About Oracle Bone Inscriptions.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions is an ancient writing carved on tortoise shells and animal bones. In Shang dynasty, the king had to do divination before doing anything. Oracle Bone Inscriptions is a tool for divination.

Before using Oracle Bone Inscriptions, we should deal with them first. Remove the flesh and blood from the Oracle bones and then saw them flat. Then, use a knife to drill a gap on the inner surface of the tortoise shell or the reverse side of the animal bone. The arrangement of these gaps is orderly. A fortune teller or wizard engraves his name, the date of divination and the questions to be asked on the Oracle Bone Inscriptions, and then burns the hole in the Oracle Bone Inscriptions with a torch. These nicks are cracked by heat, and this kind of crack is called "sign". The wizard analyzes the trend of these cracks, obtains the result of divination, and engraves on the Oracle bones whether divination is effective or not. After the divination came true, these Oracle bones engraved with Oracle Bone Inscriptions became official files and were preserved.

At present, more than 654.38+0.6 million pieces of Oracle bones have been unearthed in Yin Ruins. Some are complete, and some are just fragments without written records. According to statistics, there are more than 4,000 words in all these Oracle Bone Inscriptions, of which about 3,000 words have been studied by scholars. Among these 3,000 words, scholars have interpreted more than 1000 words. The rest are either unreadable or scholars are seriously divided. Nevertheless, through these more than 1000 words, people can still have a general understanding of the politics, economy and culture of the Shang Dynasty.