甲骨文(oracle bone script)是中国古代的一种文字，被认为是现代汉字的早期形式，有时候也被认为是汉字的书体之一，同时也是现存中国最古老的一种成熟文字。甲骨文引导炎黄子孙走上使图形记号表示意义而不约束其读者的文字发展历程，造就了延绵数千年的统一文化意识。
Oracle Bone Script
Oracle bone script refers to the ancient Chinese characters found on animal bones or turtle shells used in divination(占卜) in Bronze Age China.The vast majority record is the divination by fire of the royal house of the late Shang Dynasty at the capital of Yin (modern Anyang，Henan Province)．
Because turtle shells as well as bones were used，the oracle bone script is also sometimes called shell and bone script.As the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date to the late Shang Dynasty，oracle bone script essentially refers to Shang script.
It is certain that the writing of the Shang Dynasty experienced a period of development before the Anyang oracle bone script; however，no significant quantity of clearly identifiable writing before or during the early to middle Shang cultural period has been discovered.
The oracle bone script of the late Shang appears pictographic(象形文字的)，as does its contemporary，the Shang writing on bronzes.The earliest oracle bone script appears even more so than examples from late in the period.Comparing oracle bone script to both Shang and early Western Zhou period writing on bronzes，oracle bone script is clearly greatly simplified；this is thought to be due to the difficulty of carving on the hard and bony surfaces.The more detailed and more pictorial(图片的，图画似的) style of the bronze graphs is thus thought to be more representative of typical Shang writing (as would have normally occurred on bamboo books) than the oracle bone script forms，and it is this typical style which continued to evolve into the Zhou period writing and then into the seal script of the Qin state in the late Zhou period.
