Unread oracle bone charactersEvidence
Evidence · Unread oracle bone characters
The rate of accepted readings has been about one every three years since 2016, which at the present pace would take…
The rate of accepted readings has been about one every three years since 2016, which at the present pace would take centuries for 2,000 graphs.
What it means
Key questionWhat are the roughly 3,000 unread oracle-bone graphs, and how many of them can ever be read?
6 answers, none ahead yet
Openunchanged
Answer this evidence bears onDescendants exist and form chains will find them
Counts against1 for, 1 against
Still possibleunchanged
Next steps 3
1
Download HUST-OBC (Figshare 10.6084/m9.figshare.25040543.v3), tabulate the 9,411 undeciphered classes by image count and source, and cluster them with a period-aware image-similarity merge; report how many distinct unread classes remain and how many are singletons.
~16 h
—not judged
2
Using CHANT or Yinqi Wenyuan transcriptions, classify a random sample of 300 unread graphs by the slot they occupy in the divination formula (diviner name, ancestor, place after a hunting verb, verb, object, modifier) and estimate the share that occur only in name slots, with a confidence interval.
~24 h
—not judged
3
Compile the list of readings accepted by the National Museum of Chinese Writing since 2016 (Jiang Yubin 2018, the 2023 batch including Zhou Zhongbing and Li Chuntao, Chen Jian and Xie Mingwen 2024) with their graphs and papers, as the held-out test set for any computational method.
~6 h
—not judged
Ranked by how likely each is to move the key question, for the time it takes
Sources 1
SRC
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). The rate of accepted readings has been about one every three years since 2016, which at the present pace would take… [Evidence EVD0DEDTHBFGPBG]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDTHBFGPBG
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dedthbfgpbg,
title = {The rate of accepted readings has been about one every three years since 2016, which at the present pace would take…},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DEDTHBFGPBG},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDTHBFGPBG}
}