Barkadas ‘99 Online

Today is just an ordinary day for me as I ‘d been sitting around for about 3-4 hours listening to some interesting work-related discussion in the office . All that time , I really don’t know why I ‘ d been thinking about a wishbone . So later this day I read some articles about it perhaps that would settle the score of what I had been pondering.

Want to know the history of wishbones ? Did you really believe in it ?
Perhaps you ‘ll come up with your own rationale whether to believe it or not .

The wishbone dates back to around 320 BC, and it started with a hen, not a turkey! The Etruscans, who lived on the Italian peninsula, believed that fowl were able to tell the future because a hen would squawk before laying an egg, and a rooster would crow to announce the dawning of a new day. This led to “hen oracles”. If you wanted an answer to a question, you would draw a circle on the ground and divide it into sections, and within each wedge write a letter from the Etruscan alphabet. Grains of corn were then placed in each section, and the all-knowing bird was led into the circle to peck at the kernels. The order in which it pecked were recorded by a scribe and interpreted by high priests, believing the fowl was spelling out words or that each letter began a word in its mystical message. The chicken was then sacrificed and its collarbone hung out to dry. It was considered sacred, and anyone was allowed to stroke an unbroken bone and make a wish, thus the name wishbone.

It is said that the Romans took on the Etruscan custom as their own, and as they fought over who would get the good fortune they broke the bones. The “winner” who got their wish was the one holding the largest piece of bone, and it became known as a “lucky break”. This symbolism later spread to England, and came over to the new world with the pilgrims. Upon discovering the woods filled with wild turkeys, they changed the custom from the chicken bone to the turkey bone. And the rest is history!