What are the best resources for studying oracle bone inscriptions?
score:8
Accepted answer
I don't know how useful this will be to you but hopefully these links will at least lead you to what you are looking for.
The British Library has more than 450 oracle bones and there are some links on the page, such as a pdf catalog and digitized manuscripts. You could write them and ask if these have translations to view and they should know where you can get the vast catalogs you want.
https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/chinese-oracle-bones
Cambridge University Library has a collection of 614 oracle bones and they are creating a digital library.
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-year-old-chinese-oracle-bones-d.html
http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-CUL-00001-00155/1
The British Library page mentions the collectors Samuel Couling and Frank Chalfant. Googling turned up a book by Chalfant called 'Early Chinese writing' on the internet archive.
https://archive.org/details/earlychinesewrit01chal/page/n3
Googling also turned up a book by David Keightley called 'Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China'. Even if it doesn't have lots of inscriptions, the bibliography should lead you to what you want (but its $120 on Amazon).
https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Shang-History-Oracle-Bone-Inscriptions/dp/0520054555
Some background information and additional sources on oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文):
- David Keightley, who passed away last year, was the leading American scholar on Early China, and has written extensively on archeology of oracle bone as well as interpretation of these scripts. One of his last works is These Bones Shall Rise Again : Selected Writings on Early China (SUNY, 2015) which summarises in one volume his work on this subject.
- Sun Yirang was the first Chinese scholar to decipher the oracle bone script, and his book is available in digital format ctext.org. It was published posthumously by Lu Zhenyou, who is himself a philologist. Unfortunately, none of their work is published in bi-lingual format (to my knowledge).
- In terms bi-lingual work or current scholars who can do this, a leading candidate (my opinion) is historian and archaeologist Li Feng, at Columbia University. He is multilingual, with expertise in bronze script, which is closely related oracle bone script.
- You can find more pictures and material on oracle bones if you search online for Yinxu Archaeology Project, "Yinxu inscriptions" or combination of related words because this is the actual location, and it's close to Anyang.
- A Chinese source, sometimes with bi-lingual publications is Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (website)
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