Further excavations uncovered the remains of a royal palace, several royal tombs, and more than 100,000 pieces of bones and shells covered with words.
4,500 characters have been counted and 1,700 have been deciphered.

They show that the people of the Shang dynasty had a well-structured script with a complete system of written signs.

The Shang rulers used divination to ask the gods about the future.
The inscriptions therefore, were concerned with predicting the future.
Either a pointed, heated rod was applied to the shell or bone and a crack formed or a hole was drilled on the interior side of the shell and it was put on a fire to see where cracks would appear on the other side.
By interpreting the cracks a soothsayer predicted the answers to questions including:
what the weather was going to be like, if it would flood or not, if the harvest would be successful, whether one should take a journey, and how things were in the Shang society.

3,500 years ago Anyang was a marshy area with many tortoises which is why tortoise shells were used for divination.
They also used the flat bones of cattle or deer, for example their shoulder blades.
Later when Anyang started to dry out and tortoises became rare, people began to use bamboo strips instead; this is still practiced today at certain temples.