Oracle bones (Chinese: 甲骨; pinyin: jiǎgǔpiàn) are pieces of bone or turtle shell which were heate and cracked during divination, chiefly during the late Shāng, and then typically inscribed with a record of the divination, in what is known as oracle bone script. The oracle bones are the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing, and contain important historical information such as the complete royal genealogy of the Shāng dynasty. These records confirmed the existence of the Shāng dynasty, which some scholars had recently begun to doubt.