This Little Primer introduces students of classical Chinese to the earliest extant body of
Chinese texts dating from about the 13th to the 10th centuries BC. These texts are known as
Oracle-Bone Inscriptions and relate to any matter that was deemed sufficiently important to
require consultation with the ancestors and deities of the Shang aristocracy. Indispensable to
the study of the history of Chinese religion politics agriculture the calendar system
hunting warfare medicine sacrificial and ritual practices and other matters of life in
China's first historical dynasty these more than 130 000 pieces of inscribed turtle plastrons
and bovine scapulas though mostly fragmented comprise more text in terms of number of
characters than the combined transmitted traditional pre-Qín classical Chinese texts. The
material is presented in three forms: normalized transcriptions of the texts into modern
standard Chinese script translations into English and ink-squeezes or rubbings of the
original texts. There is also a detailed linguistic and philological explanation of the text
plus an annotation and commentary on the cultural and historical background of the material.
No special background in analyzing grammar and syntax will be required to understand most if
not all of the materials presented in this Little Primer.
