Chinese Oracle Bones

L. CARRINGTON GOODRICH
 

. N THE beautiful doors of the annex to the Library of
Congress are inscribed the names of the legendary crea¬
tors of script in various parts of the world: Thoth,
Ts'ang Chieh, Nabu, Brahma, Cadmus, and Tabmurath. The
Chinese hero is second in the list. When he lived we can only
guess. Until sixty years ago the oldest Chinese writing in existence
was thought to be on certain Chinese bronze vessels dating from
the beginning of the first millennium before our era. This writing
was already so conventionalized, however, that one was safe in
assuming that man in eastern Asia must have developed it over
a long stretch of time. Then around the year 1899 curious little
fragments of bone and tortoise shell, bearing inscribed characters
somewhat like but more primitive than those on the bronzes, began
appearing in a few antiquary shops. What was their use? How old
were they? '^^^lere were they found? Only two Chinese scholars
started work on their decipherment at first, as the time was greatly
out of joint. (In fact, this was the year the Society of Boxers began
its bid for po\ver, and one of the first scholarly investigators, a
courageous official, took his own life in 1900 because of the
humiliation suffered by the imperial court at this time.)

In the decade which followed, a number of other scholars took
up the inquiry, among them at least three foreigners: one Ger¬
man, one Scot, and one American. In fact, the last, the Rev. Dr.
Frank H. Chalfont, was the first to make the script known to the
western world; see his Early Chinese Writing {Memoirs of the
Carnegie Museum IV, i, Sept. 1906). Part of his collection of
bones and tortoise shells is in Pittsburgh, part in Chicago, and
part in Princeton. His writings, including the manuscript of a
Syllabary of all characters found (some 3,000 including variants),