Oracle Bone Script Drawing

Oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文) was an ancestor of modern Chinese characters engraved on oracle bones—animal bones or turtle plastrons used in pyromantic divination—in the late 2nd millennium BC, and is the earliest known form of Chinese writing. The vast majority, amounting to over 50,000 inscribed items, were found at the Yinxu site located in Xiaotun Village, Anyang City, Henan Province. They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BC or 1200 BC. After the Shang were overthrown by the Zhou dynasty in c. 1046 BC, divining with milfoil became more common, and a much smaller corpus of oracle bone writings date from the Western Zhou. Thus far, no Zhou sites have been found with a cache of inscriptions on the same scale as that at Yinxu, although inscribed oracle bones appear to be more widespread, being found near most major population centers of the time, and new sites have continued to be discovered since 2000. The late Shang oracle bone writings, along with a few roughly contemporaneous inscription in a different style cast in bronzes, constitute the earliest significant corpus of Chinese writing, which is essential for the study of Chinese etymology, as Shang writing is directly ancestral to the modern Chinese script. It is the oldest known member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts, preceding the bronzeware script and making it the direct ancestor of over a dozen East Asian writing systems developed over the next three millennia, including the Chinese and Japanese logographic and syllabaric scripts still in current use. In terms of content, the inscriptions, which range from under ten characters for incomplete prognostications to over 100 characters in rare cases (a few dozen being typical), deal with a wide range of topics, including war, ritual sacrifice, agriculture, as well as births, illnesses, and deaths in the royal family. Thus, they provide invaluable insight into late Shang dynasty civilization and society. Name: The common Chinese term for the script is jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文 ("shell and bone script"), which is an abbreviation of guījiǎ shòugǔ wénzì 龜甲獸骨文字("tortoise-shell and animal-bone script"). This is a translation of the English phrase "inscriptions upon bone and tortoise shell", coined by the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant (1862–1914) in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing, and first appeared in Chinese books in the 1930s. In earlier decades, Chinese authors used a variety of names for the inscriptions and the script, based on the place they were found (Yinxu), their purpose (bǔ 卜 "to divine") or the method of writing (qì 契 "to engrave"), one common term being 殷墟卜辭 (Yīnxū bǔcí, "Yinxu divinatory texts"). As the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date from the late Shang dynasty, oracle bone script essentially refers to a Shang script. Precursors: It is certain that Shang-lineage writing underwent a period of development before the Anyang oracle bone script because of its mature nature. For example, many characters had already undergone extensive simplification and linearization; the processes of semantic extension and phonetic loan had also clearly been at work for some time, at least hundreds of years and perhaps longer. However, no significant quantity of clearly identifiable writing from before or during the early to middle Shang cultural period has been discovered. The few Neolithic symbols found on pottery, jade, or bone at a variety of cultural sites in China are very controversial, and there is no consensus that any of them are directly related to the Shang oracle bone script. Source: Wikipedia

Drawing:Paint Pen on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:18 W x 24 H x 0.2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.