We don’t know a whole lot about the life of Wang Yirong. We know that he was a distinguished calligrapher at the Chinese Imperial Academy. We know that he was swept up in the chaos of the Boxer Rebellion, and eventually forced to take on a military role. When his position was overwhelmed by foreign troops, he and his family committed suicide. He was 55 years old.
But before he died, Wang made a crucial discovery that changed our understanding of history and saved countless historical artifacts.
You see, Wang fell ill in 1899. He went to a pharmacist, who made him a traditional medicine containing powder from “dragon bones.” He caught a look at the bones before they were destroyed, and realized that they looked very old — and had something that looked like writing on them. Wang asked the man if he could buy some intact bones. He took them home and realized that they did contain writing, and that this writing might be very ancient.
Wang pressed the pharmacist to reveal where the bones had come from. The man refused, not wanting to give up his trade secrets. But Wang began to go from pharmacist to pharmacist, buying up as many “dragon bones” as he could and transcribing the writing he found on them.
The bones weren’t from dragons, of course. They were much more interesting than that. Though they had come from ordinary animals (they were mostly turtle shells and ox bones), Wang realized that they contained primitive characters — the oldest version of Chinese writing ever discovered, dating to the Shang Dynasty in the 1000s BCE.
Then Wang got embroiled in the war and died. His friend, Liu E, took over the research and published their findings. Eventually, the pharmacists’ secret was revealed — the bones came from the old capital of the Shang near Anyang. There were thousands of them, buried in pits like this:
Scholars rushed to acquire these priceless artifacts before they could be turned into powder. They managed to save thousands of them, thanks to Wang’s discovery.
What was the oldest Chinese writing about? Was it economic records? Epic sagas? Royal decrees?
No, none of that. The bones contained just one thing: messages to the gods. They were evidence of the importance of divination — the art of trying to communicate with the gods or predict the future — in ancient China.
Divination was a key feature of many historic religions, which devised some, shall we say, creative ways to try to discern the will of the gods.
Let’s start with the “oracle bones” of China. As far as historians can tell, the divination ceremony worked like this: priests, under the supervision of the king himself, would select a bone, usually a flat one like the chest plate of a turtle shell or the scapula of an ox. They would write a statement on the bone for the gods to confirm or deny.
What did ancient Chinese kings want to know from the gods? Sometimes, they asked about the health of the royal family: which ancestor has cursed the king with a sick tooth? They inquired a lot about the upcoming weather: there are a lot of oracle bones that mention rain. Other times, they consulted about matters of state: should we go to war?
The bones contained a simplified, pictographic Chinese script:
These bones are full of cracks, and the cracks aren’t all from their age of three thousand years. Priests drilled holes into the bones to make them crack more easily — here’s the underside of one:
The bones would be exposed to heat, which would make them crack. The diviners would then “read” the patterns, interpreting them as messages from the gods. The random — or maybe not so random, given that priests could manipulate the patterns by drilling certain holes a little deeper — cracks on these bones guided the rulers of China in all the most important matters of state.
Nobody knows how and why the practice of reading oracle bones emerged. It makes sense that ancient people wanted to understand the will of the gods, but exactly how they got to writing messages on the shoulder blades of cows and then heating them until they cracked is a mystery. Though ancient Chinese divination may seem like a strange practice, it’s by no means the weirdest. That honor probably goes to haruspicy, the practice of examining sheep livers to divine the future.
This practice went back even farther in time than oracle bones, and it was quite widespread. The oldest evidence we have of liver-based divination dates back almost 4,000 years, and the practice eventually spread all over the Near East and Mediterranean, from Mesopotamia to Rome.
What were priests supposed to be looking for in the livers of sacrificed sheep? They often owned little guides to help them inspect the organs. Here’s an ancient Babylonian one, made of clay:
Religious officials would look for deformities and unusual features — a hard or soft spot, shiny or dull surface — and interpret them. This practice spread throughout the Near East (it appears in the Jewish scriptures) and eventually ended up a part of Etruscan culture. This Etruscan jug handle shows a haruspex (aka liver inspector) peering into an organ for signs from the gods:
The most famous Etruscan haruspicy artifact is the “Liver of Piacenza,” a bronze liver model used to train priests:
The Romans adopted this practice along with a lot of other Etruscan culture. Suetonius chronicled the importance of rituals like these in his history of Augustus who, just after taking the throne, proceeded to kill some sheep:
…On the first day he [Augustus] was in power, the livers of six victims were found with the bottom of their tissue folded back inward, and this was interpreted to mean that he would double his power within a year.
In fact, Romans didn’t just look at the livers, and not just sheep. Their priests looked at the lungs, hearts, and entrails of all sorts of animals. Here they are inspecting a cow in a sculpture from Trajan’s Forum:
The priests who did this were fairly big shots — here’s a fancy gravestone for a “Haruspex Maximus.”
In the Islamic world, they tended to perform divination with a little less blood. One of the primary forms of fortune-telling there was bibliomancy, in which people would flip open a book to a random page, plunk down their finger, and then interpret their future based on the image or text they had selected. Sometimes this was done with the Quran, but Persian people in the 1500s and 1600s produced books full of lavishly decorated paintings for the practice.
This image would have been a positive omen — it shows the story of the “Seven Sleepers,” who kept themselves safe by sleeping in a cave for centuries:
This one would have augured healing, as it shows Mohammad curing a sick child:
And this one depicts a story in which the Imam Ali, his face hidden by a veil and fire, takes his own body to be buried:
Palmistry — the art of reading the lines on people’s palms — is another form of fortune-telling that dates back to ancient times. It became especially popular in the Renaissance, captured here in this jaunty painting by Caravaggio:
Like the liver-inspectors, palm-readers needed a guide, like this one from 1648:
Or this one from an anatomy book first published in the 1500s:
We may not be extracting and palpating sheep livers to tell the future anymore, but the human instinct to try to tell the future is still alive and well. Some of the old methods are still alive — astrology, tarot cards, etc. — and we’ve developed some new ones, too. Personally, I seem to be drawn to incessant googling, hoping that somewhere, deep in a Reddit thread, I’ll be told whether it’s definitively a good idea to buy a new car or refinance my mortgage.
The alternative — that we live in a universe governed by random chance and that there’s no way to tell what will happen, or why — is pretty scary. Might as well write a message on a turtle shell and see if the gods respond.
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Another fascinating post!!