When it comes to Oracle, our impressions of it tend to be obscure and have little to do with our real lives.
But in fact, most of the Chinese characters we use now are derived from oracle bones, which is closely related to our culture.
With the continuous development of technology, we have cracked a lot of oracle bone scripts, but there are still some Chinese characters that cannot be cracked so far, and the research work of oracle bones still has a long way to go.
Oracle's past and present lives
Among the many ancient scripts unearthed in the mainland at present, it is generally believed that the seal inscription on the oracle bone is a relatively mature and systematic script, the source of Chinese characters, and the key form of the development of Chinese characters in the later period.
Cracking the oracle bone can help people understand the history of the ancient period to the greatest extent, so in a sense, the oracle bone is also a very precious historical material.
The oracle bone script of the Shang Dynasty was not used for daily writing, but often in the form of divination to predict future misfortunes and blessings and to obtain clear instructions from the gods.
This writing, recorded on the tortoiseshell or ox shoulder blade, is seen as both a response to the gods and a prototype of the oracle bone.
But we should know that the use of oracle bones for divination and inscription is not very human-capable, often interpreted by a country's wizards, and ordinary people do not have the qualifications or ability to identify the words inscribed on the oracle bones.
Therefore, this kind of writing was originally only retained in the royal family and was not widely used in civil society. During the Shang Dynasty, both nobles and commoners used brushes to write on bamboo for daily communication.
Compared with the oracle bone, the writing on the bamboo can be arbitrarily increased in the length of the article, and if it is found that it is wrong, it can also be directly cut off with a machete and rewritten.
Deletions like the oracle bone are a combination of book and knife, which also tells us that originally before the popularization of paper, people used a machete to alter it when writing.
The discovery and circulation of oracle bones
Because of the low recognition and popularity of the oracle bone script, with the fall of the Shang Dynasty, the oracle bone also suffered a catastrophe, and most of the text and related literature were destroyed in the war, which also brought great difficulties to people to learn and study the oracle bone later.
So when and where was oracle discovered? How did it survive to the present?
Legend has it that in the 25th year of the Qing Dynasty, the imperial court official Wang Yirong found a dragon bone herb in his own Traditional Chinese medicine, and the bone was engraved with symbols and words.
Because Wang Yirong usually likes to collect these cultural relics, he is also an expert in the study of epigraphy.
After seeing these words, he immediately deduced that this may be a kind of writing symbol from the pre-ancient period.
So he found the source of this keel and bought it at a high price, and Wang Yirong collected about a thousand oracle bones with writings before and after.
After Wang Yirong returned home, he arranged and analyzed these words one by one, and finally determined that the words on these oracle bones were recorded on them by means of knife carvings, and the cracks on the oracle bones were caused by high temperature burning.
After Wang Yirong's death, his collection of oracle bones was scattered everywhere, and his son sold all the oracle bones he collected during his lifetime in order to repay his original debts.
Later, these oracle bones were collected by a man named Liu E, and Liu Hu collected about five thousand pieces of oracle bones from all over the place on the basis of these oracle bone scripts.
Later, he printed these oracle bone rubbings into books and circulated them to the world, and most of the scholars in later generations studied and studied based on Liu Yan's oracle bone rubbings.
The Deciphering Mystery of the Oracle
We know that the oracle bone is a script handed down by the emperor during divination, and if we want to have a deep understanding of the content of the oracle bone, we have to understand the wording of the oracle bone.
Considering that the oracle bone is a sealed text for the purpose of divination, later generations also roughly divided the words on the oracle bone into four units of meaning.
They are the pre-word, the virgin word, the divination word and the examination word.
The so-called pre-word mainly refers to the date of divination and the person who asked the question; the zhenci mainly records the specific content of the divination; the oracle word is the information obtained by judging the pattern of the oracle bone after being burned. The final part of the test refers to whether the test results are accurate from the previous predictions.
Among them, the value of chastity is the highest, he is an indispensable part of the divination text, and he is also one of the main objects of our cracking.
In order to restore the secret behind the text as much as possible, the Chinese Character Museum once issued an announcement, saying that anyone who can crack the oracle bone text will be rewarded with a single word of 100,000 yuan.
New interpretations of controversial texts can be given, and a reward of 50,000 yuan is awarded after identification.
Such a high reward has never been paid attention to, mainly because the deciphering of oracle bones is very hard, and it is difficult to make new breakthroughs based on personal efforts alone.
There are many ways to decipher the oracle bone, and the traditional way is mostly to explore the meaning of the text from the structure of the Chinese character itself.
For example, people often compare bronze inscriptions similar to the oracle bone era, and decipher the oracle bone by discovering the laws between the two. But this method of deciphering also has many limitations.
Later linguists Mr. Tang Shengzhou and Mr. Yang Tingshuo pioneered the deciphering of historical anthropology.
Nowadays, with the combination of the old and new methods, people have taken another step forward in the deciphering of oracle bones.
In the three years since the Chinese Character Museum issued this award statement, only one person has taken away the 100,000 yuan prize by relying on a "stupid" word.
And this person who cracked the "stupid" word is Jiang Yubin, an expert in ancient characters at Fudan University.
Jiang Yubin believes that the tun character mentioned in the oracle bone is actually a stupid word in modern Chinese, and according to the conventional understanding, the two words "tun" and "stupid" have no connection.
In the ancient book Zhou Yi, Tun is interpreted as something new, with the meaning of birth and beginning. As a kind of hieroglyph, the stupid character is composed of a spring word and two worm characters, which is believed to represent the desire of the hibernating sting to break through the ground to obtain a new life when spring arrives. And the meaning of ignorance represented by the stupid word we think of now is actually added by later generations.
Stupid characters in ancient Chinese are not stupid meanings, but on the contrary, they contain new meanings, and more importantly, after replacing the tun characters in the oracle bone with stupid characters, both the writing logic and the language logic can make sense.
Nowadays, with the continuous increase of excavated materials and the development of computer information technology, the overall research level of oracle bone script has reached an unprecedented height.
In the future, the secrets behind Oracle will also be discovered one by one.