Ancient China
China’s oldest writing is a list of questions
Three thousand years ago, Shang kings asked about rain, the harvest, war, childbirth and toothache. The answers cracked across ox bones and turtle shells, and the questions were carved beside them.
The Plutto Magazine · 13 October 2026 · 2 min read
At the late Shang capital near modern Anyang, in the thirteenth to eleventh centuries BC, the king’s diviners prepared ox shoulder blades and the flat underside of turtle shells. They carved hollows into the back, pressed a hot point into each hollow, and watched the bone crack with a sharp sound.
Read the crack
The shape of the crack was the answer. The Chinese character for divination, 卜 (bu), is a picture of it. Afterwards the question was carved beside the crack, sometimes with the king’s reading, and sometimes, later, with what actually happened.
The Chinese character for divination is a picture of the crack.
The questions are startlingly ordinary. Will it rain? Will the harvest be good? Should the king go to war, or hunt? Will the queen’s childbirth go well? Why does the king’s tooth hurt? And, again and again: in the next ten days, will there be no disaster?
Medicine, then history
For centuries farmers turned up the bones and sold them as “dragon bones,” to be ground into medicine. The story goes that in 1899 a scholar-official, Wang Yirong, noticed writing on the pieces in his prescription; the details may be legend, but the bones were in the medicine trade, and collectors traced them back to Anyang. Excavations there began in 1928, and well over a hundred thousand inscribed fragments are now known.
Oracle bone script is the oldest substantial body of Chinese writing, and the direct ancestor of the characters used today. The first great archive of Chinese words is a record of people asking about what was coming.
Sources
- David N. Keightley, Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China (1978).
- David N. Keightley, The Ancestral Landscape (2000).
- David W. Pankenier, Astrology and Cosmology in Early China (2013).
Plutto presents these traditions for reflection; it does not claim that astrology predicts events.
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