Thanks to the process of digitising you can closely examine a 3000 year old Chinese oracle bone

by fulltimestudent 2 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  fulltimestudent

  Quote: "Cambridge University Library, which is celebrating its 600th anniversary this year, holds 614 Chinese inscribed oracle bones in its collection. They are the oldest extant documents written in the Chinese language, dating from 1339-1112 BCE. Inscribed on ox shoulder blades and the flat under-part of turtle shells, they record questions to which answers were sought by divination at the court of the royal house of Shang, which ruled north central China at that time.

  The inscriptions on the bones provide much insight into many aspects of early Chinese society, such as warfare, agriculture, hunting, medical problems, meteorology and astronomy.

  Among the latter is a record of a lunar eclipse dated to 1192 BCE, one of the earliest such accounts in any civilisation."

  Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-year-old-chinese-oracle-bones-d.html

  With a bit of luck this next reference may bring a copy of the digitised image to this thread. If it doesnt, you can access it from the main link above.

  https://skfb.ly/JzSD

  So you'll have to click on the link (just above) to access the image. Then you can have a play with it, turn it over, zoom in close.

  The side bar carries this information.

  The oracle bone texts are the oldest extant documents written in the Chinese language. Inscribed on ox shoulder-blades and the flat under-part of turtle shells, they record questions to which answers were sought by divination at the court of the royal house of Shang 商, which ruled central China between the 16th and 11th centuries B.C.E. For further information follow these links http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-CUL-00001-00155/5 http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/mulu/bones.html
• 

  fulltimestudent

  China was not the only culture to attempt to divine the future through such a process.

  The wikipedia entry, dealing with these objects seems fairly accurate (at least to the extent that we presently understand it), and says in part:

  "While the use of bones in divination has been practiced almost globally, such divination involving fire or heat has generally been found in Asia and the Asian-derived North American cultures.[36] The use of heat to crack scapulae (pyro-scapulimancy) originated in ancient China, the earliest evidence of which extends back to the 4th millennium BCE, with archaeological finds from Liaoning, but these were not inscribed.[37] In Neolithic China at a variety of sites, the scapulae of cattle, sheep, pigs and deer used in pyromancy have been found,[38] and the practice appears to have become quite common by the end of the third millennium BCE. Scapulae were unearthed along with smaller numbers of pitless plastrons in the Nánguānwài (南關外) stage at Zhengzhou, Henan; scapulae as well as smaller numbers of plastrons with chiseled pits were also discovered in the Lower and Upper Erligang stages.[39]

  David Keightley's books may also be helpful:

  • Keightley, David N. (1978). Sources of Shang history : the oracle-bone inscriptions of Bronze Age China. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02969-0.; Paperback 2nd edition (1985) ISBN 0-520-05455-5.
  • Keightley, David N. (2000). The ancestral landscape: time, space, and community in late Shang China, ca. 1200-1045 B.C (2nd print. ed.). Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-070-9.

  Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone
  
  
• 

  Earnest

  Cambridge University Library also holds the Cairo Genizah collection which contains many Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic mss which were preserved between the tenth and nineteenth centuries because they contained God's name or reference to him. Interestingly, these mss are preserved by both the rabbinic and Karaite streams of Judaism. Most of the mss have been converted to digital form and can be accessed at the Cambridge Digital Library.