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◎ interview and writing: sun yue, a reporter from science and technology daily

◎ planning丨zhao yingshu teng jipu

on the night of august 13, 2024, a special team from the key laboratory of oracle information processing of the ministry of education of anyang normal university (hereinafter referred to as the "oracle laboratory") returned to henan after completing the task of collecting data in south korea. they also returned with high-fidelity data of 7 pieces of oracle bones.this is the first time that my country's oracle bone cultural heritage, which was lost overseas, has been reunited with its homeland in digital form.

oracle bone script, a mysterious writing system dating back 3,000 years, contains the cultural essence and creative wisdom of the ancients, and carries the changes of chinese civilization. however, before these special symbols engraved on tortoise shells and animal bones are completely deciphered, oracle bone script faces challenges such as weathering, erosion, loss and dissipation.with the advancement of science and technology and the deepening of interdisciplinary cooperation, this ancient and mysterious text is achieving immortality across time and space.

image source: visual china

1

solving the mystery requires crossing three thresholds

"during this trip to south korea to collect oracle bone data, we actually collected data from eight pieces of oracle bones, because one of them was cracked into two pieces due to long-term weathering." liu yongge, director of the oracle bone laboratory, told reporters, "although the korean staff were very careful in their operation, they still could not avoid small pieces of oracle bones falling off."

since the "father of oracle bone script" and epigraphy expert wang yirong accidentally unveiled the veil of oracle bone script, chinese scholars have been working day and night to decipher the "civilization code" for more than a hundred years, but they still face three major difficulties:severe weathering and erosion, large amounts of loss and dispersion make interpretation extremely difficult.

for 3,000 years, the existing oracle bones have been silently fighting against natural forces such as weathering and insect infestation.the oracle bones themselves are extremely fragile and can easily be damaged by natural and human factors during every stage of excavation, preservation, and display.

song zhenhao, a member of the chinese academy of social sciences, once said helplessly: "after only a few years, some of the characters on the oracle bones stored in the chinese academy of social sciences have become blurred and unrecognizable."

in addition, due to historical reasons, a large number of oracle bones are scattered overseas.liu yongge introduced that the total number of oracle bones unearthed from yinxu is about 160,000 pieces, which are now collected in 181 museums, libraries, research institutes and universities at home and abroad. among them, about 120,000 pieces are in china.

currently, there are still tens of thousands of oracle bones held by private collectors.however, due to illegal excavation and theft, more than 30,000 pieces of oracle bones have been lost overseas and scattered in places such as the carnegie museum, the royal museum of scotland, the british museum and princeton university. many of them have not been made public to the academic community, which has constituted an immeasurable loss to china's cultural heritage.

in 2016, the chinese character museum issued a call for oracle bone inscriptions deciphering: "decipher one character and you will receive a prize of 100,000 yuan."this has made this unpopular subject a hot topic. the high reward has inspired more people to participate in the interpretation of oracle bone inscriptions, and to some extent, it has also revealed the difficulty of oracle bone inscription research.in the past eight years, only three scholars have received the award after being approved by the expert committee.

according to statistics, there are more than 4,000 oracle bone inscriptions, of which only about one-third have been successfully deciphered.in these ancient oracle bone inscriptions, some pictographic characters are difficult to accurately identify because their shapes are very different from modern chinese characters. different scholars often have significantly different interpretations of the same oracle bone character.

song zhenhao said that most of the easy-to-read characters have been deciphered, and the rest are difficult. only by careful exploration, based on the analysis of oracle bone inscriptions, context, character attributes, and font configuration, combined with other ancient characters such as bronze inscriptions and later bamboo slips, and checking their evolution, and gathering information packages of the shape and configuration of each single character in different historical periods, can the mystery be solved.

2

digital splicing technology shows its strength

on september 15, zhang zhan, director of the oracle bone script recognition and analysis research office, demonstrated and introduced the technology to reporters at the oracle bone script laboratory. he logged into the "yin qi wen yuan" website, selected the oracle bone script "fen" in the character library, and all the oracle bone information containing the character was displayed.

