How did ancient Chinese kings predict the future with turtle shells? Why did a Shang dynasty king use turtle shells and to resolve his terrible toothache?

Learn more about ancient Chinese oracle bones from the Shang dynasty

Join us on an incredible journey back in time to ancient China during the Shang dynasty, where kings used turtle shells and animal bones to predict the future and find answers to their questions. Discover how King Wu Ding used divination to try to resolve his annoying toothache and learn about China’s earliest writing system.

Watch to uncover the secrets of the oldest writings on ancient Chinese oracle bones!

Main artworks:

1. Two oracle bones, Shang Dynasty, 13th–12th centuries BCE, China, Musée Guimet, Paris, France

National Learning Standards

World History

NSS-WH.5-12.2 ERA 2: EARLY CIVILIZATIONS AND THE EMERGENCE OF PASTORAL PEOPLES, 4000-1000 BCE

Video Transcript

Hi there, brave time-travelers! I'm Cortney! Did you know there were kings in ancient China that used turtle shells and animal bones to make predictions about the future and get answers to their questions like using a Magic 8 ball?! Well, fasten your seat belts, because today we are traveling far into the distant past to meet a king with a really annoying toothache. And guess what? He thought he could fix it by tapping a turtle shell with a super-hot metal stick! Okay, are you ready to blast through time?! Commencing countdown, engines on. 3, 2, 1 .  .

Whew! That was quite a journey! We just traveled 3,000 years into the past and we landed in a city in ancient China called Yin. Yin was the home to King Wu Ding and his wife Queen Fu Hao. Wu Ding was king of the Shang dynasty, a powerful kingdom that once controlled north China. Around the time King Wu Ding lived, writing was invented for the first time in China and people started to keep records of special events.

Fun fact! The writing system that was invented over 3,000 years ago in China is an older version of the same writing system used in China today! The big difference is that during the Shang dynasty writing was mainly done on animal bones, metal, and strips of dried bamboo instead of on paper.

We know from writing left behind on turtle shells and animal bones that King Wu Ding of the Shang had a lot of worries. He worried about keeping his kingdom safe, making sure everyone had enough to eat, and even about his own health and his family's well-being. He was worried about bad luck too, especially the kind that might show up unexpectedly like bad weather!

Like many groups of people around the world, the Shang people had a belief system. A belief system is a set of ideas—it’s your own special way of thinking about how the world works and what's right or wrong. Just like you have your favorite colors or foods, you also have your favorite ideas that you believe are true.

The Shang people believed that their ancestors, like greatgreat grandparents from a long, long time ago, lived in a spirit world and could still affect their lives, sometimes in not-so-good ways.  King Wu Ding blamed his ancestors for all sorts of things, like his toothache and bad dreams. However, he wasn’t exactly sure which ancestor was causing his problems, so he used something cool called divination to figure it out!

So, what is divination exactly? You might think of it as a superpower of fortune-telling! Instead of a Magic 8 ball, King Wu Ding used special turtle shells and animal bones. Today we call these oracle bones. An oracle is a person or thing (like our Shang turtle shells and bones) that can give advice and predict the future! These oracle bones are the same turtle shells and animal bones that were later used to record special events.  Guess what special event was recorded on them? The king’s divination ceremony.

Before the divination ceremony, the turtle shells and the animal bones were cleaned up and polished. On one side little circle marks were drilled into the bones. This was the side that would be used for the divination. To find out what he wanted to know, the king tapped the circle marks with a hot metal stick to make the shell crack. It’s a bit like cracking an egg! At the ceremony he tapped two circle marks, one on the left side and one on the right side because he wanted to crack the shell twice. Here’s why:

Imagine the king was trying to figure out which ancestor was causing his toothache. While he struck the shell on the left side, he would call out “Grandfather Jia is causing my toothache!” The shell would crack where the king struck the shell and it would make a loud “puck!” sound. Then he would strike the shell on the right side and call out “Grandfather Jia is NOT causing my toothache.” Again, PUCK! The shell would crack. The king would then read both cracks to try to determine if Grandfather Jia was the culprit causing his toothache. You might think of the king reading the cracks as being kind of like reading tea leaves to find something out! If the King divined that Grandfather Jia was causing his toothache, he would then place delicious foods and drinks at his grandfather’s resting place. He did this hoping he could make his grandfather happy enough in the spirit world so that he’d leave the king’s poor teeth alone!

How do we know all of this? Well, after the divination ceremonies were over, a special writer called a scribe would carve everything that happened at the ceremony on the back of the shell.  Notice how the shell is flat, instead of curved. This is because the lower part of the turtle shell was used for the ceremony. Using the lower flat part of the shell, which is called a plastron, probably made it easier for the scribe to write the record, just like we like to write on flat surfaces today. It also made it easier to store the shells after they were used, because they could be stacked one on top of the other.

The records carved into the shells are like secret messages from the past! They are the oldest writings found in China. They tell us about what the Shang kings cared about and about their belief system.

So, there you have it, our incredible journey back in time to meet King Wu Ding and learn how he solved his toothache troubles using turtle shells like a Magic 8 ball!