Lesson 5 Bronze and oracle bone inscriptions

The superb craftsmanship of bronze

In the late primitive society, bronze wares appeared in Gansu, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Henan, Shanxi, Shandong, Liaoning, Anhui, etc. For example, bronze mirrors were unearthed at the Qijia culture site in Gansu more than 4,000 years ago. After the Shang dynasty, the number of bronze vessels increased and the types of bronze vessels were gradually enriched, mainly for food, rituals and military purposes, and their functions developed from food vessels to ceremonial vessels, becoming representative objects of the princes and nobles to symbolize their status and even state power.

The bronze vessels of the Shang and Zhou periods were not only rich in variety and quantity, but also highly skilled in production. The craftsmen of that period had mastered the exact ratio of copper, tin and lead for the manufacture of different objects. In the casting technology, the "clay casting method" was used, which was made by making a mold, making ornaments, turning the clay, roasting at high temperature, pouring metal liquid, and processing and finishing. By the late Shang dynasty, the bronze casting industry was not only large in scale, but also well-organized and meticulously divided, enabling the casting of large objects. For example, the Simuwu Tripod, the largest bronze vessel ever unearthed in the world, weighed 832.84 kg. The process of casting such a large object was very complex and required the cooperation of many people.

Oracle Bone Writing

In 1899, Wang Yirong of the Qing Dynasty first discovered oracle bone inscriptions, and since then a large number of Shang and Western Zhou oracle bones have been unearthed in Anyang Yinxu, Shaanxi and Shandong, of which more than 160,000 pieces have been unearthed.

The oracle bones are rich in content, covering rituals, warfare, agriculture and animal husbandry, official system, criminal law, medicine, astronomy and calendars, and so on. The oracle bone script is the earliest and most complete of the ancient scripts found in China, and has had a profound impact on the formation and development of Chinese writing. As far as we know, the history of writing in China starts from the Shang Dynasty.

Features of the oracle bone script

The oracle bone script uses a variety of character creation methods, including pictographs, referents, synonyms, and morphemes. Pictographs are the most primitive method of character formation, using shapes and lines to outline the characteristics of objects. About 40% of the oracle bone characters are pictographs. The word "Shang" is an indicative symbol that represents a certain thing or concept, for example, a long cross represents a horizontal line and a short cross above it represents a concept above the horizontal line. Huiyi is the combination of two or more individual characters to express a new meaning, such as "从", where two human forms are combined to express the meaning of following. The most progressive form is morpho-syntactic, which uses phonetic symbols to indicate phonetic sounds, and uses one character to indicate categories and form new characters, creating a large number of characters. The oracle bone script has the basic structure of Chinese characters, and many of these scripts are still in use today.