Do New Oracle Bone Characters Predict Future Events?

MessageToEagle.com – The inscriptions on the oracle bones were originally discovered over 110 years ago, but it is first now that scientists have been able to learn more about their meaning.

The oracle bone texts are the oldest extant documents written in the Chinese language.

They are inscribed on ox shoulder-blades and the flat under-part of turtle shells, and record questions to which answers were sought by divination at the court of the royal house of Shang, which ruled central China between the 16th and 11th centuries B.C.

Now, Chinese archaeologists have found 34 new characters and glyphs from oracle bones housed in a museum in Lyushun, a city in northeast China’s Liaoning province.

According to Xinhua “Song Zhenhao, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who is leading a team that has been researching the inscriptions since 2011, said on Thursday that the new findings are another breakthrough since such inscriptions were discovered over 110 years ago.

Inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones represent the original characters of the Chinese written language.

They date back to the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC). The new characters and glyphs, which involve names of nations, places, persons and sacrificial rituals, were found among a 1,800-piece collection of bone inscription relics in the Lyushun Museum.

Song said the team took rubbings from the text images of the 1,800 pieces and photographed them, which led to the characters being identified.

To date, archaeologists around the world have identified 4,000 bone inscription characters from studying 130,000 relics, but only half of the characters have been deciphered, he added. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. The graphic logograms of the characters convey both meaning and pronunciation.

Oracle bone inscriptions were first discovered in 1899 by Beijing academic and antiquarian Wang Yirong, although farmers had been unearthing the relics in Anyang, Henan Province, for many years. Wang noticed symbols that looked like writing on animal bones and tortoise shells.”

In ancient China people thought it ancestors of the Shang royal family were believed to have foreknowledge of future events and the ability to influence their outcome. The attribution to dead ancestors of power to influence the living and the consequent need for propitiatory sacrifice expressed as ancestor worship are deep-rooted in the Chinese people.

Success in punitive wars against neighboring tribes, in hunting expeditions and bringing in the harvest all depended on the benevolence of the royal ancestors, while sickness and natural disaster were punishments inflicted for impiety to the departed. Divination by making cracks in bone and shell was a method of predicting the future and ensuring a favorable outcome for the enquirer by identifying the correct target for appeasement.

The oracle bones were discovered at one of the most tumultuous times in China’s history. The Manchu Qing Dynasty was tottering towards its final collapse in the revolution of 1911, hemmed in by hostile foreign powers and riven by internal rebellion. Wang Yirong, the discoverer of the oracle bones, himself committed suicide in 1900 when the court fled Peking before foreign invaders. Foreigners resident in China at this time were well-placed to assemble collections of cultural objects, and it is not surprising that several of them were among the earliest collectors of oracle bones.

Lionel Charles Hopkins (1854-1952), a biographer and oracle bone collector spent a lot of time trying to decipher the meaning of the inscriptions. Hopkins was undoubtedly a pioneer in oracle bone studies. The Hopkins Collection is well known to oracle bone specialists all over the world through the published volume of drawings of the inscriptions.

Ever since the first oracle bones were discovered, scientists have tried to decipher the meaning of the characters. The oracle bones were used for divination and for predicting the future, both good and bad events.

The oracle bones were used to predict both good events and bad events. The newly discovered characters and glyphs from oracle bones housed in a museum in Lyushun could shed some light on what ancient Chinese expected to happen in the future. It could be an ancient prophecy that seemed very important at the time.

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