"Moon have eclipse, listen, eighth month." (When will there be an eclipse of the moon? I listen for the answer: In the eighth lunar month.)

Doesn't the character (wen-"listen") look like a person with large ears kneeling on the ground and praying, while listening for the commands of the spirits?

According to Mike Xu's conjectures, one of the keys to determining the links between the Shang and the Olmec is the oracle bone script, which all Chinese know of. This script, which was long regarded as China's oldest form of writing, attracts the research interest of scholars all over the world. But did you know that oracle bone inscriptions were discovered less than a century ago, and quite by chance?

Many historical "discoveries" can be ascribed to a string of coincidences. The story goes that in 1899, Qing-dynasty official Wang Yirong and his friend Liu E (author of the novel The Travels of Lao Can) were playing around with some "dragon bones" bought from a Chinese herbal medicine shop when they realized with astonishment that these were incised with many images resembling written characters. From their knowledge of ancient inscriptions on stone and bronze, Wang and Liu surmised that the markings might be written characters even older than those used in such inscriptions.

The reemergence of the Shang

When news of this discovery spread, a market for inscribed bones and turtle shells quickly sprang up, and even attracted the attention of many foreign missionaries stationed in China. But where had the bones and shells come from? Herbal medicine dealers treated this information as a trade secret, and would only reveal that they came from somewhere near the county of Tangyin in He'nan Province.

In 1903, Liu E selected 1058 bones and shells from the 5000 he had by then collected, and compiled them into a book, Turtle Shells Collected by Tieyun (Tieyun being his zi name). Later, as well-known scholars such as Luo Zhenyu, Wang Guowei, Dong Zuobin and others also began to study the inscriptions, research into these "oracle bones" gradually emerged as a field of study in its own right.

By 1928, when the Academia Sinica began a program of excavations near Xiaotun Village in He'nan's Anyang County, many oracle bones had already found their way onto the market. But over the following ten years, as the ruins of Yin-including several large tombs-were excavated, large numbers of bronze ritual objects and oracle bones were unearthed. Here was concrete evidence of the existence of the Shang dynasty, which for a time had been suspected of being a figment of early historians' imaginations. The discoveries also defined the earliest authenticated point in Chinese history.

Reliable divinations

Oracle bone inscriptions were characters incised onto pieces of turtle shell and animal bones to record the results of divinations made with them. The animal bones were mainly the shoulder blades and ribs of oxen, while the part of the turtle shell used was usually the plastron, which protects the turtle's underbelly. The bones and shells were all donated by the dukes and princes of the lands surrounding the king's own domains. For the divination, the bones or shells would be heated around holes which had been drilled into them. This would cause single irregular transverse cracks to appear, which the official diviners would interpret to judge whether they implied good or ill omen.

For example, the three-part inscription on one piece of shell reports a divination conducted on the day gui si (day 30 in the 60-day cycle of the 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches, and thus the last day of a ten-day period or xun). The first part of the inscription gives this date, the name of an official diviner, and the question to be divined: how the next ten days will pass. The second part tells the result, spoken by the chief diviner, who is the king himself: some untoward event will occur, involving a malevolent animal soul. He prescribes a ritual to ward off evil. The final part, added later, reports the outcome: despite the ritual, the next day the predicted mishap still came to pass. When the monarch went out hunting, the horse of one of his minor officials lost its footing on the steep trail and fell, and Zi Yang, who was driving the king's chariot, fell out. These subsequent events were recorded to prove how reliable the predictions had been.

How do people today set about identifying and reading these ancient, pictorial characters? "Mostly we start from the Shuo Wen Jie Zi, compiled by Xu Shen of the Eastern Han dynasty," says Yuan Kuo-hua, a researcher working on Chinese writing at the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology. (Shuo Wen Jie Zi is China's oldest systematic etymological dictionary.) Yuan explains that the changes in the way Chinese characters are written can be traced through time: by comparing oracle bone characters with later scripts such as the xiaozhuan (lesser seal) script (the standardized calligraphic style of the Qin dynasty) and the characters used in ancient bronze inscriptions, and by analyzing their radicals (the "root" part of a Chinese character which indicates the general area of meaning), one can try to interpret them.

To date, estimates mainland scholar Hu Houxuan, some 150,000 oracle bones have been discovered. More than 4000 recognizable different character forms have been found on them, but there are less than 2000 for which scholars agree on a meaning. Although there are always differences of opinion among researchers, by a continuous process of trying to identify, interpret and date the characters, over the years they have gradually pieced together a picture of the life and beliefs of the Shang, and have verified the accounts in later histories of many major events involving the Shang royal house.

For instance, ancient history books tell how King Wuding went on a punitive expedition against the Guifang tribe, and how King Zhou waged war against the far-off Dongyi people; both these accounts have been authenticated, and oracle bone inscriptions have also proved that the chronology of Shang kings in the "Basic Annals of Yin" section of the Records of the Grand Historian is not an invention.

