About Chinese Characters

Also known as "Yin Ruins Script", "Divination Rhetoric", and "Yin Qi", it is a script engraved on tortoise shells and animal bones during the Yin and Shang dynasties.

Discovered in the late 19th century at the site of the capital of the Yin dynasty, Xiaotun, in present-day Anyang, Henan Province, it is the earliest sample of Chinese characters ever found.

The total*** of more than 100,000 inscribed oracle bones contains more than 5,000 different character shapes, of which about 1,000 characters have been recognized.

The oracle bones contain about 27% of graphic characters, which shows that the oracle bones are already a fairly mature writing system.

Characteristics of Oracle Bone Script

Oracle Bone Script, which is written with a knife and tortoise shell and animal bone, belongs to the early stage of Chinese characters, and therefore has the following characteristics:

1. The lines of the strokes are thin and thin, with most of them being straight, and the folding strokes are often engraved into two knives, with almost no curves;

2. The characters are thin and long, with the straight strokes longer than the horizontal strokes, which are related to the difficulty and ease of the force exerted by the hands holding the knife.

3, the structure of the form is changed by the number of strokes, and the size is not uniform;

4, there are a large number of variant characters, especially in the hieroglyphic characters, and a character is often written in a variety of ways;

5, the position of the radicals in the combined characters can be interchanged, which means that the structure of the form was not fixed at that time.

Chinese civilization is rich in underground remains because it has lasted continuously for thousands of years. Since the introduction of modern archaeology from the West to China in the twentieth century, China has produced many significant archaeological discoveries.

In Anyang City, Henan Province, in central China, there is an area of about 24 square kilometers of the ruins of the capital city, which is the world-famous Yin Ruins. According to records, in the 14th century B.C., Shang King Pan Geng moved the capital from Qufu in Shandong Province to this area, which has been the political, cultural and economic center of the Shang Dynasty for nearly 300 years since then. In 1046 BC, King Wu of Zhou defeated King Zhou, the last emperor of the Shang Dynasty, and the Shang Dynasty fell, leaving the area in ruins. Since the Shang Dynasty was also known as the Yin Dynasty, this place was called "Yin Ruins".

The discovery and excavation of Yin Ruins is the most significant archaeological discovery in China in the 20th century. Since the first excavation in 1928, a large number of artifacts have been unearthed here, including oracle bones and bronze artifacts, of which the discovery of oracle bones is one of the major events in the world's archaeological history.

Oracle bone inscriptions are ancient writings carved on tortoise shells and animal bones. During the Shang Dynasty, the king had to divine before doing anything. The oracle bone was the tool used in divination.

Before the use of oracle bone, it should be processed, the first no to remove the flesh and blood on the oracle bone, and then sawing and grinding. Then, on the inside of the tortoise shell or the reverse side of the animal bone with a knife drilling notch. These notches were arranged in an orderly fashion. The soothsayer, or shaman, engraved his name, the date of the divination, and the questions to be asked on the oracle bone, and then burned the notches on the oracle bone with a fire burner. The cracks that appeared when the notches were heated were called "omens". The sorcerer analyzes the direction of these cracks and comes up with the result of divination, and whether the divination is true or not is also engraved on the oracle bone. After the divinations were fulfilled, the oracle bones engraved with the divinations became a kind of official archives and were preserved.

At present, more than 160,000 pieces of oracle bones have been excavated in Yinxu***. Some of them are complete, some are just broken pieces without written records. According to statistics, all these oracle bones on a variety of words totaling more than four thousand, of which about three thousand scholars through the examination and research, in the three thousand words, scholars read the same is more than one thousand words. The rest are either unreadable or the scholars are in serious disagreement. Nonetheless, through these 1,000 words, people can already have a general understanding of the political, economic, cultural and other aspects of the Shang Dynasty.

The earliest monograph on oracle bone inscriptions is Liu E's Tie Yun Zang Turtle, published in 1913.

Famous historian and literary scholar Guo Moruo's book "Study of Oracle Bone Characters", published in 1929, is another important monograph. Current authorities in the study of Chinese oracle-bone inscriptions include Prof. Qiu Xigui of Peking University and Prof. Li Xueqin of the Institute of Chinese History.

In addition to the Shang dynasty oracle bones found in Yinxu, earlier oracle bones from the Western Zhou dynasty have also been discovered in recent years, only that the literature recorded on these bones is very scarce and therefore not as important as that of the Shang dynasty oracle bones. And Yinxu excavation of great significance is not only the discovery of oracle bones. 70 years, archaeologists in the Yinxu **** found more than 50 sites of palace and temple complexes, the king's tomb 12 tombs, thousands of tombs of the nobles and civilians, sacrificial pits 1,000, handicraft workshops 5, more than 30 horse and cart pits, as well as a large number of bronzes, jades, pottery, bone tools, etc., all of which, showing a three-dimensional image of the ancient Chinese society. three-dimensional image of ancient Chinese society

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