Oracle bones are pieces of bone or turtle shell used in royal divination in the mid Shang to early Zhou dynasties in ancient China, and often bearing written inscriptions in what is called oracle bone script. Oracle bone script (literally "shell bone writing") refers to incised (or, rarely, brush-written) ancient Chinese characters found on oracle bones, which are animal bones or turtle shells used in divination in ancient China. The vast majority of the such bones are ox scapulae and tortoise plastrons which record the pyromantic divinations of the royal house of the late Shang dynasty, primarily at the capital of Yin (modern Anyang, Henan Province), and date from around 1200-1050 B.C. A few are from Zhengzhou and date to earlier in the dynasty, around the 16th to 14th centuries BC[citation needed], while a very few date to the beginning of the subsequent Zhou dynasty. The late Shang oracle bone writings, along with a few contemporary characters in cast bronzes, constitute the earliest significant corpus of Chinese writing, but contrary to popular belief are not the earliest Chinese characters. Some have proposed that oracle bone script is linked with Jiahu Script.
