Oracle Bone and Bronze Inscriptions and Xu Shen’s Shuowenjiezi

The oldest Chinese characters we are aware of to date are the oracle bones inscriptions from Shang dynasty (around 1700 BC).  This does not mean that they represent the oldest Chinese writing.  It simply means that so far we have not found anything older.  There is no guarantee that in the future we won’t find writing that is older still.  There is no guarantee either that we will find it.  There may have been older writing that simply did not survive.  It is indeed a miracle that we even have oracle bones characters from so long ago, given the perishable materials that were used to produce such characters. 

Oracle bone characters were inscribed on tortoise shells and the shoulder bones of oxen with sharp instruments.  Hence their name in Chinese: 甲骨文jiaguwen ‘shell bone writing’.  While the Chinese term refers to the materials on which the writing was produced, the English term ‘oracle bone inscriptions’ tells us that the purpose of these early characters was mainly divination, i.e., fortune-telling, for matters such as the waging of wars. 

            Although their shapes are very different from the characters of today, being less uniform in shape and more picture-like, oracle bone characters were already fully developed, with semantic-phonetic compounds as well as the simple pictographs and ideographs.  Therefore, there must have been precursors to oracle bone characters, which represented the first attempts at Chinese writing.

Oracle bones inscriptions were discovered only a little more than 100 years ago.  In 1899, these bones surfaced in the Anyang area of Henan province in central China, the ancient capital of the Shang dynasty.  The local peasants, intrigued about the markings on these ancient looking bones, called them dragon bones and had used them as medicine.  Soon they caught the attention of a scholar of Chinese writing, who collected over 5000 pieces of these bones.  Now the deciphering and study of oracle bone inscriptions is a major discipline in itself.

             Before the oracle bone inscriptions were discovered, the oldest writing for a long time was the bronze inscriptions, which were discovered almost two thousand years ago at the height of the Han dynasty, from which the Chinese ethnicity and Chinese characters got their names （汉人 and 汉字）respectively。 Bronze inscriptions 金文 jinwen ‘metal writing’ are characters imprinted on bronze vessels used for ceremonial purposes.  They are about 1000 years younger than oracle bone inscriptions，being from Zhou dynasty about three thousand years ago.  Seal characters followed (so-called because of its use on seals) in the Qin dynasty (221-206 BC). There are two styles 大篆dazhuan ‘greater seals’ and 小篆xiaozhuan ‘lesser seals’. 

            Another major stage in the evolution of the Chinese writing is the appearance of隶书lishu ‘clerkly style’ in the Qin dynasty(221-206 BC).  The style got its name from the official scribes that adopted this style of writing.  Due perhaps to the change of the writing instrument, this style is more stylized, more uniform in shape and also closer to the present form.  A major historical figure connected to this stage of the evolution of Chinese writing is the first emperor 秦始皇Qinshihuang, who, in his efforts to unify the country, ordered the standardization of Chinese characters, as well as weight and measure.

The most important study of Chinese characters 说文解字Shuowenjiezi ‘exegesis of characters’ was written in the Eastern Han dynasty by许慎Xu Shen（58-147 AD). 说文解字was the first work to systematically analyze and categorize Chinese characters. The categories Xu proposed are still valid today.  Xu thus was the first to recognize such characters as pictographs, simple and compound indicative characters and semantic phonetic compounds, as well as of the equivalent of the Rebus Principle.

            There is a wealth of websites with excellent pictures and discussion of oracle bone and bronze inscriptions, as well as the evolution of Chinese writing.  I include some of them here for your reference.

Websites on Oracle Bones Inscriptions

In English:

http://www.ancientscripts.com/chinese.html

http://www.logoi.com/notes/chinese_origins.html

In Chinese (but the pictures are worth looking at even if you can’t read Chinese):

http://www.chinavista.com/experience/oracle/oracle.html

http://www.chinesefortunecalendar.com/OracleBone.htm

http://www.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/uclib/bones/desc01a.htm

http://faculty.vassar.edu/brvannor/translation.html

http://chineseculture.about.com/library/weekly/aa_oracle02a.htm

http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Culture/language-oracle-bone.html

http://www.cc5000.com/zhishi/shufa/jiaguwen1.htm

Chinese Websites on Bronze Inscriptions (for the pictures, if you can’t read Chinese):

http://homepage2.nifty.com/tagi/koten011.htm

http://www.npm.gov.tw/exhbition/wen0630/c.htm

http://www.shanghaimuseum.net/library/asp/lbs_show.asp?ssflid=4&lbdhid=28