Anyang

Inscribed bones from the fields around Anyang were being ground up and sold as dragon bones for medicine until a scholar in Beijing recognised the marks on them as archaic Chinese writing in 1899. Systematic excavation began in 1928 and found the last Shang capital: palace foundations, workshops, royal tombs and the pits in which the divination records had been discarded.

The procedure can be reconstructed in detail. An ox shoulder blade or a turtle plastron was cleaned and thinned, and a series of hollows was gouged in the back. A heated point applied to a hollow made the bone crack on the other side with a sharp sound, and the shape of the crack was read as the answer. The charge put to the bone, the date, the diviner's name and sometimes the outcome were then cut into the surface.

What the kings asked about is the closest thing there is to a diary of Bronze Age Chinese religion. Will it rain in the coming ten days. Will the harvest be good. Should this campaign be launched. Is the king's toothache caused by an ancestor, and if so which one. Will Lady Hao's childbearing be fortunate. In the later reigns the king increasingly performed the divination himself and the recorded answers become uniformly favourable, which historians read as a shift in what the ritual was for.

At the top of the Shang order stood Di, a high god who commanded rain, thunder and the fortunes of cities and who is never recorded as receiving sacrifice directly. Approach went through the dead. The royal ancestors were named by the ten day cycle of the week, each receiving offerings on the day matching his name, and over generations these grew into a fixed ritual schedule that ran through the whole year, so that the calendar itself was an ancestral cult. The ancestors could send illness and could also intercede, and a great deal of the divination is concerned with identifying which of them is angry and what will settle it.

Excavation has matched the texts to the ground. The tomb of Fu Hao, found intact in 1976, held hundreds of bronzes, many inscribed with her name, along with jades, weapons and the remains of attendants; the oracle records mention her childbearing, her illness, sacrifices made for her after death, and her leading of troops in the field, which makes her one of the earliest individuals anywhere whose life can be read from both texts and burial.

The royal tombs also contain large numbers of sacrificial burials, headless bodies in rows and separate pits of skulls, and the inscriptions confirm what the pits show, recording the offering of captives in specified numbers on specified occasions. The atlas records this as documented, because it is, in the words of the people who did it.