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The Oracle Mystery

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The term of Oracle Bones is familiar to many of the students around the world, whether in the United States or in China. Finding out the background and mystery behind Oracle Bones and seeking out its relationships to other cultures especially interest me basically because it represents the origin of my mother language - Mandarin. According to Richard R. Wertz in Oracle Bones, the Oracle Bones, also called “Dragon Bones”, referring to bronze vessels, shell fragments, plastron, or ox scapula, have the earliest characters and forms of Chinese writing incised or brushed on it. The characters mostly flourished and widely used in Shang Dynasty in a very complex system (1766 BC–1122 BC). However, the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier. This form then evolved for quite a long time into the well-developed modern styles of Chinese calligraphy. Unlike most of the western languages that are considered as “phonograms”, scripts and symbols on Oracle Bones are mostly “logograms”, commonly known as “ideograms”, which represents ideas directly rather than words and morphemes (Wertz). The characters from the picture shown on the right are extracted from original Oracle Bones in Shang Dynasty, retrieved from Ancient Scripts: Chinese, an online library collected sufficient source of ancient languages. It has been translated as “Today, will it rain?” by Lawrence Lo. Finally, the purpose of Oracle Bones is brightened. Besides the use as the proof of contract in business or keeping records on the of events. “Today, will it rain?” by Lawrence Loby the royal family or misconduct of some disobedient soldiers during a campaign, it has also been used in the practice of divination (Li 156). According to Richard R. Wertz, priests would carve both positive and negative outcomes of the divination onto the bone and the patterns on the appearance of the cracks would predict the future events

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