Introduction
The history of the origin of oracle bone starts from the period of King Wu Ding in the Shang Dynasty. It is more or less three thousand years old. These oracle bones were utilized for divination by ancient Chinese rulers. As far as their formation is concerned, these bones were heated until they broke after cracking, and then these cracks were elaborated and interpreted in different ways. After this, certain questions were asked of the bones, and occasionally also the prognostications and the real upshots were then carved into the bones. (Boileau, 350-78). These scripts on bones are considered to be the most primitive recognized examples of Chinese alphabets or characters.
The very first elementary scriptural symbols were found on the clay pots of the Longshan Culture. These late Neolithic people are identified for their glistening black pottery primarily exhumed in 1928 in Longshan, Shandong Province. Earthenware relics from locations endorsed to the Erlitou Culture that came afterward were previously carrying symbols that would be the predecessors of the composed or written language of the renowned oracle bones belonged to the Shang Dynasty about 16th-11th centuries BC. If historically evaluated, these oracle bone inscriptions were initially exposed in the autumn of 1899. They were discovered in the outskirts of Yinxu, close to Xiaotun village of Anyang city situated in Henan Province. This was the spot of the main city of the Yin Dynasty that is the name specified to the later era of the Shang.
In very old times the king would search for stimulation through foresight divination. For this purpose, a hot device was applied to the back of some animal bone or tortoiseshell and the hidden connotations in the cracks produced were then tried to be traced and interpreted. This practice went on to be sophisticated with an inscribed record of the divination being carved on the oracle bone. In this way, oracle bone inscriptions came into existence and gained popularity.
Divination was a prevalent way of foretelling and foresight inquiry in the Shang Dynasty and it saw oracle bone captions develop into a full-grown and all-inclusive writing system.
The superstitious kings of the Shang bowed to divination to direct them in those perspectives of life that signified most to them and they prioritized them. This seems auspicious for the history of the Shang dynasty since it led them to offer us oracle bone inscriptions related to such varied topics as economics, politics, culture, and as well as the standards of good manners of such far off periods. These early writings also grip matters of astronomical and geographical phenomena. They comprise wide-ranging written records of lunar and solar eclipses, which can be availed of to verify the exactness of advanced astronomical calculations.
The popular view is that the Chinese celestial world is a projection of China’s bureaucratic government and deities are like the hierarchical officials of the world. Chinese bureaucracy is based on the world beyond (Keightley, 119-25). She is now persuaded that the Han emperors built their state according to a preconceived celestial administration inherited from the Shang and Zhou Kings. We may trace a lot of findings in the works of Keightley on the religion/politics of the Shang dynasty. In his study of the Shang oracle bones, Keightley argues that the Shang kings used their ancestral world as a model for their earthly administration. He says that “the generational, hierarchical, and jurisdictional taxonomy by which the Shang kings classified their ancestors and the bureaucratic, contractual way” in which the Shang kings appealed to their ancestors served as a model for the Shang secular institutions/relationships (Keightley, 763-831). Because the ancient Chinese kings patterned their secular administration after a charter myth, the Chinese political order, at least until the Republic period, was never completely separated from its religious roots.
Oracle Bones Remains
The oracle bones have been found in very great numbers, some piled in a confused mass as deposited by floodwaters, others undisturbed as buried by the Shang people. From these bones, twenty-five of the traditional names of the Shang-Yin Kings has been recovered, while five other royal names, not yet equated with the traditional forms have been found. Some of the traditional names are now found to have been miswritten, probably due to a copyist’s error in antiquity. The absence of the names of the last two kings of the dynasty is explained by the probability that Yin Hsü was destroyed during the reign of the twenty-ninth King.
Although the oracle bones are the most important of the An Yang discoveries from the point of view of the historian, they are not the only discoveries shedding light on the culture of the Shang period. Clear proof has been found that the Shang not only was a bronze using people but that they made and cast bronze at Yin Hsü itself. Although the floors of houses have been unearthed, no brick or tile has been found, which makes it probable that Shang architecture had not progressed beyond the use of mud-brick and wood, much as these are still used in the construction of the peasant’s cottage in North China. Seashells, cowries, and the bones of a whale prove that Yin Hsü was in communication with the sea coast. The presence of many bones not used for oracular purposes has shown that the pig, dog, sheep, ox, and goat were domesticated by the Shang.* Bones of elephants, bears, and tigers also occur.
The oracle bones which mention the names of kings also give their relationship to their predecessors, a matter of importance in the ritual of ancestor worship. It has therefore been found that the twenty-five kings identified covered sixteen generations starting with T’ang the founder, as related in the historical tradition. The disparity between the number of reigns and generations is explained by the fact that the Shang practiced fraternal succession, a fact surmised from the historical tradition and now confirmed by the oracle bone inscriptions.
Oracle Bones Inscriptions
In traditional Chinese pharmacology, there is an item called ‘dragon bones’. Some of these came from tortoise shells and animal bones. Interest in such dragon bones has led to important discoveries, including the dawn of Chinese civilization itself.
