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Despite the pictorial nature of the oracle bone script, it was a fully functional and mature writing system by the time of the Shang dynasty, [19] meaning it was able to record the Old Chinese language, and not merely fragments of ideas or words. This level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred ...
Western Zhou dynasty characters (as exemplified by bronze inscriptions of that time) basically continue from the Shang writing system; that is, early W. Zhou forms resemble Shang bronze forms (both such as clan names, [e] and typical writing), without any clear or sudden distinction. They are, like their Shang predecessors in all media, often ...
The earliest undisputed examples of true writing in China—where symbols are used to fully record language, rather than simply having individual meanings in isolation—are the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty, with the earliest examples dated c. 1200 BCE. [8] [c]
From the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – c. 1050 BCE), Chinese writing evolved into the form found in cast inscriptions on ritual bronzes made during the Western Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 – 771 BCE) and the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BCE), a form of writing called bronze script (金文; jīnwén). Bronze script characters are less angular ...
The Shang dynasty (Chinese: 商朝; pinyin: Shāng cháo), also known as the Yin dynasty (殷代; Yīn dài), was a Chinese royal dynasty that ruled in the Yellow River valley during the second millennium BC, traditionally succeeding the Xia dynasty and followed by the Western Zhou dynasty. The classic account of the Shang comes from texts such ...
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.
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 occasionally by local farmers [14] since as early as the Sui and Tang dynasties, and perhaps starting as early as the Han dynasty. [15]
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).