Question

name the animals used for the oracle bones​

Answer 1

Answer:

Explanation:

Oracle bones (Chinese: 甲骨; pinyin: jiǎgǔ) are pieces of ox scapula or turtle plastron, which were used for pyromancy – a form of divination – in ancient China, mainly during the late Shang dynasty. Scapulimancy is the correct term if ox scapulae were used for the divination, plastromancy if turtle plastrons were used.

Answer 2

Answer:

Explanation:

Oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文) was the form of Chinese characters used on oracle bones—animal bones or turtle plastrons used in pyromantic divination—in the late 2nd millennium BC, and is the earliest known form of Chinese writing. The vast majority, amounting to over 50,000 inscribed items, were found at the Yinxu site (in Xiaotun, near modern Anyang, Henan Province). They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty,[a] beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BC or 1200 BC.[1][2] After the Shang were overthrown by the Zhou dynasty in c. 1046 BC, divining with milfoil became more common, and a much smaller corpus of oracle bone writings date from the Western Zhou.[3] Thus far, no Zhou sites have been found with a cache of inscriptions on the same scale as that at Yinxu, although inscribed oracle bones appear to be more widespread, being found near most major population centers of the time, and new sites have continued to be discovered since 2000.[4]

The late Shang oracle bone writings, along with a few roughly contemporaneous inscription in a different style cast in bronzes, constitute the earliest[5] significant corpus of Chinese writing, which is essential for the study of Chinese etymology, as Shang writing is directly ancestral to the modern Chinese script. It is the oldest known member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts, preceding the bronzeware script and making it the direct ancestor of over a dozen East Asian writing systems developed over the next three millennia, including the Chinese and Japanese logographic and syllabaric scripts still in current use. In terms of content, the inscriptions, which range from under ten characters for incomplete prognostications to over 100 characters in rare cases (a few dozen being typical), deal with a wide range of topics, including war, ritual sacrifice, agriculture, as well as births, illnesses, and deaths in the royal family. Thus, they provide invaluable insight into late Shang dynasty civilization and society.