概要
甲骨文字
紀元前1200年ごろ、殷の占いに用いられた中国最初の文字。亀の甲や獣の骨に熱した青銅の棒を当て、生じた割れ目を見て占い、その内容を刻んだものが甲骨文である。漢字の直接の祖先であり、いまの漢字の原型をここに見ることができる。象形・指事・会意・形声・転注・仮借という六書の原理も、すでにこの段階で定まっていた。甲骨文に始まる漢字の体系は、3200年を経たいまも生きている。19世紀末、薬屋で「竜骨」として売られていたものが古代の文字だと判明し、学界を驚かせた。
文字
Signs · Unicode · Types解読
薬屋から学界へ（1899〜現在）以前
Until oracle bones came to light, scholars regarded the Shang dynasty — recorded in Sima Qian's "Records of the Grand Historian" — as myth and legend. Meanwhile, for decades, farmers in Xiaotun village (Anyang, Henan) had been digging up bone fragments and selling them to apothecaries as "dragon bones," to be ground into hemostatic and analgesic powders. Inscribed bones actually fetched lower prices, and shopkeepers sometimes scraped off the writing to raise the value.
突破
In 1899, the paleographer Wang Yirong — sick with malaria — recognized inscriptions on a bone fragment he had pulled from his boiled prescription. He immediately bought up every inscribed bone in the Beijing apothecaries: ~1,500 pieces in that year alone. In 1903 his friend Liu E published "Tieyun canggui," bringing oracle bones into scholarship; in 1908 Luo Zhenyu traced the source to Xiaotun in Anyang, opening the way to systematic excavation.
以後
Systematic excavation by Academia Sinica began in 1928; to date ~160,000 fragments have been recovered, yielding ~5,000 distinct characters of which ~1,500 are deciphered. The king names on the bones match Sima Qian's Shang genealogies exactly — turning legend into history. China's International Center for Oracle Bone Studies now offers a 100,000-yuan (~$14,000) bounty for each newly decoded character, encouraging AI-assisted attempts. Oracle bones are the direct ancestor of modern Chinese characters — a still-living writing system 3,200 years on.