When is Oracle Bone Inscriptions mainly used?

Prevalent in the Yin and Shang Dynasties.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions, also known as "Wen Qi", "Oracle Bone Inscriptions", Yin Ruins or "tortoise shell and animal bones". Oracle Bone Inscriptions recorded and reflected the political and economic situation of Shang Dynasty, which mainly refers to the words carved on tortoise shells or animal bones by the royal family in China in the late Shang Dynasty (14 ~ 1 1 century), and their contents are generally the things asked or the results obtained by divination.

After the demise of the Shang Dynasty and the rise of the Zhou Dynasty, Oracle Bone Inscriptions still used it for a period of time, which is an important material for studying the social history of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties.

The original Oracle Bone Inscriptions.

People in Shang dynasty were good at divination, and used the "omen" (tiny vertical and horizontal cracks) that appeared when Oracle bones were burned to predict the good or bad luck in the future. The carapace includes the abdominal carapace and dorsal carapace of soft-shelled turtle, and the bones are mostly the shoulder blades and ribs of cattle. Oracle Bone Inscriptions was first discovered in Xiaotun Village, Anyang County, Henan Province, about 3000 years ago. After identification, it is an earlier character than seal script and seal script.

Before the 24th year of Guangxu reign (1898), when harvesting peanuts, local farmers accidentally picked up some tortoise shells and animal bones and sold them to pharmacies as Chinese medicine. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the epigraphist Wang He and the student Zhao Jun accidentally discovered ancient Chinese characters on the "keel" of a Chinese herbal medicine, and only after textual research did they know that this was the capital of Shang Dynasty.

However, according to later generations' research, Wang was not the first person to find Oracle bone inscriptions, and there were others such as Wang Xiang, Meng, Liu E, Duan Fang and Hu Shicha. At first, people who profited from antiquities monopolized Oracle Bone Inscriptions and deliberately described the unearthed place as Tangyin or Weihui. Scholars were misled by it.