Shang China and the Oracle Bones

c. 1600 BCE — East Asia, Shang China

Today: The Yellow River valley, China (capital at Anyang)

Along China's Yellow River, the Shang dynasty founded the first Chinese state we can confirm from written records — and those records are extraordinary: questions to royal ancestors scratched onto ox bones and turtle shells, then cracked with heat to read the gods' replies. This 'oracle bone' script is the direct ancestor of the Chinese characters still written today, making it the world's oldest writing system in continuous use. Here writing was invented independently, a second time, half a world from Sumer — for talking not to accountants but to the dead.

Worth knowing: Chinese pharmacists were unknowingly grinding up these inscribed bones as 'dragon bones' for medicine — until a scholar spotted the writing on one in 1899, saving a 3,000-year-old archive that was quite literally being eaten.

Pattern: Information-medium revolution — A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Entry 20 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.