(soft piano music)
- [Narrator] We're in the Shanghai Museum,
and we're looking at a
very early Oracle Bone.
And this is so important
because this brings us
to the very beginnings of
writing in ancient China.
- [Narrator] The Oracle
Bone is on an ox scapula,
so it's actually the shoulder blade here
that you can see carved
little tiny characters
from the right to the
left, all in little lines.
- [Narrator] And those
characters are still,
many of them, recognizable
as Chinese characters today.
- [Narrator] Yeah, about
40% of them, actually
are decipherable, and we
have tons of these remaining.
We have about 200,000 of them.
- [Narrator] We're not
really used to the idea
in the west that we could read writing
that's more than 3,000 years old.
- [Narrator] And, of course,
this is really important,
because you can read history through it.
When we have a group of
these objects together,
we can look back and
see how things evolved
on this particular year, what
kinds of concerns people had.
- [Narrator] It's an Oracle Bone,
so we know that it something
that could divine the future,
that could help people understand
what the future might bring.
- [Narrator] They would get these bones,
they would inscribe the questions on them,
and then a diviner would come
and use a particular ritual
that involved a heated rod, a metal rod,
that they would touch to the bone,
and the way that the cracks would evolve
on the questions would divine the future.
- [Narrator] So the cracks
would be read by someone
who had a kind of special power.
- [Narrator] The questions
were all directed
toward somebody named Shangdi,
the deified ancestor of
the Shang royal cult.
And we're talking about the Shang Dynasty,
this is in the cradle of civilization,
the Yellow River Valley, the capital.
And the kinds of questions
that people would ask
would involve everything from
the very mundane to ritualistic things.
When should a sacrifice be performed,
a particular rite of worship.
This one we're looking
at, a question about
the bumper harvest, when to be planting.
- [Narrator] And, ancestor worship
was incredibly important
during the Shang Dynasty,
and that's something that will change with
the next dynasty, the Zhou Dynasty.
- [Narrator] Now, when
we get into the Zhou,
we see a different concept of the divine.
- [Narrator] So, Shangdi
was the particular
ancestor/god of the Shang Dynasty.
- Exactly, royalty.
- And it makes sense with the
- next dynasty--
- Exactly (drowned out).
- you'd have to adjust that.
- You'd have to adjust.
- [Narrator] So, we see these on,
especially on scapula of oxen,
but also other animal bones,
and also tortoise shell.
- [Narrator] Tortoise shell
is another favorite medium,
probably also as tortoise
was an important mythological
creature from very early times.
But, here, you can see that
the medium itself is very flat,
it's a good surface to carve into.
And, when we're looking
at these kinds of things,
keep in mind that this is what we have.
We have bones, these
stood the test of time,
but that doesn't mean that there
wasn't also writing on other things.
- [Narrator] And the
writing that we're seeing,
we know that Chinese
characters stand for words,
but, perhaps, at this time in history,
the signs that we're seeing
are more pictographic--
- Yeah, they've been--
- until it evolved.
- [Narrator] Yeah, they've
been slowly decoded
and, actually, art historians have spent
quite a bit of time
trying to decipher this,
enough so that we can read them,
but, at this point, writing
is a functional medium.
It's to communicate, in
this example, with the gods.
Eventually, it evolves into calligraphy,
which becomes this art form.
- [Narrator] And, so, the
importance of Chinese writing
here in this very early moment.
- [Narrator] A lot of major developments
in Chinese society right, we've got
centralized power as a
major theme coming out
of the writing, the idea
that people can communicate
and organize, and this idea
of creating a history here.
- [Narrator] And, so
lucky that we can at least
untangle 40% of it,
- Yeah, 40%.
- of these thousands
of bones that survive.
- Exactly.
- And, one day,
we'll understand even more of them.
- [Narrator] Even more of them, exactly.
(piano music)