At the end of the 19th centurye century and early 20thearchaeologists discovered mysterious artifacts in China. A sort of tablet marked with logograms, which experts were unable to decipher directly. It is in Henan province, near the city of Anyang, that a large quantity of these objects have been unearthed over the years, raising questions about their usefulness in ancient China. A real investigation then begins to try to understand the scope of these texts, among the oldest written on the continent more than two millennia ago.
Nearly 13,000 oracle tablets discovered in China in more than a century
The first tablets stir up the most outlandish hypotheses among local populations, believing that authentic dragon bones were then unearthed. From the 1950s onwards, archaeologists were able to decipher an ever-increasing quantity of these ancient symbols, including tablets dating from the late Shang dynasty, appearing around 1600 BC, up to 1046 BC .
Unlike cuneiform and hieroglyphic scripts, several hundred characters used on the tablets are still used in modern Chinese writing, making the task easier for researchers.
One of the most remarkable Chinese archaeological finds is a 3,000-year-old “oracle bone.” © Smithsonian Channel, YouTube
Divinatory artifacts
The latter succeeded in determining that these engravings had a predictive function: these strange artifacts were then used for oraclesoracles to determine the future. A whole ritual was put in place during the creation of these relics. The forecasts were written in shells of tortoisetortoise and ox bones, then heated by flames to produce cracking sounds, then interpreted by oracles.
Many characters currently remain indecipherable, but the historianshistorians established that some of these artifacts were mainly used by the Chinese nobility, or even directly by the royal family. Even older tablets, produced during the Neolithic, intrigue scientists. Despite their primary divinatory utility, they above all offer key elements on the appearance and development of writing in ancient China.
