Meteorological Records from the Divination Inscriptions of Shang

Abstract

FIG. I According to traditional chronology, which has been broadly confirmed by modern research, China's early historical dynasty Shang (or Yin) ruled for a period that ended in about I 100 B.c. and began 500-600 years before.1 Excavations, undertaken partly for practical purposes, partly with an archeological aim, led to a series of thrilling scientific findings, including Peking Man and China's Red and Black Pottery culture.2 The discoveries also included the now famous oracle inscriptions of Shang from the site of Yin Hsui, the late Shang capital, near Anyang in northern Honan (Fig. 1).3 Besides bronze vessels of great perfection and other objects of bronze, stone, or bone, the site yielded fossil bones of various kinds. Many of the bones were obviously nothing but the remains of hunted or domesticated animals; but a large fraction of them, and some tortoise shells also, bore curious markings, which careful investigation revealed to be a very early form of Chinese script. A group of brilliant Chinese experts and a few equally brilliant Western scholars began to decipher the queer texts. Today, forty years after the discovery of the oracle bones and about thirty-five years after the first attempts to read them, more than two dozen collections have been made4 and a large part of the inscriptions deciphered. The civilization of Shang as revealed by the inscriptions and other archeological findings in Anyang represented a relatively advanced type. A complicated script was used to communicate with the magic world. In most cases the text was intended directly or indirectly