Cracking Bones for Answers

Inscribed bones from the fields around Anyang were being ground up and sold as dragon bones for medicine until a scholar in Beijing recognised the marks on them as archaic Chinese writing in 1899. Systematic excavation began in 1928 and found the last Shang capital: palace foundations, workshops, royal tombs and the pits in which the divination records had been discarded.

The procedure can be reconstructed in detail. An ox shoulder blade or a turtle plastron was cleaned and thinned, and a series of hollows was gouged in the back. A heated point applied to a hollow made the bone crack on the other side with a sharp sound, and the shape of the crack was read as the answer. The charge put to the bone, the date, the diviner's name and sometimes the outcome were then cut into the surface.

What the kings asked about is the closest thing there is to a diary of Bronze Age Chinese religion. Will it rain in the coming ten days. Will the harvest be good. Should this campaign be launched. Is the king's toothache caused by an ancestor, and if so which one. Will Lady Hao's childbearing be fortunate. In the later reigns the king increasingly performed the divination himself and the recorded answers become uniformly favourable, which historians read as a shift in what the ritual was for.