Oracle bone inscriptions are one of the earliest writings in the world
But some time ago, writings earlier than oracle bone inscriptions were discovered in Ningxia
\Discovered in Damai Field, Zhongwei, Ningxia In a large number of independent rock art groups, my country's oldest pictorial writings, which are thousands of years older than oracle bone inscriptions, were discovered. At present, the research results have been verified by Mr. Liu Jingyun, an expert in ancient writing from Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, and he finally believes that the discoveries in the Damaidi rock paintings may rewrite the history of Chinese writing.
An astonishing number of prehistoric rock paintings remain in the Damaidi rock art belt in the Beishan area of ??Weining, Ningxia. The early rock art can be traced back to the late Paleolithic Age, about 20,000 years ago. According to the survey and research by rock painting experts from the Northwest Second Nationalities College, there are 3,172 groups of 8,453 individual rock paintings in the Damai Field of Zhongwei, Ningxia, including the sun, moon and stars, gods of heaven and earth, hunting, grazing, and dance sacrifices. Rock painting experts used Lishi Huangyi to date the early rock paintings between 16,000 and 10,000 years ago. After nearly two years of field investigation and extensive research, the pictures and texts in the rock paintings were finally approved by Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House. Oracle expert Liu Jingyun conducted research and verification.
There are still stone tools and pottery shards from the Stone Age left in the Damaidi rock art area and its adjacent areas. This shows that the barley field during the primitive society was a gathering area for ancient human settlements and activities, and a holy place of worship for them to hold sacrificial rituals. Research shows that the pictorial symbols in the Damaidi rock art area are the original Chinese characters, and many pictographic and abstract symbols already have elements of ancient characters. The main basis is: these pictographic symbols have the basic pictographic form of original Chinese characters, and similar images can be found in pottery symbols and later oracle bone inscriptions of roughly the same period; a complex composed of two or more pictographic symbols has basically the characteristics of The elements that make up writing such as pictographic characters, ideographic characters, and referring characters are understood. More importantly, this kind of pictographic symbol is by no means accidental and isolated in the Damai Field petroglyphs, but is distributed in a star shape.
According to Li Xiangshi, a member of the International Rock Art Committee and a researcher at the Rock Art Research Center of Northwest Second National University, more than 1,500 pictorial characters have been found in the individual figures of the Damaidi rock paintings, of which only the legible pictorial characters are A small part, most of them cannot read yet. /
In the world: The name "cuneiform" was given by the British, called cuneiform, which comes from Latin and is a compound word composed of the two words cuneus (wedge) and forma (shape). This name expresses the most essential external characteristics of ancient Mesopotamian writing. In fact, cuneiform writing, like the writing of other peoples in the world, has experienced the development process from symbols to writing.
Cuneiform writing was a great invention of the Sumerians. Sumerian eventually evolved from pictorial writing into cuneiform writing, which took hundreds of years and was completed around 2500 BC.
Archaeological discoveries have confirmed that in ancient Mesopotamia, the initial appearance of writing did not look like wedges, but just flat pictures. Obviously, ancient Mesopotamian writing, known as cuneiform writing by later generations, originated from pictographic hieroglyphics. Archaeologists have discovered clay tablets engraved with this hieroglyphic symbol in the ancient city of Uruk, which have been dated to around 3200 BC. This is the earliest written record in the world. This kind of writing is simple and the expression is intuitive. Sometimes complex meanings and abstract concepts are expressed by combining several symbols. For example, the combination of "eye" and "water" means "cry", and the combination of "bird" and "egg" means "cry". "Sheng" etc. This kind of writing is pictographic. If you want to express a complex meaning, use two symbols together. For example, "sky" plus "water" means "rain"; "eye" plus "water" means "cry", etc. Later, it was developed that one symbol can represent multiple meanings. For example, "foot" can also mean "walking", "standing", etc. This is an ideographic symbol.
