“The earliest record of written Chinese is inscriptions carved on turtle shells and oxen shoulder blades excavated from the ruins of the Shang dynasty (sixteenth to eleventh centuries BCE) capital at modern Anyang in Henan province. This type of writing is usually called “oracle-bone script,” and it was carved there for the purpose of divination. It was first discovered accidentally in Anyang in 1899 after a Qing-dynasty scholar, Wang Yirong, who was an expert on bronze script, found a strong resemblance between bronze script and the carvings on some “dragon bones” that had supposedly some curative powers and were perhaps given to him as part of a medicinal prescription. Currently, over 100,000 pieces of shells and bones with engraved script have been recovered through excavation in Anyang. A total of about 3,700 different characters have been identified from these artifacts; however, only about 2,000 of them have so far been deciphered. Closely related to the oracle-bone script is the bronze script that is carved on the surface of bronze vessels supposedly placed in palaces and used for sacrificial ceremonies at the times of Shang and Western Zhou dynasties.”

—Chaofen Sun, from Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction, 2006.