Neolithic graves in central China may hide the world's earliest
writing, if the "signs" carved into 8,600-year-old tortoise shells
can be deciphered by academics.
The claim, made by a team of Chinese and American researchers in
the March issue of Antiquity, a journal based at Cambridge
University, Britain, has triggered heated debate among the world's
archaeologists.
The debate centers on the origin of writing.
The earliest writing on earth is commonly believed to have evolved
in what is today's southern Iraq about 5,200 years ago. There,
settlers invented the cuneiform, a way of arranging impressions
stamped on clay by a wedge.
It
is commonly recognized that writing didn't emerge in China until
2nd millennia BC, about 2,000 years after it appeared in Iraq.
In
China, early writing known as jiaguwen consisted of pictographic
inscriptions on bone and tortoise shells.
However, the Chinese and American researchers claim their findings
may overturn long-held convictions about where the evolution of
Chinese writing began. After studying the artifacts from a site
called Jiahu, in central China's Henan
Province, they have proposed that the pictograms inscribed onto
animal bones and shells unearthed there predate the jiaguwen used
in the Shang Dynasty (c. 16 century-11 century BC).
The Jiahu site dates back more than 7,000 years. The researchers'
findings have been covered by the British Broadcasting Corporation
and US television networks because, if proven correct, it would
mean the Jiahu "signs" would predated the writing of Mesopotamia by
more than 2,000 years.
The researchers have won support from some archaeologists but been
challenged by others, who call their hypothesis "nonsense."
"There is nothing new here," Robert Murowchick, a Boston University
archaeologist told Science magazine. He reportedly dismissed
the notion "simple geometric signs" can be linked to early
writing.
Andrew Lawler from Science magazine commented: "The research
is sure to fire up a long-standing debate about how Chinese writing
evolved and whether religious practices spurred its origin."
Discovery in Jiahu
The project is based in University of Science and
Technology of China (USTC), winning state sponsorship. The
research team was led by Li Xueqin, a renowned historian and
archaeologist. It also includes archaeologists Zhang Juzhong and
Wang Changsui from USTC in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui
Province, as well as Garman Harbottle, a researcher with
Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
Their work is based on the 1983-87 excavation of the Jiahu site,
which was discovered in 1962. The site has been carbon dated to
between 7,000 and 5,800 BC.
"Since the excavation began, we had noticed tortoise shells, which
contain pebbles of various colors and shapes, in the graves. We
paid special attention as similar shells appeared in Yinxu, where
the oracle bones or jiaguwen were found," said Zhang Juzhong, then
leader of the excavation team from Henan Institute of
Archaeology.
Everyday Zhang looked through the shells newly unearthed to see if
there were markings. And finally, on an afternoon in May, 1987, an
intern student from Zhengzhou University, Henan, found a stone tool
inscribed with a series of signs.
The next day, archaeologists opened Grave M344, and saw an adult
male whose head was missing. Where his head would have been were
eight sets of tortoise shells and one fork-shaped bone
artifact.
Zhang picked up one nearly complete plastron -- part of a tortoise
shell -- pierced with a hole.
"It felt so smooth," he recalled. "Its owners must have often held
it in their hands."
He
carefully brushed off the dust, and on the lower middle part of the
plastron was an eye-shaped sign, which greatly resembled the later
jiaguwen pictograph for "eye" in the Yinxu oracle bones.
"We were exhilarated, and bought meat and liquor for celebration,"
recalled Zhang.
Team member Wang Changsui said the tortoise shell was also faintly
marked with a resemblance of a man holding an object with the same
fork-like shape as the artifact. He believes the sign is related to
ancient divination.
Another plastron was incised with two vertical strokes, fairly
similar to the character for "20" in the jiaguwen inscriptions
found at Yinxu, said the research paper.
Up
to 16 signs were found on 14 fragments of tortoise shells, pottery,
bone and stone artifacts in the excavation. The Jiahu site had
already revealed a society of unexpected complexity, with 45 house
foundations, 370 cellars, nine pottery kilns, and 349 graves
containing objects including tools, ornaments, and ritual or
musical artifacts.
The Jiahu site has revealed several important discoveries,
including the earliest known musical instruments -- playable
seven-hole bone flutes spanning an octave.
