Neolithic signs in China
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The first use of signs in what is today China begins circa 6500 B.C. with the creation of Neolithic proto-writing.
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[edit] Oracle bone script
The oldest Chinese inscriptions that are indisputably writing are the Oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文; pinyin: jiǎgǔwén; literally "shell-bone-script"). The oracle bone script is a well-developed writing system, attested from the late Shang Dynasty (1200-1050 B.C.)[1][2][3] from Anyang, and from Zhengzhou, dated 1600 BC[citation needed]. In addition, there are very few logographs found on pottery shards and cast in bronzes, known as the Bronze script (Chinese: 金文; pinyin: jīnwén), which is very similar to but more complex and pictorial than the Oracle Bone Script. Only about 1,400 of the 2,500 known Oracle Bone logographs can be identified with later Chinese characters and therefore easily read. However, it should be noted that these 1,400 logographs include most of the commonly used ones.
[edit] The legend of the creation of chinese characters
According to legend, though, Chinese characters were invented earlier by Cangjie (c. 2650 BC), a bureaucrat under the legendary emperor Huangdi. The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount Yangxu (today Shanxi) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called zi — Chinese characters. It was said that on the day the characters were born, Chinese heard the devil mourning, and saw crops falling like rain, as it marked the beginning of civilization, for good and for bad.
[edit] Neolithic signs
The earliest Neolithic signs come from Jiahu, a Neolithic site in the basin of the Yellow River in Henan province, dated to c. 6500 BC [1], known as the Jiahu Script. It has yielded turtle carapaces that were pitted and inscribed with symbols. By the discoveries at Jiahu reported here Neolithic sign use in China must now be extended backward another two millennia to c. 6500 BC. Sign use, however, should not be easily equated with writing, although it may represent a formative stage. In the words of the archaeologists who made the discovery:
- Here we present signs from the seventh millennium BC which seem to relate to later Chinese characters and may have been intended as words. We interpret these signs not as writing itself, but as features of a lengthy period of sign-use which led eventually to a fully-fledged system of writing...The present state of the archaeological record in China, which has never had the intensive archaeological examination of, for example, Egypt or Greece, does not permit us to say exactly in which period of the Neolithic the Chinese invented their writing. What did persist through these long periods was the idea of sign use. Although it is impossible at this point to trace any direct connection from the Jiahu signs to the Yinxu characters, we do propose that slow, culture-linked evolutionary processes, adopting the idea of sign use, took place in diverse settings around the Yellow River. We should not assume that there was a single path or pace for the development of a script.[4]
In Damaidi, at Beishan Mountain in Ningxia, 3,172 cliff carvings dating to 6,000-5,000 BCE have been discovered over an area of 15 square kilometers, "featuring 8,453 individual characters such as the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing." These pictographs are reputed to be similar to the earliest characters confirmed to be written Chinese.[5]
Another early script possibly related to modern Chinese characters is the Banpo Script from Shaanxi province, dating from the 5th millennium BC. Some researchers believe it to be related to the Oracle bone script. This relation is contested, however, and evidence is scarce.
Later excavations in eastern China's Anhui province and the Dadiwan culture sites in the eastern part of northwestern China's Gansu province uncovered pottery shards, dated to c. 5000 BC, inscribed with symbols [2][3]. It is unknown whether these symbols formed part of an organized system of writing, but many of them bear resemblance to what are accepted as early Chinese characters, and it is speculated that they may be ancestors to the latter.
Inscription-bearing artifacts from the Dawenkou culture culture site in Juxian County, Shandong, dating to c. 2800 BC, have also been found [4]. The Chengziyai site in Longshan township, Shandong has produced fragments of inscribed bones used to divine the future, dating to 2500 - 1900 BC, and symbols on pottery vessels from Dinggong are thought by some scholars to be an early form of writing. Symbols of a similar nature have also been found on pottery shards from the Liangzhu culture (Chinese: 良渚) of the lower Yangtze valley.
Although the earliest forms of primitive Chinese writing are no more than individual symbols and therefore cannot be considered a true written script, the inscriptions found on bones (dated to 2500 - 1900 BC) used for the purposes of divination from the late Neolithic Longshan (simplified Chinese: 龙山; traditional Chinese: 龍山; pinyin: lóngshān) Culture (c. 3200 - 1900 BC) are thought by some to be a proto-written script, similar to the earliest forms of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It is possible that these inscriptions are ancestral to the later Oracle bone script of the Shang Dynasty and therefore the modern Chinese script, since late Neolithic culture found in Longshan is widely accepted by historians and archaeologists to be ancestral to the Bronze Age Erlitou culture and the later Shang and Zhou Dynasties.
[edit] References
- ^ William G. Boltz, Early Chinese Writing, World Archaeology, Vol. 17, No. 3, Early Writing Systems. (Feb., 1986), pp. 420-436 (436)
- ^ David N. Keightley, Art, Ancestors, and the Origins of Writing in China, Representations, No. 56, Special Issue: The New Erudition. (Autumn, 1996), pp.68-95 (68)
- ^ John DeFrancis: Visible Speech. The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems: Chinese
- ^ Xueqin Li, Garman Harbottle, Juzhong Zhang, Changsui Wang: The earliest writing? Sign use in the seventh millennium BC at Jiahu, Henan Province, China. Antiquity 77, 295 (2003): 31-45 (31 and 41)
- ^ "Carvings may rewrite history of Chinese characters", Xinhua online, 2007-05-18. Retrieved on 2007-05-19.
