The 5,000-year interval between Jiahu symbols and Shang oracle bone script

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Key facts

• Oracle-bone script is the earliest generally accepted fully developed Chinese writing system. Surviving inscriptions begin in the late Shang during the reign of Wu Ding and continue under his successors; the cited chronology dates Wu Ding to 1198–1189 BCE.
• Jiahu’s symbols date to roughly 6600 BCE, leaving about 5,000 years before the accepted late-Shang corpus. No generally accepted inscribed tortoise shell is known from the interval.
• In 2007, researchers at Damaidi in Ningxia announced incised symbols on pottery sherds dated to about 8,000 years before the announcement—roughly 6000 BCE, not 8000 BCE—and suggested they might be ancestral to Chinese characters.
• In 2006, pottery fragments from Pingliangtai in Shaanxi were reported as about 4,500 years old, or around 2500 BCE, more than a millennium before late-Shang oracle-bone inscriptions.
• Other proposed comparanda include a red-painted symbol on a Longshan-culture pot, a marked jade tortoise from around 3300 BCE, incised symbols at Banpo and Jiangzhai, and cinnabar-painted marks at Taosi around 2000 BCE.
• The symbols are discontinuous, and their interpretation as independent marking systems rather than precursors in an unbroken lineage to Shang script remains disputed.

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