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Oracle bone script is the oldest attested form of written Chinese, dating to the late 2nd millennium BC. Inscriptions were made by carving characters into oracle bones, usually either the shoulder bones of oxen or the plastrons of turtles. The writings themselves mainly record the results of official divinations carried out on behalf of the ...
Overview of Chinese history. The recording of events in Chinese history dates back to the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BC). Many written examples survive of ceremonial inscriptions, divinations and records of family names, which were carved or painted onto tortoise shell or bones. [1][2] The uniformly religious context of Shang written records ...
Wang Yirong, Chinese politician and scholar, was the first to recognize the oracle bones as ancient writing.. Shang-era oracle bones are thought to have been unearthed periodically by local farmers [14] since as early as the Sui and Tang dynasties, and perhaps starting as early as the Han dynasty, [15] but local inhabitants did not realize what the bones were and generally reburied them. [16]
For broader world history, recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BC, and it coincides with the invention of writing. For some geographic regions or cultures, written history is limited to a relatively recent period in human history because of the limited use of written records.
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
Rib of a rhinoceros killed in a royal hunt, bearing an inscription including the character 商 (Shāng, fifth character from the bottom on the right) [2]. The Late Shang, also known as the Anyang period, is the earliest known literate civilization in China, spanning the reigns of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding in the second half of the 13th century BC and ...
Chinese bronze inscriptions, also commonly referred to as bronze script or bronzeware script, are writing in a variety of Chinese scripts on ritual bronzes such as zhōng bells and dǐng tripodal cauldrons from the Shang dynasty (2nd millennium BC) to the Zhou dynasty (11th–3rd century BC) and even later. Early bronze inscriptions were almost ...
Bibliography of the Chinese language and writing system. The Chinese language has an attested history spanning more than three millennia, and linguists have reconstructed forms spoken millennia prior to the earliest known examples of written Chinese c. 1200 BC. Chinese may be viewed either as a holistic unit with great internal topological ...