Oracle Bones were bones that the Chinese would carve or scratch their questions on. Then the priests would burn the oracle bone until it would crack. Then the priest read these cracks to the Chinese people for their answer. The Chinese people believed their answer to be from the gods. This was also known as the first stages of Chinese writing. These were very important to the Chinese. The oracle bones bear the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing, using an early form of Chinese characters.