How many years ago did Chinese characters come into being?

The earliest carved symbols date back more than 8,000 years.

In recent decades, the Chinese archaeological community has released a series of excavated materials related to the origin of Chinese characters earlier than the oracle bone inscriptions of Yinxu in Anyang. These materials mainly refer to the carved or painted symbols that appeared on pottery in the late primitive society and the early historical society, and also include a small number of symbols engraved on oracle bones, jade, stone tools, etc. It can be said that together they provide a new basis for explaining the origin of Chinese characters.

Through systematic investigation and comparison of the carved symbols on pottery shards unearthed in more than 100 sites of 19 archaeological cultures throughout China, Wang Yunzhi, a doctoral supervisor at Zhengzhou University, believes that the earliest carved symbols in China appeared at the Jiahu site in Wuyang, Henan, which has a history of more than 8,000 years.

As a professional worker, he tried to make a comprehensive arrangement of these original materials through scientific means, such as the comprehensive use of archaeology, paleographic formation, comparative philology, scientific and technological archaeology, and high-tech means, so as to sort out some clues about the occurrence and development of Chinese characters before the Shang Dynasty.

However, the situation is not so simple, except for the small materials that have been found in Zhengzhou ** site and Xiaoshuangqiao site (the site has found more than 10 cases of early Shang Dynasty Zhushu Taowen in recent years) can be directly compared with the Yinxu script, other pre-Shang symbols are scattered and scattered, missing many links from each other, and most of the symbols do not match the Shang Dynasty script configuration. There are also some symbols with heavy regional colors and complex backgrounds.

Chinese characters are one of the most spoken scripts in the world, and they are also the ones with the longest lifespan.

It is difficult to determine with certainty when Chinese characters began to be produced. The oldest writing that can be seen today is the Shang Dynasty inscription on oracle bones and cast on bronze objects. The writing of the Shang Dynasty was already a very developed script, and the era of the initial production of writing must have been far before the Shang Dynasty, that is, the Xia Dynasty or earlier than the Xia Dynasty.

It is about four or five thousand years ago, and it should be in the Neolithic period.

In the pottery talismans unearthed from the Erlitou culture and the Dawenkou culture, many pictures and characters similar to objects can be seen. On this basis, the ideograms in these pictorial characters and pottery patterns evolved into memographic characters. Chinese characters are gradually accumulated from scattered and individual characters, and after reaching a certain number, they become a kind of writing system through artificial norms.

According to research, the primitive Chinese characters were produced in the middle of the Neolithic period, and it took nearly 2,600 years for it to develop into a preliminary writing system.

There are three stages in the development of Chinese characters: the first stage is the pictorial writing stage. Writings before the Shang Dynasty should belong to this stage.

The second stage is the phonetic writing stage based on the ideographic script and with the phonetic script as the main body. Writings from the oracle bone inscription to the Qin dynasty belong to this stage. The third stage is the stage of morphophonetic characters with the main body and some morphophonetic characters and phonetic characters remaining, from the Qin and Han dynasties to modern Chinese characters.

The Yin Shang period was around the 14th century BC, more than 3,400 years ago.

Chinese characters were created about 4,000 years ago, and legend has it that Cangjie invented them. It is the world's most populous language of the type of acacia, and it has undergone a long evolutionary process.

It has a history of more than 3,400 years.

In the late Yin and Shang dynasties in the 14th century BC (about 3,400 years ago), "ideograms" evolved into the more stereotyped "oracle bone inscription", which is considered to be the first form of "Chinese characters" and is a kind of hieroglyphs.

After Qin Shi Huang unified China, he also unified the text, and the prime minister at that time - Li Si collected and sorted out the text at that time and then deleted the complicated and simplified beautification processing, and this unified text was called - "Xiao Seal", also known as "Qin Seal". At this time, there were almost no traces of hieroglyphs in the text.

The development of Chinese characters has gone through three stages:

1. Pictorial and Writing Stage: Writing before the Shang Dynasty should belong to this stage.

2. The stage of phonetic writing based on epigraphic characters and with phonetic characters as the main body: the characters from the oracle bone inscription to the Qin Dynasty belong to this stage.

3. With the morphophonetic characters as the main body, some morphophonetic characters and phonetic characters of the morphophonetic characters are also retained, and the Chinese characters from the Qin and Han dynasties to modern Chinese characters belong to this stage.

By the 21st century, Chinese characters have been around for more than 6,000 years.

Chinese characters are one of the oldest scripts in the world, dating back more than six thousand years. In terms of form, the circle gradually changes from a graphic to a stroke, a pictogram to a symbol, and a complex to simple. In the principle of word making, from the form, ideogram to shape and sound. Except for a very few Chinese characters (such as , , etc.), they are all one syllable per Chinese character.

Chinese characters are the longest continuously used script so far, and they are also the only ones that have been passed down to the present day in the major writing systems of ancient times.

In ancient times, Chinese characters were not only used in China, but also served as the only international communication script in East Asia for a long time, and before the 20th century, they were the official written standard scripts of Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, the Ryukyus, and other countries, and all East Asian countries created their own Chinese characters to a certain extent.