This paper tries to attribute some peculiarities of the oracle inscriptions of Period I to the personality of King Wu Ding himself and comes to the conclusion that Wu Ding must have suffered from a persecution complex. It was precisely his occasional dumbness and permanent fears of the dead and of evil spirits that motivated him to consult bone and shell oracles frequently and, moreover, to have divination questions and postscripts about the real events written. From this point of view early Chinese writing owed much of its development to the personal suffering of King Wu Ding.