As
soon as the excavation ended, a team of researchers with the Henan
Institute of Archaeology went to Beijing "with complex feelings,"
said Zhang. They consulted more than 10 leading archaeologists and
historians, including Hu Houxuan, Su Bingqi, Li Xueqin and Zhang
Zhenglang, about the signs.
"Some of the scholars said the signs are early writings, made
before the Yinxu oracles, and they interpreted several signs on the
spot," said Zhang Juzhong.
"Others said they are intentionally inscribed signs but not
necessarily writings, and still others said the etchings are just
marks, not signs."
Clues to writings' evolution
With no consensus from the authorities, the team returned to Henan,
and Zhang started to research the curious markings.
As
he and fellow researchers later wrote, "while we do not challenge
the primacy of Mesopotamia in human literacy, we do suggest that
China, with a potential record of nine millennia, offers a unique
opportunity to observe the evolutionary stages which led to the
development of a script.
Co-author Li Xueqin told China Daily: "We don't say they are
words or languages. We do say they are signs and the earliest
evidence in the world of a long line of experimentation in sign
use, which led to writing."
Yao Zongyi, professor with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who
did textual research on each of the signs, supported Li. He wrote,
"the carved signs of Jiahu provided new materials to solve the key
problems about the origin of Chinese writing."
The researchers, who cannot decide at this stage what these signs
represent, compare them with the jiaguwen inscriptions of 2nd
millennia BC, from the Shang Dynasty. For instance, a sign
inscribed on a broken plastron, which resembles the modern
character for "sun," represents "window" in the Yinxu oracles.
But many researchers objected to the attempt to tie " the Jiahu
etchings to the Shang breakthrough," said Science magazine
writer Lawler.
William Boltz, professor of Classical Chinese at the University of
Washington, Seattle, said: "There is a span of 5,000 years (between
Jiahu and Shang period)... How can the development of Chinese
writing have taken so long?"
The professor noted speculation about the links between the two
based on graphic similarity alone over such a great period of time
is next to meaningless.
"How does anyone know that the one graph is in fact the graph for
'eye'?'' he said.
"It may look like an eye to someone, and it may have some general
approximate graphic similarity to the graph that stood for the word
for 'eye' in the Shang language, but it might just as well be a
graph that stands for something else, perhaps a heap of grain under
a protective cover."
The span of five millennia is conspicuous because there haven't
been any inscribed tortoise shells found between 6,000 BC and the
Shang Dynasty in Henan or anywhere else in China.
But Zhang said while no inscribed shells were found, many potteries
and pot fragments from the five millennia that followed have been
unearthed carrying signs, especially in the Dawenkou, Yangshao,
Longshan, Liangzhu Cultures.
In
several cultures after Yangshao (6950-4950 BC), pottery signs grew
more complex and began to be applied with writing brushes, wrote
the researchers.
For example, a flat pot from the late Longshan Culture (2310-1810
BC) at Taosi, north China's Shanxi
Province, is brush-painted with a red sign, which is identical
to the modern character wen (literature).
And a jade tortoise of 5,300 years ago at Lingjiatan, east China's
Anhui Province, hid a jade tablet in it, which was inscribed signs
"of the same nature" as those from Jiahu.
"Neolithic men may have abandoned the use of tortoise shells as a
material to write on for a certain period and turned to other
materials," said Zhang. "After all, the oracle bones found in Yinxu
and recently in Zhengzhou were so mature that they couldn't have
appeared all of a sudden,"
Lawler wrote the genesis of Chinese writing is even harder to pin
down because "many researchers assume that there were earlier
writings -- about unknown subjects -- on perishable material such
as bamboo."
Besides the gap of five millennia, researchers were also puzzled by
the fact the Jiahu signs and others found elsewhere in China before
the Longshan Culture were mostly single markings, while the
jiaguwen oracles were written in sentences at Yinxu.
"That fact pushes us back to the slippery question of what writing
is, and if a single character accounts for writing," said
Zhang.
If
the single signs from Jiahu are writing, Chinese writing could be
traced back to about nine millennia ago.
More "ifs" may lie in Jiahu, where only 5 per cent of the site has
been excavated, and meanwhile many other Neolithic sites remain
untouched.
"The present state of archaeological record in China, which has
never had the intensive examination of, for example, Egypt or
Greece, does not permit us to say 'in which period of the Neolithic
did the Chinese invent their writing?'" wrote the researchers.
"What did persist through these long periods was the idea of sign
use."
(China Daily June 12, 2003)