In 1898 (or 1899), Wang Yi-Jung, then Chancellor of the Imperial University in Manchu China, found that the surfaces of certain fragments of the ‘dragon bones’ displayed engraved characters. He concluded that the hieroglyphic writings, which he did not understand, went back to a period more ancient than that of the bronze inscriptions with which he was familiar. After he died in 1900, his friend Liu Ô, a noted writer, inherited his findings and continued the task of searching and collecting, and published in 1903 the results in a six-volume work based on an assemblage of 1,058 pieces. This led to the eventual unearthing in 1911 of the ruins of the ancient royal Shang capital at Anyang, making possible a scientific reconstruction of an ancient civilization that had a profoundly religious orientation. In this case, the fragments in question are found to carry oracular inscriptions going back some four thousand years.
Chinese Antiquity as an Open Frontier
Archaeological discoveries have thrown light on the religious character of prehistoric China, putting it in the company of the ancient Near East. For the late fourth and early third millennium B.C., we have evidence of potters’ marks resembling writing, of scapulimancy (etymologically, ‘shoulder-bone divination’) using a variety of animal bones, and clay phallus objects involved in ancestral worship.
Archaeologists have begun to speak of Chinese civilization as having had very possibly multiple origins. Perhaps it is more accurate to call this civilization the composite of many regional cultures, each with its special features. If no writing system earlier than that of the oracle bones has been definitively discovered or deciphered, even that may yet come. The Neolithic population in northern China (starting from the late fourth millennium B.C.) appears to have been the first people anywhere to use animal shoulder blades for divination, by heating them and interpreting the cracks which ensued. The practice reached its height by Shang times, with the widespread use of turtle shells in addition to shoulder blades, the sophisticated preparation of the animal remains, chiseled to produce hollows and grooves to facilitate the application of fire, and also structure the omen cracks. Inscriptions were added afterward, noting the occasion and result of the particular divinatory act, and also sometimes the coming to pass of the events which proved the efficacy of the oracle. After the fall of the Shang, the Chou continued divination by shells and bones for a while before the practice died out.12.
In ancient China, there was little difference between astronomy and the study of the heavens, and astrology or analyzing the influence of heavenly bodies on human life and society. Indeed, the observation of the heavens was motivated by the belief that heavenly laws and astral bodies influence earth as well. Besides, a calendar based on astronomical knowledge was important, as this was to be the basis of the seasonal arrangement of religious rituals and agricultural work. Tradition makes the cultural hero Fu-hsi the maker of the first calendar, and the Yellow Emperor its reformer and the rectifier of intercalation. It appears that the Chinese already knew about the five planets and the twelve zodiacal signs, and carefully determined solstices and equinoxes some four thousand or more years ago. Comets and eclipses were considered warnings from above, so that human beings, especially rulers, might reform their conduct as well as their conduct of government.
Oracle bone inscriptions often refer to dreams, which may also carry warnings from the spiritual world. Sometimes the spirits were understood as demanding sacrificial offerings. Thus the interpretation of dreams often involved divination itself. In ancient Egypt, this was done with help from astrology. In China, there was a multitude of methods, by consulting oracle bones or the Book of Changes, or with the help of meteorological phenomena. Even more, interestingly, the practice was made of divination by dreams which were later subjected to verification by appeal to oracle divination. In Chinese antiquity, there were also officials (chan-Jen/zhanren), in charge of dream interpretation, who performed their duties with the help of their knowledge of the stars.
Talking about the link between early Shang culture and oracle bones, Li writes:
“Last year, the National Research Institute excavated, in the Shang culture bearing stratum at Anyang, three pieces of bone resembling the ordinary oracle bones but with characters written with writing fluid rather than carved into the surface. They were found in two widely separated places, the two discoveries were separated by half a year, and the date of production of the two earlier of the three is placed by Tung Tso-pin as perhaps a century before the date of the later one; they can not be ascribed, therefore, to the accidental activation of a single individual at a single time and place.” (Li, p.245).
Shamanic Kingship in Ancient China
The Chinese word wang (king) is found frequently on oracle bones. The graph is sometimes supposed to represent fire in the earth, other times an ax, but in any case, designates, without doubt, the political ruler and his royal ancestors. The French scholar Léon Vandermeersch sees a relation between this word and another term, originally denoting ‘male’, and explains it as the virile ‘king’, father of the ethnic group, heir of the founder-ancestor’s power. Thus he places kingship in a familial and patriarchal context. As already explained, the ancient kings also claimed some kind of divine descent, whether we are to understand it totemically or otherwise. Divine descent symbolizes, without doubt, direct access to the supernatural, and the kings of antiquity were already called t’ien-tzu/tianzi, literally, the sons of Heaven, even if the kings and other rulers of historical China, unlike the emperors of Japan, never claimed for themselves any personal divinity.
