'Earliest Chinese Characters' Unearthed

Archaeologists have discovered pottery bearing inscriptions dating back 4,500 years, which could prove to be China's earliest example of written language.

These pottery fragments, found in the ruins of an ancient city in Huaiyang County of Henan Province, are believed to be parts of a spinning wheel, according to a report released by the county government.

A photo, posted on the local government's website, showed a piece of black pottery bearing white strokes. The fragment formed half of a round spinning wheel, with a diameter of 4.7 centimeters and a thickness of 1.1 centimeters.

The inscriptions are similar in shape to the Ba Gua writings, an octagonal diagram that is a fundamental philosophical concept of ancient China, the report said, quoting renowned Chinese archaeologist Li Xueqin of Tsinghua University. "The discovery of the inscriptions on the spinning wheel proves that Pingliangtai, where the ruins are located, could be one of the birthplaces of Chinese civilization," Li said.

Zhang Zhihua, curator of Pingliangtai ancient city museum, said he found the fragments in May while accompanying a group of archaeological magazine reporters around the Pingliangtai ruins. "When I picked up the fragment and saw the inscriptions, I was very excited because I knew it could be a major discovery," Zhang said in the report.

Before this discovery, the earliest known Chinese characters are inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells -- known as the Oracle Bones -- buried in the royal tombs of the Shang Dynasty 3,000 years ago. They were used by oracles to divine auguries from the gods.

Inscriptions on these bones, one of the oldest forms of writing in the world, resemble the cuneiform writing of the ancient Near East and hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt, experts say.

This has been known for a very long time. The current theory traces ALL writing to a single source ~ Sumer.

A linguist at Indiana University has tied such farflung languages as Sumerian, Sa'ami, a written Chinese language, and a spoken American Indian language ~ to the group that first developed writing.

These hieroglyphic/pictographic techniques are not to be confused with alphabets or syllabries invented thousands of years later.

Sioux or Plains Indian sign language is essentially the same as these earliest hieroglyphic/pictographic languages ~ with my little sign language guidebook I was able to read a display of Shang Dynasty written materials at the Smithsonian several years back.

"hmmm, writing in china that resembles cuniform and egyptian type writing....sounds like some folks were traveling and found a nice place for a stayover after a long journey....."

In 1159BC, the trees worldwide recorded a catastrophic event recorded in their rings. The Shang Dyhasty collapsed at this time and it is recorded that 250,000 Chinese 'took to the sea.'

The Olmec And The Shang

Michael Xu, who teaches Chinese studies at Texas Christian University, reports finding artistic motifs on 3,000-year-old artifacts from the Olmec culture in southern Mexico that are identical to Chinese inscriptions from the Shang Dynasty, which dates to the same era.

Xu has studied hundreds of drawings on tortoise shells and animal shoulder blades that have been kept for decades in American museums and largely ignored.

And he reports, "When I first brought my artifacts from the Americas to China, scholars there thought that I just had more examples of Shang writing."

Xu says that Olmec and Shang dynasty symbols for sun, sky, trees, water, rain, astronomy, sacrifice and religion are so close they can't be accidental.

Furthermore, he has found that the symbols occur in the same sequences in both cultures. There are several dozen examples of these, which means the symbols can be read as sentences -- the same sentences with the same meanings in China and in Mexico.

This style of writing, called "jiaguwen," the oldest Chinese characters, existed in Asia for about 600 years, until about 1,000 B.C. Xu dates the similar writing in Mesoamerica at about 1,100 B.C.

What's significant, Xu notes, is that the Olmecs are regarded as the first civilization, the mother culture of the hemisphere, appearing 1,000 years before the Mayans and with no antecedents.

"It seems like those people came out of the sky," says Xu. "Overnight they knew how to use jade, damasks. They had astrology, astronomy." In particular, he said they had artistic motifs on jade bars, called "jade celts," that were used as ritual objects and to identify the rankings of their leaders.

"You cannot find jade celts anywhere else in the world except ancient China and Mesoamerican sites. Nobody else used jade for ritual objects, for burial, especially wrapped up in cinnabar, the red powder, except in these two places."

There is the legend in China, says Xu, that when the Shang dynasty collapsed, replaced by the Zhou dynasty, some 250,000 people were displaced and disappeared.

"I don't think 250,000 people came to America," says Xu. "But some made it. How many does it need to spread the gospel? Maybe only a dozen; look at missionaries today. Scholars ask, where is the bronze, where is this, where is that? Look at the Mayflower people from Europe. Did they bring palace things? They did not. They mostly just brought themselves

The Sumerians were quite simply herdsmen. They followed animal herds wherever they went, North to South, South to North, and established a series of base camps along the Euphrates River.

No doubt they were following the herds North from Sundaland as the Ice Age ended and Sundland was gradually covered with water.

Folks speaking a cognate language went all the way to Norway following the herds ~ most likely reindeer.

Later on Semitic and Indo-European speakers moved in on their territory. They were reduced to being "scribes" while the Semites and Indo-Europeans went about creating Babylon and Persia.

I suspect the Sumerians made a good living out of the "scribe" business for the next few thousand years.

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