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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
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.
The very large size of the collection and the significance of the texts for scholarship make it one of the most important discoveries of early Chinese texts to date. [1] [2] On 7 January 2014 the journal Nature announced that a portion of the Tsinghua Bamboo Strips represent "the world's oldest example" of a decimal multiplication table. [3]
However, references in earlier texts surviving on other media make it clear that some precursor of these Warring States period bamboo slips was in use as early as the late Shang period (from about 1250 BC). Bamboo and wooden strips were the standard writing material during the Han dynasty and excavated examples have been found in abundance. [4]
Many early Chinese texts were composed before the End of the Han dynasty in 220 CE. They involved numerous Confucian classics , such as the Four Books and Five Classics , alongside poetry, dictionaries, histories and surveys on topics such as mathematics, astronomy, music and medicine, among others.
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.
Written Chinese is one of the oldest continuously used writing systems. [26] The earliest examples universally accepted as Chinese writing are the oracle bone inscriptions made during the reign of the Shang king Wu Ding (c. 1250 – c. 1192 BCE). These inscriptions were made primarily on ox scapulae and turtle shells in order to record the ...
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).