"this is the oracle bone script big data platform created by the laboratory. the platform was opened to scholars around the world in 2019. this platform integrates three libraries: oracle bone script text library, record library, and document library. currently, 153 kinds of oracle bone records, more than 239,000 oracle bone images, and more than 33,000 oracle bone treatises have been put online." zhang zhan said.

home page of the "yin qi wen yuan" website.

"digitalization, dataization, and intelligence" are the three key words of "yin qiwenyuan". liu yongge introduced that the original intention of building this platform was to comprehensively and systematically organize the relevant data accumulated over more than 100 years and build the world's largest oracle bone data center.

"this oracle bone script looks like a tv, and it has two ears. in fact, it means 'lamp', implying a form of sacrifice." zhang zhan showed it to reporters, "this character was deciphered with the help of digital technology."

oracle bone splicing is an operation to accurately restore the position of oracle bone fragments based on the shape of the oracle bones and the oracle bone characters engraved on them.during the thousands of years of burial, oracle bones often broke into multiple pieces due to factors such as stratum pressure, water infiltration, and excavation. digital splicing is the key technology to break through this research bottleneck.

zhang zhan further introduced that the spliced ​​oracle bone inscriptions are like new materials for historical archaeology, and their value has doubled, so this technology is called the "rediscovery" of oracle bone inscriptions. the laboratory is committed to using artificial intelligence and other technologies to automatically splice oracle bone fragments, and has currently spliced ​​70 sets of oracle bone fragments.

the fragility of oracle bones is worrying.by establishing a digital full-information data model, researchers have given oracle bone artifacts eternal "life".

in 2022, oracle labs and tencent launched the "oracle global digital revitalization" plan. at present, they have achieved technical breakthroughs such as "micro-trace analysis" and "oracle bone 3d modeling", and built an "oracle bone full information data model" including 3d models, micro-trace enhancement images, micro-trace grayscale images, digital copies, digital rubbings and scientific imaging layers, realizing the high-fidelity restoration and protection of oracle bones in digital space.

"this is a job that is more delicate than embroidery and as complex as a scientific experiment," said liu yongge.

when photographing oracle bone fragments with high-precision cameras, researchers need to use a combination of high-definition photography, macro photography, 3d modeling, infrared photography, multi-spectral photography, and other technical means.more than 150 photos were taken for each piece of oracle bone to ensure that all information was collected.the researchers then precisely aligned and superimposed different oracle bone images, with each layer displaying different information.

"for example, this character cannot be seen on the oracle bone rubbings, and even the real object cannot be seen clearly." wang chaoyang, chief architect of tencent ssv digital culture laboratory, pointed to a picture of oracle bone and introduced, "but with the help of micro-trace enhancement, high-fidelity and other technical means, we can get a glimpse of these 'hidden contents'."

oracle full information data model and effect display.

in the 3d research room of the oracle laboratory, director guo an showed reporters the "real oracle bones" restored with high fidelity in digital space. on the screen, this digitized oracle bone can be rotated 360 degrees freely and can be enlarged or reduced as needed.

through micro-trace analysis, the reporter can not only see the writing style and stroke overlapping relationship of the characters on the oracle bones, but also have an in-depth understanding of information such as drilling shape, divination cracks, material texture, etc.

guo an told reporters that in the future, "yinqiwenyuan 2.0" will adopt the full information data model of oracle bone inscriptions to form new technical specifications and standards for the protection and organization of oracle bone inscriptions.

3

ai collaborates to create a “circle of friends”

can artificial intelligence become the key to unlocking ancient "codes" and bring new possibilities to the interpretation of oracle bone inscriptions?

"our 'human-machine collaboration to assist in the interpretation of oracle bone inscriptions' project has successfully built a huge character library containing 1.73 million oracle bone inscriptions.the purpose of this project is to solve the basic problems of "not being able to see the oracle bones clearly" and "not being able to find the characters", etc. "liu yongge said.

