Oracle bone script was an ancestor of modern Chinese characters engraved 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 about 150,000 pieces, were found at the Yinxu site located in Xiaotun Village, Anyang City, Henan Province. The latest significant discovery is the Huayuanzhuang storage of 1,608 pieces, 579 of which were inscribed, found near Xiaotun in 1993.They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty,beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BC or 1200 BC. 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.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.
