{"id":25,"date":"2011-01-06T00:01:58","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T08:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=25"},"modified":"2011-04-03T22:05:12","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T05:05:12","slug":"chinese-oracle-bones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/06\/chinese-oracle-bones\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese Oracle bones — ~1500BC, China"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Oracle Bones "horse"<\/p><\/div>\n

Written Chinese is, by some measures, the most successful writing system on the planet.\u00a0 It has persisted for thousands of years and is still in use today.\u00a0 While it has gone through a number of distinct changes, those changes have been evolutionary, not revolutionary; they did not change the fundamental nature of the writing system.\u00a0 Akkadian<\/a>, as I have discussed, was quite different from Sumerian<\/a> in both the shapes of the glyphs and in the nature of what was represented (a syllabary instead of logograms).\u00a0 Chinese logograms have stayed logograms for at least four thousand years.\u00a0 Although the modern shapes look very different from the earliest shapes, it is possible to trace their evolution.<\/p>\n

The Oracle Bones script existed in about 2000BC, but were lost for a while.\u00a0 In the late 1800s AD, Chinese scholars discovered that medicine men were grinding up bones with glyphs on them, and recognized that those glyphs were precursors to their writing system.\u00a0 Apparently people would carve questions about the future (like “when will it rain?”) on bones or turtle shells, then put the bones into a fire.\u00a0 The diviner would look at how the bone cracked from the fire and (allegedly) use that information to give the questioner an answer.\u00a0 (The archeologists are now digging up more of the bones, the medicine men hopefully less.)<\/p>\n

Among the glyphs found on the bones were glyphs for an ink brush and an old-style Chinese book made from bamboo slats.\u00a0 This strongly suggests that there was writing that predated the oracle bones, but which was on perishable material.\u00a0 This is an argument which might bolster the status of symbols like Vinca<\/a>: perhaps there was more writing on perishable media.\u00a0 However, it might also damage their claims to full writing system-hood: if Vinca was actually writing, it should have had more non-perishable evidence.<\/p>\n

In fact, there is some evidence for possible earlier writing systems in China.\u00a0 The Ji\u01ceh\u00fa<\/a> script has a small number of symbols that might be a writing system which dates from 6600BC.\u00a0 There are at least seven other candidates for Neolithic Chinese writing systems<\/a>, but like Vinca, we will probably never know.\u00a0 All of them, however, are less<\/em> pictorial than Oracle Bones script, while one would expect an earlier script to be more<\/em> pictorial than Oracle Bones.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a>, Ancient Scripts<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written Chinese is, by some measures, the most successful writing system on the planet.\u00a0 It has persisted for thousands of years and is still in use today.\u00a0 While it has gone through a number of distinct changes, those changes have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,8,13,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-in-its-area","category-logograms-language-types","category-probably-developed-by-illiterates","category-unknown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}