The use of Oracle Bone Inscriptions

Characters are slowly created by working people in their long-term life practice and will be created because of needs. After the primitive society, the ancient characters in China were considered to be relatively mature in Shang Dynasty. Oracle Bone Inscriptions is the earliest writing we can find now.

In Shang Dynasty, slave owners believed in gods and ghosts. Every time you encounter big things, such as fighting or offering sacrifices, or small things, such as rain and thunder, you should use tortoise shells and animal bones for divination, and take this divination as God's meaning. In divination, gods are asked whether what they are going to do is good or bad. After divination, the fortune teller will engrave this event and the result of divination on tortoise shells and animal bones in the words of the time. Therefore, people call this kind of writing recorded on tortoise shells and animal bones "Oracle Bone Inscriptions".

These words written by Oracle Bone Inscriptions are no longer a simple image description, and they are divorced from pictographs. Most of the written words are understandable, and many pictographs, sounds and excuses are also used. Oracle Bone Inscriptions is also a kind of ancient Chinese characters with certain rules, and the people we use today evolved from Oracle Bone Inscriptions. Oracle Bone Inscriptions played a great role in studying the development of Chinese characters and Shang society, and was also a precious historical material.

Simply from Oracle Bone Inscriptions, we can know the general situation of the social, economic and cultural development of the ancient Shang Dynasty. In agriculture and animal husbandry: the main tools of agricultural production are stone knives, stone sickles, plows and copper shovels; Crops include millet, millet, barley, wheat and rice; At that time, domestic animals were generally cattle, horses, sheep, chickens, pigs and dogs. In handicraft industry, there were workshops for smelting bronzes at that time. These workshops not only produce bronzes, but also produce all kinds of daily necessities for people's lives and cold weapons for war. At that time, the smelting technology of copper in Shang Dynasty was very mature, and the production level of bronzes was first-class, ranking first in the world in bronze culture.