"ai is a force that cannot be ignored," wang chaoyang told reporters. "on the 'yin qi wen yuan' ai collaborative platform, we collected high-definition oracle bone information in advance, and then associated the physical text with the standard text for experts and scholars to search."

the platform has 4,500 standard glyphs, of which 1,500 have been deciphered and more than 3,000 have not been confirmed. users can search for oracle bone inscriptions or text by simply inputting current chinese characters or text images.

“this platform is not only a search tool for ‘human-machine collaboration’, but also a social medium for ‘human-human collaboration’.”wang chaoyang said, "here, every expert has the authority to mark. as long as they are willing, they can share their personal research information with colleagues, realize the 'mutual understanding' of knowledge, collide with each other's inspiration, and jointly stimulate new research ideas. with such collaborative cooperation, we will achieve the effect of '1+1>2'!"

wang chaoyang further gave an example: "take the word 'car' as an example. the frequency of appearance of the word 'car' in oracle bone inscriptions is very high, but it is not easy to aggregate them. now, with the help of computer matching and ai collaborative technology, we can quickly find and mark the word 'car' on the oracle bone tablets."

in addition, the writing methods of oracle bone script vary greatly. in order to accurately identify the standard glyph of a character, developers need to know which characters are similar to it, in which documents this character has appeared, and what its radicals are. in order to answer these questions, they worked closely with the chinese character museum and zhengda character center to import more precious materials into the platform.

he added: "for example, the character '丁' is written like this on this piece of oracle bone, but how is it written on other oracle bones? with just a click, the relevant information will be immediately presented in front of you. through the matching of character shapes, a lot of information is closely linked, which greatly facilitates the compilation and research of oracle bone inscriptions."

the oracle bone inscriptions and glyph matching functions after micro-enhancement displayed on the "yin qi wen yuan" ai collaborative platform.

also,the oracle laboratory also provides three open data sets for free: oracle handwriting, oracle detection, and oracle recognition.these data sets have been widely used by major research institutions and scientific research institutes at home and abroad, and have been downloaded more than 35,000 times. they provide strong data support for the "digitalization" and "intelligentization" research of oracle bone inscriptions.

4

new opportunities for “wanderers” to return home

in 2017, oracle bones was inscribed on the unesco memory of the world register.thirty years before that, in 1987, at an academic conference commemorating the yin and shang culture held in anyang, henan, a japanese scholar proposed the idea of ​​returning oracle bone inscriptions to their homeland. this idea, like a seed, was deeply rooted in the memory of chinese scholars.

song zhenhao, who is over 70 years old, is one of the leading figures in contemporary chinese oracle bone studies. the loss of more than 30,000 pieces of oracle bones overseas has always been a pain in his heart. decades ago, he also made a wish to return the oracle bones to their homeland, and devoted all his energy to the work of sorting out oracle bone inscriptions. he has sorted out and published 16 types of oracle bone inscriptions, with nearly 10,000 pieces, "to make up for it."

during the 2023 national people's congress, he yuling, deputy to the national people's congress and deputy director of the anyang station of the institute of archaeology of the chinese academy of social sciences, solemnly proposed the suggestion of "returning oracle bone inscriptions to their hometown in a digital form" in an interview with the media. he said,"it is our unshirkable responsibility to protect, inherit and study oracle bone inscriptions. the digital return of oracle bone inscriptions is imminent and time is running out."

in may this year, the sixth national oracle bone inscriptions sorting and research and the first digital oracle bone inscriptions co-creation plan release ceremony was held in anyang, marking the official launch of the "digital oracle bone inscriptions co-creation plan". this plan has brought new opportunities for oracle bones to "return home", and has also made the "oracle bone inscriptions big data return home" gradually become a reality with the help of technology.

the tunnan 2172 oracle bones, discovered in the xiaotunnan site of anyang in 1973, are one of the representative oracle bones.

under the "digital oracle bone co-creation plan", tianjin museum and anyang museum took the lead in providing their own matching funds to realize the full process of oracle bone research and development from collection and modeling, research and interpretation, to exhibition and study. the "digital oracle bone co-creation center" also negotiated with relevant academic institutions in france, the united kingdom, the european union and other countries to help oracle bones lost overseas "return home".

