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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.
As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Literary Chinese. [12] In the early 20th century, Literary Chinese was replaced in large part with written vernacular Chinese, largely corresponding to Standard Chinese, a form ...
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]
Introductions to the discovery talks of 5 genres of writings: 1) 六艺類 six arts 2) masters' writings 諸子類 3) writings in the style of ci 辭 and fu 賦 ("rhapsody") 4) writings on numbers and divinations, 术数 5) writings on "Recipes and Methods” 方技 [4]
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]
Early Chinese prose was deeply influenced by the great philosophical writings of the Hundred Schools of Thought (770–221 BC). The works of Mozi , Mencius , and Zhuang Zhou contain well-reasoned, carefully developed discourses that reveal much stronger organization and style than their predecessors.
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).
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.
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