Everything has soul

Three thousand years ago, Pan Geng moved the Shang capital to Yin (Anyang), starting the period of twelve reigns which is also known as the Yin Shang or Yin era. In those days the population lived mainly by agriculture, so people "relied on Heaven for their food"-their livelihood depended on the weather. In the hope of getting a good harvest, the people of Yin constantly asked divinations of, and made sacrifices to, the relevant spirits, such as those of the mountains, rivers and the earth. Warfare, engaged in to enlarge the national territory or to defend against attacks from other peoples, was also an important affair of state; before going into battle they would ask the spirits who should command the troops, whether they would be victorious, and so on. In the words of the Zuo Zhuan (a history of the Spring and Autumn period): "The greatest affairs of state were sacrifices to the spirits, and military matters."

The monarch himself was an even greater focus of divinatory activities. All public and private affairs of the royal household were matters for divination, from which direction to take for the hunt and whether the harvest would be good, to whether the queen would give birth to a boy or a girl, and whether the child would be healthy. Even rainfall would arouse worries as to whether it had to do with the king's ill-health.

According to the ideas of the time, the whole natural world was a system of "souls," and all living things were imbued with a life force. Di (the word later used to mean "emperor") was the creator of order in the natural world. The world could be divided into four parts according to the directions East, West, South and North, and each of these was governed by a "direction spirit"; "wind spirits" were responsible for communicating the words of the spirits. The souls of the ancestors were present throughout nature, protecting their descendants. Catholic priest Jean Lefeuvre, who has been studying oracle bone writings for much of his life, says that di is not the same as the God of Christianity: it is not a "boss," but the original source of life.

Royal privilege

Eminent archeologist Chang Kuang-chih says that of the three ancient dynasties of Xia, Shang and Zhou, the people of the late Shang were the ones who had most ritual dealing with ghosts and spirits. They were "the most accomplished of shamans."

Although divination was used to enquire about anything and everything, it was not the domain of the common people, but the monopoly of a small number of members of the royal household. It was practiced by a sacred group of diviners led by a "wizard king." In fact, the king himself was usually this shaman.

But we shouldn't think of divination as simple superstition. In fact it served a very practical purpose: the rulers used it as a means of keeping the populace under their control. Chang Kuang-chih says that before undertaking any course of action, the Shang kings would always ask the advice of their ancestors, or at least would use the purported instructions of their ancestors as a pretext for their actions.

As for the strange and beautiful bronze artifacts, as the objects used for ritual ceremonies they too were part of the ruling class's political armory. Whoever had control of the bronzes had control of political power. In ancient China politics, art and religion formed an integrated, tripartite whole-just like a great bronze tripod vessel-which "held up the sky."

Tracing it home

In recent times researchers came to the realization that the ideographs used in oracle bone inscriptions fall into all the six traditional categories of Chinese characters, such as pictophonetic, mutually interpretative, phonetic loan, etc.. Hence they must already have been well developed, and were unlikely to have been China's first writing. Perhaps earlier scripts had been written on materials such as wood or bamboo, and had not survived. In 1985 a potsherd incised with 11 characters was found at Dinggong Village in Shandong Province; the shard is over 4000 years old.

According to legend, the Shang dynasty moved its capital many times. What was life like in the early Shang, before Pan Geng moved to Yin, and in pre-Shang times?

In 1951 at Erligang in Zhengzhou, He-nan Province, a site was discovered which carbon-14 dating showed to be a Shang city older than Xiaotun in Anyang County. Six years later another site was found at Erlitou in He'nan's Yanshi County. It is thought to date from the early Shang or from the late Xia, which is known only from legend. Harvard University, where Chang Kuang-chen teaches, is currently carrying out excavations at Shangqiu in He'nan in the hope of learning more about the origins of the pre-Shang cultures.

The discovery of oracle bone inscriptions rebuilt knowledge of a royal dynasty which some had suspected was imaginary, and the many neolithic sites discovered in mainland China over the past few decades have not only shown up even earlier traces of written language, but have also debunked the idea which we learned from childhood, that China's central plain was the cradle of Chinese civilization.

For instance, at around 3300 BC the Liangzhu culture in Zhejiang, in the Yangtze River basin, was already producing exquisite jade ware. At Hemudu in Yuyao County, Zhejiang, paddy rice was grown in 5000 BC, the earliest such cultivation known in the world. These "chance discoveries," which are often stumbled upon when building roads or houses or ploughing fields, have enabled Chinese culture to be traced further and further back into the past.

How many more secrets of our ancestors remain to be discovered ?

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This turtle plastron is incised with the record of a divination to enquire about the annual harvest. The crosswise cracks, produced by heating, were interpreted by divination officials to predict good or bad fortune. (courtesy of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica)

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From 1928 to 1937, the Academia Sinica excavated the ruins of Yin in Anyang County, He'nan Province. Our picture shows relics in Xiaotun Pit No. 127. (courtesy of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica)