The writing ossécaille is a Chinese writing of before our era.

Many inscriptions were discovered at the end of the 19th century, engraved on bones of animals gǔ (骨), generally of the Omoplate S of bovines ( Scapulomancie ), and on scales of tortoise jiǎ (甲) of the drill plate of the carapace ( plastromancie ), from where its name by the Chinese of writing jiǎgǔwén (甲骨文), literally writing ossécaille .

The majority of the found inscriptions are divinatoires bǔcí (卜辞), this is why one often calls them inscriptions divinatoires or oracular. Thereafter, one realized that certain in fact nothing had to see with the divination, one thus started to distinguish the inscriptions divinatoires bǔcí (卜辞), of the inscriptions not divinatoires fēibǔcí (非卜辞).

Inscriptions divinatoires

The subjects subjected to the divination by scapulomancie were varied, but related to primarily the events of the royal family (birth, death, marriages), forwardings military and requests for tribute, time, harvests and the ritual ones to achieve. At the great time of the scapulomancie Shang, several different cracks were produced for the same question, which was turned differently to each one (affirmative or negative proposal, change of a detail of the sentence as date etc.) because interpretation was binary: auspicieux (jí 吉) or not auspicieux (xīong 凶); sometimes, more than one fragment was necessary for the same subject. The comment mentioned the date in days expressed in the sexagesimal Système, the name of the soothsayer (who was sometimes the king himself), the proposal submitted to divination. Sometimes one finds precise details concerning the source of the bones or carapaces, the number of divinations, the answer of the god Di (帝) or of the ancestors, and even occasionally the accuracy or not of the prediction. The comments seem to be first of all written with the brush (one found the traces of them) before being engraved for filing, in theory on the face opposed to that where the cups had been dug, i.e. on the external face of the drill plates.