Were the ancient kings also shamans? One way of answering this question is to look at the stories concerning the early dynastic founders. The mythical Yü the flood-controller, of the Hsia dynasty, has been characterized as walking in a particular gait, described as the shaman’s dance step. The information about King T’ang, the founder of the Shang dynasty, that we find in classical texts is much more rational. According to several accounts, T’ang’s conquest of Hsia was followed by many years of drought, during which he was told by the diviners that Heaven could be placated only by a human sacrifice. Thereupon he purified himself, placed himself on the firewood, and prepared to offer himself to the Lord-on-high. But no sooner was the fire lit than the rain came and quenched it. The Tungus word shaman means literally ‘one who is excited, moved, or raised’, that is, a person of either sex who has mastered spirits and who can at will introduce them into his or her own body, or a person who permanently incarnates these spirits and can control their manifestations, entering into controlled states of trance in appropriate circumstances.
Conclusion
Grave goods such as zoomorphic and anthropomorphic amulets, certain oracles bones of fish and birds, and assemblages of small sticks have also been interpreted as items of shamanic equipment. The reconstructions made from archaeological evidence accord well with the material gathered by later ethnographers. There is little consensus in the debate as to when shamanic practices first appeared in Siberia. The crucial problem has always been the limitations of our data, and in this context, it may be seen that rock art motifs provide a unique opportunity for tracing the early roots of shamanic concepts. Nevertheless, there are difficulties in interpreting which images are ‘shamanic’ and which are not.
As the native Asian peoples became more culturally assimilated, the sacral motifs lost their symbolism. The formerly sacred images and associated material culture moved to the profane sphere and were incorporated into daily life as objects of everyday use. The penetration into Siberia of new religious beliefs gradually transformed most of these sacred features, which had once been the property of a very restricted number of owners, into items of common knowledge. The appropriate deposition of oracle bones is important if this respectful relationship is to be nurtured. In Shamanism, feeding the ‘clean’ heart and head of elk to the dogs is thought particularly offensive and elk heads are often consumed at holy sites, forming one of the best sorts of pory or fare for the spirits. Relationships with the bear are more complex but also involve appropriate treatment of bones and their deposition in deep pools, whereas elk bones are returned to the forest to a ‘clean place’. For the bear, special carvings are made in cedar trees beside the path leading back into the yurt.
The process of making and casting bronze was probably not invented in China but brought in from some point to the west. But the best bronze casting of the Shang is equal to the finest work of the sort ever done anywhere, up to and including the present. It appears that Shang craftsmen must have made great improvements on the work of their teachers in this respect. Shang decorative art is baffling in its almost complete lack of antecedents in our known materials. It resembles little in Neolithic art. Attempts have been made to show that it was borrowed from the West, but these have proved abortive. While we can not say with any certainty what its origins were, it appears to have been intimately related to the religion and the mode of life of the Shang people themselves as these are revealed in the oracle bones. Preliminary comparisons lead to the expectation that careful study may show relations between Shang art and some of the art found in America and islands of the Pacific.
Chinese culture is unique in its continuity. Its most striking characteristic is a capacity for change without disruption. It would appear that that characteristic goes back even to the Neolithic cultures which preceded the Shang in northeast China. Shang culture, like all great cultures, was eclectic, fertilized by influences from many quarters. But these influences and techniques, when they were accepted, met the same fate which has overtaken every people, every religion, and every philosophy which has invaded China. They were taken up, developed to accord with Chinese conditions, and transmuted into organic parts of a culture which remained fundamentally and characteristically Chinese.
Shamans are involved in the death in a variety of ways. As healers they attempt to prevent death, through intercession, journeying, and combat with supernatural forces. In some cultures, they are prohibited from funerals because shamanistic séances can bring back the dead, but in many societies, they are among the ritual specialists involved in funerary rites. In other cultures, they can be the masters of mortuary ceremonies. In many shamanistic societies, the shaman’s journey to supernatural realms often involves traveling along the same routes as the dead are believed to take, and the shaman’s journey can be regarded as a symbolic death. These ideas are widespread and may set up a recursive relationship between shamanic journeys and a society’s perceptions and knowledge of mythical funerary geographies. In some societies, shamanic rituals take place at the burial site, and the oracle bones are incorporated into séances and rites because of their power over the living. Furthermore, shamans form a very special category of the dead and may be likened to the dead during life. Indeed, shamanic initiations often involve a symbolic and sometimes violent death through dismemberment or devouring by animal spirits, followed by the symbolic reassembly and rebirth of the body.
References
Boileau, Gilles, “Wu and Shaman.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 65(2002)2: 350-378.
Keightley, David N. (1999). “Shamanism, death, and the ancestors: Religious mediation in Neolithic and Shang China.” Asiatische Studien. 52.3: 763–831.
Keightley, David N. 2000: The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China, Ca. 1200-1045 B.C (China Research Monograph) Univ of California Inst of East. 119-25
Li Chi Chia Ku Nien Piao A Chronological Table of the Discoveries of the Oracle Bones of Anyang, Bull. Nat. Res. Inst., vol. II (1930), no. 2, pp. 241-260.