During the nineteenth C , James Leonard Farmer in China ’s Henan Provinceunearthed strange , crack animal boneswhile till the fields . The bones were thought to be “ dragon finger cymbals , ” or fossilize , mineral - rich dinosaur skeletons . Villagers sold these bones to physicians , whoground them into powdersused to cover everything from cramp to combat injury .
In 1899 , Wang Yirong , an ancientness student and chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing , realized the bones were specialwhen he notice they were covered with a shape of ancient writing . deplorably , Yirong ’s research was switch off short afterhe killed himselfduring the Boxer Rebellion . However , his bone collection was sell to his friend , the author and politician Liu E , whopublished a bookof rubbings in 1903 that revolutionized academics ’ understanding of ancient China .
Liu E ’s relics turned out to be “ seer bones , ” which were used 3000 years ago byShang Dynasty rulersfor both divination and record - keep purposes . Oracle bones were fashioned from burnish ox scapulae and tortoise shells , and engraved with question for the ancestors . Rulers inquired about everything from crops to health to war . The bones were then ignite with alloy rods , which stimulate their surfaces to fracture . The king or another appointed diviner see the crack — which were recall to be message from the utter — and commemorate the answers by carve them into the bone .
The bone were a major diachronic find . Not only did they confirm the Shang Dynasty ’s existence , they also provided extraordinarily elaborate genealogical records of its royal families , as well as information on the menstruum ’s religion , civilisation , and military . They even recorded the earliest - known description of solar eclipses and comet .
The discovery was authoritative for linguists , too . The bones ’ inscriptions are the earliest known human body of systematic penning in East Asia , and are a direct predecessor of today ’s Chinese handwriting . About 6000 dissimilar characters have been describe thanks to seer bones , admit 2000 that have present - day equivalents .
Over the years , a report 200,000 fragments of oracle osseous tissue have been excavated , including 50,000 with lettering . Many of them are now in the permanent collections of renowned insane asylum such as theMetropolitan Museum of Art , the Smithsonian Institution’sFreer Sackler Gallery of Art , and the National Palace Museum in Taipei .
regrettably , experts believe that many seer finger cymbals were crushed into medicines over the year — meaning that countless records of China ’s early history are now lost forever . But withrecent discoverieslike the identification of newfangled oracle bone characters , the bones still teach scholars newfangled things about the Shang Dynasty — will in all likelihood continue to do so far into the future .
[ h / tHyperallergic ]
