, oracle bone script, shang dynasty oracle bones, what are oracle bones, chinese oracle bones
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What are oracle bones?
They are animal bones and turtle shells used for divination by the kings of the late Shang dynasty in China. Heat was applied to make them crack, and the questions asked were carved on them.
What kind of questions were put to the oracle bones?
Practical ones from the royal household: whether it would rain, whether a hunt or a campaign would go well, which ancestor was causing an illness, and whether the next ten days would pass without trouble.
How were the oracle bones discovered?
They had long been dug up at Anyang and sold as medicine. Their writing was recognised in 1899, and excavations from 1928 onward recovered them in great numbers from the Shang capital.
