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Located in present-day Anyang, Henan, Yin served as the capital during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – c. 1046 BCE) which spanned the reigns of 12 Shang kings and saw the emergence of oracle bone script, the earliest known Chinese writing. Along with oracle bone script and other material evidence for the Shang's existence, the site was ...
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.
The following is a list of the world's oldest surviving physical documents. Each entry is the most ancient of each language or civilization. For example, the Narmer Palette may be the most ancient from Egypt, but there are many other surviving written documents from Egypt later than the Narmer Palette but still more ancient than the Missal of Silos.
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at the Yinxu site near modern Anyang identified as the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1250 BC. [46] These are the oracle bones, short inscriptions carved on turtle plastrons and ox scapulae for divinatory purposes, as well as a few brief bronze ...
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]
An extreme case is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda: the earliest parts of this text date to c. 1500 BC, [1] while the oldest known manuscripts date to c. 1040 AD. [2] Similarly the oldest Avestan texts, the Gathas, are believed to have been composed before 1000 BC, but the oldest Avestan manuscripts date from the 13th century AD. [3]
The earliest traditional Chinese dynasty for which there is both archeological and written evidence is the Shang dynasty (1600 to 1046 BC). Shang sites have yielded the earliest known body of Chinese writing, the oracle bone script, mostly divinations inscribed on bones.
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.