The practice of burning animal bones for divination in China reaches back to the fourth millennium BCE. It attained increasing levels of sophistication in the preparation and variety of animal bones used under the Shang, beginning in the sixteenth century BCE (Venture 2009). This entry will concentrate on inscribed Shang oracle bones, which date to the late Shang period. A conservative estimate of oracle bone inscriptions places their production to around 1200–1045 BCE (Keightley 1978). They are considered to be the earliest available evidence of the first systematic form of writing in China. Indeed, Shang characters are direct predecessors of some modern Chinese characters (Boltz 1994). Philologists and sinologists have done much to interpret and translate these oracle bones, a significant number of which had been unearthed in the late Shang capital of Anyang, in Henan province (Academia Sinica 2010a; UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d; Yin Xu 2007). Although interpretative work with...
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Vicas, A. (2014). Oracle Bones. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_9991-1
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