Cliff carvings may rewrite history of Chinese characters

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200705/1...518_375834.html

Chinese archaeologists say they have found more than 2,000 pictographs dating back 7,000 to 8,000 years, about 3,000 years before other texts that are believed to be the origin of modern Chinese characters.

The pictographs are on the rock carvings in Damaidi, at Beishan Mountain in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, which covers about 450 square kilometers with more than 10,000 prehistoric rock carvings. Paleographers claim that the pictographs may take the history of Chinese characters back to 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. Previously, scholars believed the earliest Chinese characters included 3,000-year-old inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells, known as the Oracle Bones, and 4,500-year-old pottery-born inscriptions, both found in central Henan Province, one of the birthplaces of Chinese civilization.

"We have found some symbols shaped like both pictures and characters," said Li Xiangshi, a cliff carving expert at the North University of Nationalities based in Yinchuan, capital of Ningxia.

"The pictographs are similar to the ancient hieroglyphs of Chinese characters and many can be identified as ancient characters," said Li. The Damaidi carvings, first discovered in the late 1980s, cover 15 square kilometers with 3,172 cliff carvings, featuring 8,453 individual figures such as the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing. "Through arduous research, we have found that some pictographs are commonly seen in up to hundreds of pictures in the carvings," said Liu Jingyun, an expert on ancient Oracle Bone characters.

"The size, shape and meanings of the pictographs in different carvings are the same," Liu said. Liu believed the meanings of all the pictographs could be deciphered on the basis of certain classifications such as gender.

Source: Xinhua

Interesting, do they have photos of those pictographs?

^ ^
I am just wondering where Baishan mountain is located. From the news of China.com, The place is in Damaidi mountain of Zhongwei city next to Tenggeli desert.





(Picture from China.com.cn)

A Chinese "Venus" was also found in Ningxia, apparently around the same area: http://english.people.com.cn/200312/22/eng...22_130951.shtml

Slightly older sets of symbols were also found on tortoise shells from the Jiahu site in Henan: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2956925.stm

The site has been known for a while (late 80s that article says, ie 20 years ago), and that story pops up with some regularity, it seems (I am pretty certain it was mentionned on CHF before). But we never seem to get anything more than "there are pictograms, which are 8000 years old, and might mean something..." (note the Venus story DaMo posted, which mentions the same carvings at the end, in the same blurry way).

So, do these cliff carvings rewrite the historiy of chinese characters, as the title implies? We don't know... and the article doesn't help.

I'm always amazed at the imprecision and lack of serious of those Xinhua informations, but then, back in the 80s, they used to announce that a possible cure for AIDS had been found (which use some element of traditional pharmacopeia) every other week...

Francois

How about this: we can say that a script has evolved once we have evidence of:

1 - Approximate consistency in character form and enough characters to prove this ... We haven't found enough ancient characters in a single site so far, but there are supposedly 2000 here. If there are enough characters that match in form, at least the basis for a written language has been lain.
2 - Representations beyond mere tangible objects ... Basic rule in grammar is that every sentence must contain a verb. Also, there would have to be numbers and other complex concepts representing time, space, color etc at least.

What do you think of these criteria?

Damo is right, and this is exactly what is missing from such annoucements.
It isn't like Chinese archaeologists don't know this, but little details like this don't make as good a story for the masses.
As Francois rightly said elsewhere the difficulty is the nature of later Chinese script is based on earlier pictograms.
When somebody draws the sun, or deer, like seen here they are more like pictures or doodling than meaning Chinese characters or an evolved script, i.e writing.

There is nothing here to drive back the creation of script to 7,000 years ago. The pictures could be from a African rock face, a paleo-American petroglyph or a NZ Maori boundary marker. People drawing what they experience.
The rays of the sun, a prey species etc.

Even the much more convincing abstract Banpo characters on pottery, about half the age of these, are not accepted as real script. Unless there is a sentence, and grammar, then these yet earlier cliff artworks are just singular images and could be found anywhere in the world.

Xinhua really is more often than not worse than useless for learning about real advances in archaeological knowledge.
This is about journalism, not a statement of academic fact.
Re-writting history and pushing back the bounds of time seems to be an obsession and reasonable discussion never seems to come into it.

One thing I find especially sad about those stories is that there probably are many good, interesting, and useful stories to be made about this site. What it is exactly, what are the theories on its origin and the culture who did these carvings, what the signs mostly represent, how it links to other ancient sites (same culture, different?).

But the only information we seem to get is always this kind of "new world record" piece of news, with lots of meaningless figures.

Another funny point is that, even though the article is short, the information seems to be a bit contradictory: compare the second and foutth paragraph, which seem to say the same thing, but with completely different numbers (wrt the surface of the site, the number of carvings...).

Francois