Chapter 15 Section 6 Newly Discovered Western Zhou Oracle Bone Inscriptions After 1949

In 1977, during the excavation of the ancestral temple site of the Xizhou Palace in Fengchu Village, Qishan, Shaanxi, more than 17,000 pieces of tortoise shells and ox bones were found in a cellar in the second room of the West Wing.Most of them are tortoise shells, and 289 of them are engraved with oracle inscriptions. Each piece has a small number of characters, and the largest one has 30 characters.Its content includes offering sacrifices to Shang Wang Wuyi, Wen Ding, and Emperor Yi, some divination and asking Shang Wang's field hunting, some records about Zhou Wang's important officials Taibao and Bi Gong, and some records about "Fighting Shu" and "Chuzi came to sue" , there are records of Yi hexagrams and hexagrams, etc., which provide important materials for the study of the history of the late Shang Dynasty and the early Western Zhou Dynasty.In addition, since 1949, oracle bone inscriptions of the Western Zhou Dynasty have also been discovered in Hongdong Fangdui in Shanxi, Zhangjiapo in Chang'an, Shaanxi, Qijia in Fufeng, Shaanxi, Baifu in Changping, Beijing, Jiangying in Fangshan, and Nanxiaowang in Xingtai, Hebei.The oracle bone inscriptions of the Western Zhou Dynasty are characterized by extremely small and slender, which shows that the engraving technique is very skilled and superb. Before 1949, only the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty were discovered, and the discovery of the oracle bone inscriptions of the Western Zhou Dynasty is one of the major achievements of archaeological work since 1949.