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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 ...
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 ...
Furthermore, there is no evidence of the phonetic loan usage and semantic-phonetic compounding [f] necessary to produce a functional script as seen in the Shang dynasty's oracle bone script. Thus, leading scholar Qiu Xigui (2000) argues that: What these symbols represent definitely cannot be a fully formed system of writing; this much is quite ...
Under the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty (up to c. 1046 BC), pieces of bone, usually plastrons of tortoises or scapula of oxen, were used in pyromantic divination and then inscribed. The used oracle bones were deposited in pits at the Shang cult centre now known as Yinxu (near modern Anyang , Hebei ) and forgotten for millennia.
A 2003 report in Antiquity interpreted them "not as writing itself, but as features of a lengthy period of sign-use which led eventually to a fully-fledged system of writing". [2] The earliest known body of writing in the oracle bone script dates much later to the reign of the late Shang dynasty king Wu Ding , which started in about c. 1250 BC ...
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).
Unlike the Xia, the Shang dynasty's historicity is firmly established, due to written records on divination objects known as Oracle bones. The oldest such oracle bones date to the Late Shang (c. 1250—1046 BCE), during the reign of Wu Ding (1250–1192), putting the exact details of earlier rulers into doubt. [43] [44]