The Guardian just reported today on a find from Zhungqiao (near Shanghai) of artifacts bearing writing-like symbols that date back over 5,000 years. If this were substantiated, this would take the history of Chinese writing back an additional millennium or more from the earliest attested ‘oracle-bones’ and other inscriptions of the Shang dynasty. The article reports that the artifacts in question were excavated between 2003 and 2006, and the information is both slight and non-specific, and doesn’t link to any specific publication as of yet, so it’s difficult to know how, if at all, this relates to the host of other reports of writing or writing-like material from Chinese Neolithic sites (the Wikipedia page on Neolithic Chinese signs is quite extensive). The signs from Jiahu are much older than those of the newly reported find, for instance. I think that the difference that’s at question, and discussed in the Guardian piece, is the presence on some of these artifacts of series of several signs in a row, thus suggesting sentence-like structure rather than, say, ownership marks or clan emblems or just decoration, which is what most of the other Neolithic signs have been determined to be. I have to say that, if the stone axe pictured in the article is representative of the new finds, then I’m dubious of the entire enterprise – those do not look, to me, to have a writing-like nature, and some of them may not be ‘signs’ at all. I hate to be so negative, but the tendency to announce finds in the media that never come to anything in publication is so great that we should indeed be highly skeptical when such announcements are made in the absence of a published site report or article.
Posted on: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 05:40:07 +0000
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