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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.
The findings at Anyang include the earliest written record of the Chinese so far discovered: inscriptions of divination records in ancient Chinese writing on the bones or shells of animals—the oracle bones, dating from c. 1250 – c. 1046 BC. [27] A series of at least twenty-nine kings reigned over the Shang dynasty. [28]
Classical Chinese [a] is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from c. the 5th century BCE. [2] For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary Chinese, which was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early 20th century.
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the Qieyun, a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions.
Comparing the three ages, the ancient Chinese, the Roman, and the Modern, Spengler states that "Caesarism" is an inevitable product of such an age and it "suddenly outlines itself on the horizon." In China the culmination occurred with the First Emperor, in the Mediterranean with Sulla and Pompey and in our world is expected in one century [=2022].
Classical Chinese's most obvious contrast with modern written vernacular Chinese is that the former rarely uses words of more than one character; nearly all Classical words are one character in length. This stands directly in contrast with vernacular Chinese, in which two-character words are extremely common.
Agriculture began almost 10,000 years ago in several regions of modern-day China. [13] The earliest domesticated crops were millet in the north and rice in the south. [14] [15] Some Neolithic cultures produced textiles with hand-operated spindle-whorls as early as 5000 BCE. [16] The earliest discovered silk remains date to the early third ...
Similar expressions such as "5000 years of Chinese history" have also emerged and become popular in China, including the People's Republic of China period. For example, the popular history books on Chinese history compiled by mainland Chinese writers Lin Handa and Cao Yuzhang were published under the title of "Five Thousand Years Up and Down". [5]