100多年前，在殷墟的小屯村，一个农民在自己家的地里翻地，忽然有一些骨片随着泥土翻了上来。他捡起来一看，有的骨片上面还有一些深红色的像字一样的刻痕。他很吃惊，继续往深处挖，又发现了很多，都是一些龟甲和兽骨，他不知道这是什么。

More than one hundred years ago in Xiaotun Village in the Yin Ruins, while a peasant was ploughing, he saw some bones turning up with the mud. He picked up one piece. There were scarlet carvings on the bones, which looked like some kind of inscriptions. He was shocked. He kept digging. More and more bones showed up. All of them looked like tortoise shells or animal bones. He had no idea what they were.

　　上古的人十分相信鬼神，常常用龟甲和兽骨占卜，这就是祖先们占卜用的龟甲。上面刻的字就是甲骨文。

Ancient men believed in gods and ghosts. They often used tortoise shells or animal bones to tell fortune. These tortoise shells or animal bones were nothing more than the ones used by our ancestors, and the characters inscribed on them are oracle inscriptions.

　　当时的国王每天都会遇到很多问题，比如：要去打仗，能胜吗？老天会下雨吗？会有人来进攻吗？王后什么时候生孩子？是男还是女呢？这些都要用占卜来问天神。天神当然不会回答他们应该怎么做，不过天神会回答“是”和“不是”。甲骨的裂纹就是天神给出的答案，这就好像我们今天考试的时候做正误选择题一样。

Every day the king would have to give answers to many questions. For instance: Would we win this battle? Would the rain be pouring down? Would someone attack us? When would the queen bear a baby? Would it be a boy or a girl? People had to pray that god could give them the answers. Of course god would not answer all those questions in details. But it would answer "Yes" or "No". And god would hide his answers in those cracks on the tortoise shells, just like the way we do True / False questions in modern tests.

　　目前，殷墟共出土甲骨15万片，共有单字约4500个。

So far, in the Yin Ruins 150, 000 pieces of those shells and bones have been unearthed, and about 4,500 characters have been identified.

　　为什么小屯村甲骨特别多呢？因为国王常常占卜，用过的甲骨越来越多，这是有关国王和国家情况的重要记录，不能随便扔掉，所以就有一些专门的地方放这些甲骨。用我们现在的话说就是档案馆。小屯村正好就是商代的一个“档案馆”。商朝灭亡以后，“档案馆”倒塌了，这些甲骨就埋在了地下，埋了3000多年。

Why were so many oracle bones found in Xiaotun Village? Because the king often went to the god for answers, he needed more and more bones for that purpose. Important information was kept on those bones and couldn't be thrown away randomly. There had to be some special places to store all the "bone documents". To use today's language, there had to be archives. Xiaotun Village was such an archive in the Shang Dynasty. With the collapse of the Shang the archive fell down. And all those shells and bones were buried for over 3,000 years.

　　甲骨文印证了包括《史记》在内的一系列文献的真实情况，把有记载的中华文明史向前推进了近5个世纪。

Standing as an evidence for those historical events recorded in many documents including Shiji, the oracle bone inscriptions have pushed the history of Chinese civilization 500 years back.