The excavated inscriptions begin in the long reign of King Wuding (1250–1192 BCE), and from the information they contain we can piece together the rituals that produced them. The king would put questions to his ancestors, summoning their spirits from their great tombs on the other side of the river that ran through Anyang. Pressing a heated stick against a shell or bone, he would interpret the cracks it produced, and specialists would inscribe the results on the “oracle bone.”
