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Replica of an oracle turtle shell

Replica of an oracle bone

Oracle bones were first fully excavated from the Anyang site in Henan Province China in 1899.

They are mostly ox scapulae (shoulder blades) and turtle shells or plastrons, used for scapulomancy: after being heated (such as having a heated rod inserted through the bone), they would crack, and the priest in charge of the ceremony would read the cracks to learn the answer to a question written on the bone. He looked both for the presence of a crack or the absence of a crack to assay the relative strength of one question's answer to another, or to balance the weight between any two or more questions. Often these ceremonies would be performed to foretell the future. As the questions and answers became formulaic, and recorded in books and notes, it became convenient to reject bones that tended to crack in an unacceptable manner, and accept only those bones that had the right size and thickness for the right number of cracks in the right places. The size of the bone turned out to be that which could support hexagrams - and not heptagrams or octagrams - notwithstanding the fact that six lines in a row, any of which could be intact or broken, added up to 64, was the most manageable number for the task at hand.

The questions were often asked of ancestors, whom the ancient Chinese revered and worshipped. Oracle bones offer some of the earliest examples of Chinese writing. Their use as a method of divination in China seems to date back to the middle of the Shang Dynasty, probably in the reign of Pangeng, around 1350 BC when the Shang capital was moved to Yin. The site at Anyang is believed to be the site of this ancient capital.

Oracle bones found in the 1970s have been dated to the Zhou period, with some dating to the Spring and Autumn period of the later Zhou Dynasty.

They were also called dragon bones on account of their discovered use by Chinese scholar Wang I. Jung when they were found sold in Chinese medicinal centres either whole or crushed for the healing of various ailments that Jung hoped to use to cure his then-mysterious malaria, which western doctors could not diagnose.