liu yongge wrote a word for the reporter and said affectionately: "this is the oracle character for 'moon'. during the mid-autumn festival, the ancients looked at the moon and missed their hometown. i hope that one day, the oracle bones far away in foreign countries can return to their hometown in digital form, realizing another sense of reunion."

further reading

vlog from more than 3,000 years ago

science and technology daily reporter sun yue

if oracle bone inscriptions are a kind of "code", then following the clues after deciphering, we can dispel the thick dust of history, trace the mysterious history of ancient china, and explore the "daily life" of our ancestors. it can be said that oracle bone inscriptions are from vlogs more than 3,000 years ago.

what can we read from these vlogs engraved on tortoise shells and animal bones?

among them, there is the real genealogy of the shang royal family, the daily lives of various shang people, and a "small encyclopedia" of the yin and shang society: whether it is the political territory, geographical structure and corresponding internal and external service system of the shang kingdom, or wind, frost, rain, snow, floods, droughts, insect disasters, grain farming, or a wide variety of building names, musical instruments, sacrificial songs, patient records...all aspects of human life are shown in the oracle bone inscriptions.

"in the oracle inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells, we can see the characteristics of the shang dynasty's royal succession law and marriage and kinship system, the political landscape of the king's affairs and the activities of his subjects, the thoughts and emotions of the characters in major events, the relationship between the shang king and the vassal states, the class structure of the powerful and the common people and slaves in social life, the hierarchical relationship between managers of economic industries and handicraft workers..." liu hao, a staff member of the chinese character museum, believes that these contents make the shang dynasty a reliable historical era with unearthed ancient writing records, fill the gaps in history books, and make the distant shang dynasty come alive.

oracle bone inscriptions have come all the way from the ancient times when people worked from sunrise to sunset, and are covered with thousands of years of mud and carry the weight of civilization. today, they have been integrated into the blood of civilization and are radiating new vitality.

on september 23, a cultural exchange activity jointly initiated by the chinese writing museum and the hami city museum - "chinese writing frontier journey, oracle bones on campus" came to hami no. 11 middle school. a dialogue between ancient and modern times and mutual learning between civilizations spanning more than 3,300 years and more than 2,500 kilometers began.

in anyang, the chinese character museum and yinxu museum have respectively built national research and study bases in recent years, and have made every effort to expand the "yin shang culture and oracle bone inscriptions" themed research and study tour activities. the "i love oracle bone inscriptions" themed course launched by the chinese character museum and the "character paradise" and "dream of yin shang" themed courses developed by the yinxu museum attract more than one million young tourists online and offline every year.

young people learn to write oracle bone calligraphy at the "oracle bone school" of the chinese writing museum.

from the exquisite design of the "hanyi chen-style oracle" font, to the stunning presentation of the holographic image "oracle universe", to the vivid and interesting "oracle emoticons" and the creative oracle animation, chen nan, a professor at the academy of fine arts of tsinghua university, showed reporters a series of oracle works he created in recent years. these creative cultural products not only attracted the attention of many young people, but also aroused their strong interest and love for oracle.

talking about the inheritance of oracle bone inscriptions, chen nan was deeply touched: "at present, we should look back at the profound philosophical thinking, artistic order and design wisdom in traditional culture from the perspective of modern design, and promote the research and dissemination of the contemporary translation and revitalization of chinese traditional culture."

in the united states, canada, france, germany, the united kingdom and other places, a number of international oracle bone exhibitions have been held. through more than a hundred cultural relics and interactive experience projects such as woodblock printing, oracle bone rubbing, and brush writing, the audience can personally feel the long history of chinese civilization.

"oracle bone fever has arrived, but there are still many unsolved mysteries waiting for us," said song zhenhao, a member of the chinese academy of social sciences. "i believe that with the efforts of researchers and the empowerment of science and technology, we will be able to decipher more wonderful stories from 3,000 years ago."