Oracle bone script is the oldest attested form of written Chinese, dating to the late 2nd millennium BC. Inscriptions were made by carving characters into oracle bones, usually either the shoulder bones of oxen or the plastra of turtles. The writings themselves mainly record the results of official divinations carried out on behalf of the ruling Shang dynasty royal family. These divinations took the form of scapulimancy where the oracle bones were exposed to flames, creating patterns of cracks that were then subjected to interpretation. Both the prompt and interpretation were inscribed on the same piece of bone that had been used for the divination itself.
Oracle bone script
Fragments of divination on bull scapula
Table of the Chinese sexagenary cycle inscribed on an ox scapula, dating to the reigns of the last two kings of the Shang dynasty during the first half of the 11th century BC
Oracle bone script fragment featuring a character for 'spring' in the top-left which has no known modern descendant
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally correspond to morphemes in the language, which may either be independent words, or part of a polysyllabic word. Most characters are constructed from smaller components that may reflect the character's meaning or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of thousands of characters; college-educated Chinese speakers know approximately 4,000. This has led in part to the adoption of complementary transliteration systems as a means of representing the pronunciation of Chinese.
A 12th-century Song dynasty redaction of the Shuowen Jiezi
Chinese written from top-to-bottom on restaurant and bus stop signs in Hong Kong
A turtle plastron bearing oracle bone inscriptions
樽; Fāngzūn wine container – inscription commemorates a gift of cowrie shells.