Oracle bone script is the oldest attested form of written Chinese, dating to the late 2nd millennium BC.

The writings themselves mainly record the results of official divinations carried out on behalf of the Late Shang royal family.

These divinations took the form of scapulimancy where the oracle bones were exposed to flames, creating patterns of cracks that were then subjected to interpretation.

Out of an estimated 150,000 inscriptions that have been uncovered, the vast majority were unearthed at Yinxu, the site of the final Shang capital (modern-day Anyang, Henan).

The subjects of concern in inscriptions are broad, and include war, ritual sacrifice, and agriculture, as well as births, illnesses, and deaths in the royal family.

It is known that the Shang people also wrote with brush and ink, as brush-written graphs have been found on a small number of pottery, shell and bone, and jade and other stone items,[14] and there is evidence that they also wrote on bamboo (or wooden) books[b] just like those found from the late Zhou to Han periods, because the graphs for a writing brush (聿 yù, depicting a hand holding a writing brush[c]) and bamboo book (冊 cè, a book of thin bamboo and wooden slips bound with horizontal strings, like a Venetian blind turned 90 degrees), are present in oracle bone inscriptions.

[15] Additional support for this notion includes the reorientation of some graphs,[e] by rotating them 90 degrees, as if to better fit on tall, narrow slats.

[18] Columns of text in Chinese writing are traditionally laid out from right to left; this pattern is first found with the Shang-era bronze inscriptions.

[16] Despite the pictorial nature of the oracle bone script, it was a fully functional and mature writing system by the time of the Shang dynasty,[19] meaning it was able to record the Old Chinese language, and not merely fragments of ideas or words.

[14] By the late Shang, oracle bone graphs had already evolved into mostly non-pictographic forms,[citation needed] including all the major types of Chinese characters now in use.

A graph when inverted horizontally generally refers to the same word, and additional components are sometimes present without changing the meaning.

In other cases, the character may be assumed to be a phono-semantic compound, and a rough meaning can be inferred based on the semantic component.

This character may reasonably be guessed to a compound with 示 'altar' as the semantic and 升 (modern reading sheng) as the phonetic.

[24] Though no modern character consists of these two components, it likely refers to a type of Shang dynasty ritual with a name similar to the pronunciation of 升 in Old Chinese.

[h] In the same collection of fragments, the character ⟨阝心⟩ was surmised to be a place name, since the semantic component 阜 means 'mound', 'hill', and the divination concerned the king traveling for a royal hunt.

In August 1977, a cache containing thousands of Zhou-era oracle bones was discovered at a site closely linked to the ancient Zhou heartland.

Wang translated the sentence as: "Prognostication on the day dingwei: if the king performs the sheng sacrifice, will it benefit Ancestor Wu?"