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Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary .
At the beginning of the current era, the Chinese script was the only writing system available in East Asia. Classical works of the Warring States period and Han dynasty such as the Mencius, the Commentary of Zuo and Sima Qian's Historical Records were admired as models of prose style through the ages. Later writers sought to emulate the ...
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. [a] The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty.
Wang Yirong, Chinese politician and scholar, was the first to recognize the oracle bone inscriptions as ancient writing. Among the major scholars making significant contributions to the study of the oracle bone writings, especially early on, were: [26] Wang Yirong recognized the characters as being ancient Chinese writing in 1899.
Excavation year (begins) Name Location / Period Materiality of Written Artifacts # Content Report Year of publication Notes 1992 老河口安崗竹簡M1, M2
Although court records and other independent records existed beforehand, the definitive work in early Chinese historical writing was the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian written by Han dynasty court historian Sima Qian (145 BC – 90 BC). This groundbreaking text laid the foundation for Chinese historiography and the many official ...
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An example of Chinese bronze inscriptions on a bronze vessel – early Western Zhou (11th century BC). The earliest known examples of Chinese writing are oracle bone inscriptions made c. 1200 BC at Yin (near modern Anyang), the site of the final capital of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 – c. 1046 BC).