Oracle Bone Inscriptions: A New Exploration of the Three-Thousand-Year-Old Chinese Writing System

This book presents a systematic re-examination of the Oracle Bone Inscription writing system by integrating up-dated archaeological discoveries and scholarly advances, with the aim of illuminating new aspects of the early evolution of Chinese characters.Building on this foundation, the study identifies variant character groups and tackles fundamental questions concerning the total reservoir of characters, thereby establishing a quantitative framework for further analysis. It outlines key structural features, such as the prevalence of monomeric glyphs and planar composition, and brings to light systemic properties including shallow structural hierarchy, positional flexibility coupled with spatial symmetry and limited functional diversity resulting from low graphic efficiency. Additionally, the work highlights the highly skewed distribution of character frequency, underscoring the primitive stage of the writing system.This book will serve as an essential reference for scholars in the fields of paleography, Chinese historical linguistics and grammatology.

About the Author

Tingzhu Chen is a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She is a leading expert in Oracle Bone Inscriptions (OBI) studies and has published numerous articles in this area. She currently directs the National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC) project, "Development of an Oracle Bone Inscriptions Dataset for Recognition Studies" (Grant No. 24Z300404220).