With the development of society and the increase in people's interactions, the things to be expressed are becoming more and more complex and abstract, and primitive graphics are increasingly unsuitable for people's needs. As a result, the Sumerians transformed writing. On the one hand, it simplifies graphics, often using parts to represent the whole; on the other hand, it increases the meaning of symbols. For example, in addition to "foot", the symbol "foot" can also mean "standing" and "walking", and "plough" In addition to "plough", the symbol can also mean "ploughing" and "people who plow the fields". In this way, hieroglyphs developed into ideograms, that is, the meaning of symbols is not directly expressed by graphics but derived from them.
About 2500 BC, Sumer has developed a syllabic script, that is, using pronunciation symbols instead of ideographic symbols. Words with the same sound often use one character, and one symbol can also represent a sound. For example, the cuneiform word "star" has the sound "um" in Sumerian. If it is used to express pronunciation, it has nothing to do with the original meaning of the word "star". It only expresses pronunciation. This is the expression. Sound symbols.
This is also the inevitable result of social development, because since 3000 BC, Sumer has been fighting for years. In order to praise themselves, the rulers have gradually increased the number of inscriptions describing the process of the war. At this time, we often encounter some proper nouns, such as "capture" and "capture". In order to distinguish the names of cities and rulers, they began to use phonetic symbols. Phonetic symbols are a step further than ideographic symbols. First, the number of symbols is reduced. Second, phonetic symbols can also express things that graphic symbols cannot. Prepositions, adverbs, particles, word cases, word beginnings, word endings and other grammatical and grammatical structures. The meaning of the statement expressed in this way is more precise. After these changes, the Sumerian writing system gradually became complete. In the process of simplifying hieroglyphics, the Sumerians began to gradually replace hieroglyphics with cuneiform symbols, and eventually created cuneiform writing.
The Sumerians first wrote on clay tablets. Imprinting on clay tablets is therefore only suitable for writing short, straight strokes. Since the corners of reeds or wooden sticks are used to press when writing, the marks left when pressed are wider and deeper, and the marks left when they are pulled out are thinner and narrower. In this way, the beginning of each stroke of this writing symbol is wider. Thick and thin at the end, like a wooden wedge, which is how the name "cuneiform" comes from. After the cuneiform became the standard font for writing, later inscriptions on stones were also carved in this shape.
At first, cuneiform was written in a straight line from right to left and top to bottom. The disadvantage of this writing method was that the written characters were often erased by the carving hand. Later, the glyphs were turned sideways 90 Degree, changed to a horizontal line from left to right.
The invention of cuneiform by the Sumerians was an outstanding contribution to world culture. The Sumerian language system is unique in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and syntactic structure. It is very different from Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian that later belonged to the Semitic language family. But which language family it should be classified into, no scholar has been able to solve it yet. Therefore, the affiliation of the Sumerian language, like the Sumerians, remains a mystery to this day. Moreover, the Sumerian language existed for a relatively short period of time. After the Babylonian king Hammurabi came to power, it became a dead language and was no longer commonly used. Only used by priests during religious ceremonies, it is somewhat similar to Latin.
At the end of the third millennium BC, Akkadian, a Semitic language, replaced Sumerian. The Akkadians transformed and developed on the basis of absorbing the Sumerian language and writing, and established a relatively complete cuneiform writing system. The later Babylonian and Assyrian languages ??were mainly perfected on the basis of Akkadian.
Cuneiform writing spread mainly in West Asia and Southwest Asia. During the reign of the Babylonians and Assyrians, cuneiform developed further, the vocabulary became more expanded and complete, and the calligraphy became more refined and beautiful. With the spread of culture, other ethnic groups in the Mesopotamia also adopted this writing. Around 1500 BC, the cuneiform script invented by the Sumerians has become a common writing system for national exchanges at that time. Even Egypt and the Mesopotamia countries used cuneiform in letters or treaties in diplomatic exchanges.
Later, due to the development of commerce, the Persians in the Iranian highlands improved the Mesopotamian cuneiform script and gradually turned it into an advanced alphabetic script.