Posted on 05/18/2007 11:54:50 AM PDT by Jedi Master Pikachu
Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought. State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country. They say many of these symbols bear a strong resemblance to later forms of ancient Chinese characters. Scholars had thought Chinese symbols came into use about 4,500 years ago.
The Damaidi carvings, first discovered in the 1980s, cover 15 sq km (5.8 square miles) and feature more than 8,000 individual figures including the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing. "We have found some symbols shaped like both pictures and characters," Li Xiangshi, a cliff carving expert at the North University of Nationalities in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, told Xinhua news agency. "The pictographs are similar to the ancient hieroglyphs of Chinese characters and many can be identified as ancient characters." Until the discovery, the earliest characters included 4,500-year-old inscriptions on pottery from Henan province in central China.
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A Google search also brought up this FR thread from Renfield: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1835863/posts.
They all look closer to pictures than characters.
Chinese characters were developed from pictographs, weren’t they?
how about a book review?
How do they know it’s that old? Because if they said any younger, it wouldn’t be an attempt to disprove God.
A bit tongue in cheek, perhaps, but ever notice how many dates that get provided that are suspiciously just a little bit past the biblical chronology? It’s probably not an organized effort, but I doubt it’s a coincidence, given that the vast majority of scientists are athiests.
How so?
There are supposed to be over 8,000 carvings, but the ones which were found and presented to you seem to be clearly pictures rather than characters.
Case in point, the Chinese character for house may bear some resemblance to a house, and could be descended from a picture of a house (this is just hypothetical). However, would finding a carving of a house constitute find early Chinese writing? (rhetorical). It's debatable at least.
“How so?”
They decided to put the date of this writing outside of the biblical timeline.
Biblically, the universe is only about six thousand Earth years old. Personally didn’t use the phrase “if the dating was accurate” in comment 1 because of this—it probably isn’t accurate (some Creationists can squeeze out a few more millennia—so making the universe some 10,000 or so years old).
I would think a picture language like the Chinese language seems to be, would probably be one of the first languages. It’s an intuitive way to create a language, even if we Westerners view it as needlessly complicated and with little nuance.
And those dinosaurs existed at the same time as humans.
Oddly, this could be turning into a crevolist thread.....
The four 'independent' writing systems to have sprung up around the world (not including what is considered proto-writing) are: Sumerian cuneiform; Egyptian hieroglyphs; Chinese characters; and Mesoamerican glyphs. The other writing systems (including alphabets and other phonetic writing systems) are supposed to be descended from these scripts. Today, Sumerian cuneiform and Mesoamerican glyphs and their potential derivatives have been all but wiped out. The most prolific is Egyptian hieroglyphs, from which the Greek, Latin, Cyrillic alphabets came from, along with the writings of southwestern Asia (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.), south Asia, and southeast Asia. Even Korean Hangul could be descended from Egyptian rather than the writing of much closer China.
The second survivor is Chinese, which a smaller circulation than the Egyptian descendants, but still large (the PRC alone has some 1.3 billion people, most of them literate, and Japan, Korea, and other Asian nations with phonetic scripts still supplement their language with Chinese characters).
What does this have to do with the dinosaurs?
Look, you’re free to not believe in the Bible if you choose not to. God gave us free will to make our own decisions.
Cursive style. |
The pictures are distorted so that the post looks pretty (which it SHOULD if the preview pans out--the Mayan might be bumped up a little).
Anyway, here goes....
Yep. The pictures aren’t evenly spaced. And the type isn’t centered underneath its relevant picture.
Are you saying I can’t believe in the Bible and think that way?
As the comment stated, it was hypothetical—not versed in Chinese writing (or language in general). Appreciate your pointing the pig over a roof thing, but the main point still stands: that finding a carving doesn’t necessarily translate into proof of writing even if that writing is in somewhat pictographic form.
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