The first Chinese writing we can still read
Before bazi, before the I Ching, Shang diviners heated bone and read the cracks. The questions they carved into those bones are the earliest surviving Chinese writing.
A question, a bone, a fire
Late Shang divination (roughly 1250–1050 BCE) used turtle plastrons and ox scapulae. A diviner prepared the bone, bored hollows into the back, and applied heat. The heat produced a crack on the front — a 兆 (zhào) — and the crack was read as an answer. The king or a named diviner often performed the reading; the question, the day, and sometimes the outcome were then carved beside the crack.
These are not fortune-telling cards. They are administrative and ritual records: the Shang court asking whether the harvest would be good, whether a campaign would succeed, whether rain was coming, whether a birth would be safe, or which ancestor was causing an illness.
What they asked
- Harvest, hunting, and the condition of the fields.
- Weather, rain, drought, and the favour of sky powers.
- War, alliances, and the movements of neighbouring groups.
- Childbirth, illness, dreams, and ancestral displeasure.
- Sacrifice: which ancestor, which offering, which day.
The bone was a medium, not a horoscope. The answer was a crack; the inscription is the court’s record of the question and its response. Reading it well requires knowing the diviner, the reign, and the formulaic language of the inscription — which is why the academic editions behind the glyphs matter.
From picture to character
These nine graphs are public-domain vector tracings based on the Sinica Database’s oracle-bone records. Each one is still recognisable in the modern character beside it.
A cluster of small marks around a centre — the early graph for “stars”.
A circle with a mark inside: the sun, and by extension the day.
A crescent: the moon, and the month it measures.
A human figure with an emphasised head — sky/heaven above the person.
A person seen in profile: the simplest graph for a human being.
A person carrying grain — the harvest, and the year that contains it.
The shape of a crack in heated bone — the act of divination itself.
Rain falling from the sky, drawn as drops beneath a cover.
A ceremonial axe-head — the early graph for royal authority.
What this is not
Oracle-bone divination is not the coin oracle, and it is not the bazi or ziwei chart. It is a different technique from a different millennium: heat and cracks, not coins and hexagrams; Shang court questions, not a personal birth chart. We use the script as a visual and historical layer, not as a claim that any of these systems are the same practice.
The glyphs are also not a font. They are individual scholarly tracings, not a typeface that can set a sentence; we keep them as images and never use them as decorative “ancient” body text.
Sources and credits
All nine vector images are public-domain files from the Ancient Chinese Characters project on Wikimedia Commons. Their source records point to the Sinica Database (CC0), with plate references recorded per glyph in our repository. The historical framing also draws on the Tsinghua “Remarkable Oracle Bone Script” exhibition and 殷契文渊, an oracle-bone database at Anyang Normal University.
Public-domain tracings; translation and framing by Court of Stars. For reflection and education. Not medical, legal, or financial advice.