Shang oracle bones record far more than sacrifice and divination. Their inscriptions cover weather, harvests, warfare, illness, childbirth, rituals and other royal affairs, and were carved mainly on ox shoulder blades and turtle plastrons. Human sacrifice and ritual bronzes are documented at Shang royal tombs such as Fu Hao's tomb at Anyang, where some vessels also contained human hair. Sacrificial pits at Sanxingdui, broadly contemporaneous with the late Shang, contained human remains and ritual deposits. The presenter interprets the petroglyph as an animal sacrifice and the panel as a king kneeling before his deceased father with a turtle as medium; those specific identifications are not established archaeological facts.
Shang oracle bones document sacrifice and broader royal divination
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Key facts
- Oracle-bone inscriptions are chiefly divination records, but they cover much more than sacrifice and divination, including weather, harvests, warfare, illness, childbirth and other royal affairs.
- Oracle bones were carved mainly on ox shoulder blades and turtle plastrons.
- Shang royal tombs, including Fu Hao's tomb at Anyang, contain human sacrificial remains and ritual bronzes; human hair was also found in some vessels.
- Sanxingdui sacrificial pits, broadly contemporaneous with the late Shang, contained human remains and ritual deposits.
- The evidence does not establish that turtles were selected for divination because they symbolized communication with ancestors.
- The presenter interprets the petroglyph as animal sacrifice and the panel as a living king kneeling before his deceased father with a turtle as medium; these are interpretations, not established identifications.
Sources
independent.academia.edu
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Oracle Bone, Shang Dynastysmarthistory.org
Most oracle bone inscriptions contain four parts: an introduction, a charge (the topic of the oracle-bone inscription), the prognostication (interpretation ...
Oracle bone scripten.wikipedia.org
Inscriptions were made by carving characters into oracle bones, usually either the shoulder bones of oxen or the plastrons of turtles.
The Oracle Bone Inscriptions from Huayuanzhuang Eastarchive.org
The Huayuanzhuang East oracle bone inscriptions form a corpus of more than 2500 individual divination accounts, which were engraved on ...
Oracle boneen.wikipedia.org
Four inscribed bones have been found at Zhengzhou: three with numbers 310, 311, and 312 in the Hebu corpus, and one that has a single character ( ㄓ), which ...
Chinese Oracle Bones - Cambridge Digital Librarycudl.lib.cam.ac.uk
The oracle bone texts are the oldest extant documents written in the Chinese language. Inscribed on ox shoulder-blades and the flat under-part of turtle shells,
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