本报电 日前，第六届中国邮政“919电商节”在京启动。         This photo taken on Nov. 18, 2025 shows the Leonid meteor shower seen in Heihe City, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. (Photo by Qian Boyu/Xinhua)Chinese archaeologists have pieced together ancient oracle bone fragments to decipher what they say is the earliest written record of a meteor shower, dating back more than 3,000 years and shedding light on astronomical observation in the Shang Dynasty (c.1600BC-1046BC), roughly the Late Bronze Age in the West in which Homer's Odyssey was rooted.
The inscription, found among more than 80,000 fragments, consists of three characters that read "star", "all" and "west," describing a large number of meteors streaking across the night sky and falling westward like rain, Huang Tianshu, a professor at Tsinghua University's Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts, told the Global Times.
"The first character is 'star'… the second means 'all' or 'in batches', depicting meteors falling in large numbers like rain, and the third is 'west,' used as a verb to mean falling westward after crossing the sky," Huang said. "This is important astronomical data recording a meteor shower more than 3,000 years ago."
The team spent years rejoining shattered oracle bones, a process of piecing fragments back together, and only after reassembly did the meaning become clear. 
"Before rejoining, you have no idea what it is saying. Once rejoined, the content becomes largely intact and turns into a very important piece of material for studying history or language," Huang added.
    One piece of ancient Chinese oracle bone Photo: CCTVHuang Dekuan, head of the expert committee for China's national ancient script project, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the record is "the earliest meteor shower documented in Chinese writing," adding that it was a representative achievement that would enable oracle bone inscriptions to be better used as scientific historical sources and push oracle bone studies to a new level.
The discovery is part of a decade long effort that has newly rejoined more than 1,200 groups of fragments, with the results published in a major compendium of oracle bone facsimiles. The research was part of a state-backed project on inheritance and studies of ancient Chinese scripts and civilization, CCTV reported.
The first phase of the national project is about to complete, yielding a string of major findings. These findings provide vital new materials for studying early Chinese civilization and demonstrate the significant value of ancient Chinese characters in the development of Chinese and even human civilizations, per CCTV.
。

B | 作为第五届中国农民丰收节金秋消费季系列活动之一，今年的“919电商节”推出乡村振兴“万单计划”、“百大品牌”特惠活动、社区团购“万团齐发”等十大活动，助力农民创利增收。今年以来，中国邮政不断加大农村电商资源投入，打造了叠加电商、寄递、金融等场景的邮乐购站点42万个，建成标准化农产品基地1000个，深入推进交邮联运、邮快合作。截至目前，中国邮政助力农产品销售规模达66亿元。（李心萍）