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The King’s Menagerie: Animals in Oracle Bone Inscriptions
The King’s Menagerie: Animals in Oracle Bone Inscriptions
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The King’s Menagerie: Animals in Oracle Bone Inscriptions

There are no pictographs in oracle bone inscriptions more vivid than those formed of animal shapes. The current exhibition features animal scripts and paintings in oracle bone inscriptions, such as pigs, dogs, buffalos, goats, elephants, horses, deer, tigers, turtles, snakes, pheasants, and dragons. There are mythical creatures and actual species including domesticated and wild animals, which could be kept as livestock, used as sacrifices, or they may simply be pests. These creatures subsequently become synecdoches that refer to names of people, places, or meteorological phenomena, thereby engendering a whole host of lexicons.

The exhibition is divided into five sections: Animal Game, Animal Tribute, Animal Sacrifices, Animals in Practice Inscriptions, and More than Animals, showcasing how the people in the Shang period recorded their ecological observations on oracle bones, as well as how they applied the knowledge of nature to comprehend the complicated human world and associated abstractions.

This online exhibition base bases on ⇛the offline exhibition in the Museum, and transcends the limitation of physical spaces, expending the contents to more than doubled. Furthermore, viewers will be granted with a better reading experience on oracle inscriptions via the “image comparison” plugin of the Open Museum platform.

Walking into the Shang kings’ menagerie is like witnessing in person human-animal interactions against the backdrop of more than three millennia ago.