A Late Shang Divination Record
Oracle Bone (early 12th century B.C.E)
(Preface:) Crack-making on chia-shen (day twenty-one), Ch’üeh divined: (Charge:) “Lady Hao will give birth and it will be good.” (Prognostication:) The king read the cracks and said: “If it be on a ting day that she give birth, it will be good. If it be on a keng day that she give birth, there will be prolonged luck.” (Verification:) After thirty-one days, on chia-yin (day fifty-one), she gave birth. It was not good. It was a girl.
(Preface:) Crack-making on chia-shen (day twenty-one), Ch’üeh divined: (Charge:) “Lady Hao will give birth and it may not be good.” (Verification:) After thirty-one days, on chia-yin (day fifty-one), she gave birth. It really was not good. It was a girl.
Translated by David N. Keightley
The kings of the late Shang period (c. 1200–1050 B.C.E.) attempted to communicate with the spiritual forces that ruled their world by reading the stress cracks in cattle scapulas and turtle plastrons. They and their diviners produced these cracks by applying a heated brand or poker to the bones or shells, intoning, as they did so, a charge that conveyed their intentions, wishes, or need to know. After the divination ritual was over, a record of the topic and, sometimes, of the prognostication and the result, was engraved into the bone. Those inscriptions, recovered only within the last hundred years by archeologists and painstakingly deciphered by paleographers, provide a direct contact with many of the Shang kings’ daily activities and concerns. This inscription, like many, shows that the Shang king himself, in this case Wu Ting (ca. 1200–1180 B.C.E.), read the oracle. The ritual and spiritual ability to foretell the future was generally a royal monopoly; the diviners, such as Ch’üeh, rarely prognosticated in this way.
The inscriptions on the oracle bones represent the earliest written Sinitic texts. Since the script is in essence fully formed when it first appears and there are few if any indigenous precursors in the rich archeological record for the preceding millennia that reveal its gradual development, the origins of writing in China remain deeply puzzling. New discoveries and directions in research, however, are expected to throw light on this question.
For more information on the Chinese writing system, see selection 167.