Wang Ruo, deputy director of the Lüshun City Museum, told Xinhua that the experts believe the six new characters are nouns that refer to the names of specific places or people.
"Experts are still working to decipher the characters," he said.
Among these relics, one part of a whole picture of inscriptions has 150 characters. Such a long article is rare among bone inscriptions, Song said.
He believes the team will discover more new characters after a thorough study of the collection.
Dating and contents
To date, archaeologists around the world have identified 4,000 bone inscription characters from studying 130,000 pieces of relics, but only half of the characters have been deciphered, Song said.
Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. The graphic logograms of the characters tell both meaning and pronunciation.
According to the team's project schedule, the experts will classify the relics based on dating and the content of the inscriptions, which will eventually lead to a published compilation by 2014.
Song said deciphering bone inscriptions will greatly contribute to research on the early Chinese history of the Shang Dynasty.
Oracle bone inscriptions were first discovered in 1899 by Beijing scholar and antiquarian Wang Yirong, although farmers had been unearthing the relics in Anyang, Henan Province, for many years. Wang noticed symbols that looked like writing on animal bones and tortoise shells.
Media reports said an estimated 160,000 pieces of tortoise shell and animal bones with inscriptions have been recovered from the Yin Ruins in Anyang since the ruins were discovered in 1928. The site inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2006 has been proven to have served as the imperial capital of the Shang Dynasty. A large number of the relics have been collected by private collectors.
Source: Xinhua
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