In 1988, a geologist working in Ningxia stumbled across a treasure trove of several thousand rock carvings spread over a 15 km area. The very earliest scrapings at the site, known as Damaidi (大麦地), are between 20,000 and 30,000 years old. The most recent carvings date from the Western Xia period (1032-1227 AD) with the majority of the inscriptions and pictographs dating from about 7,000 years ago.
Many of the images–sheep, hunting scenes, horses, deer, tigers–suggest nomadic hunter/gatherer and then later pastoral neolithic cultures living at the site. The images change over time, suggesting that man
y different cultures had used the site over the centuries.
Xinhua (h/t Tea & Gossip) reported yesterday that researchers studing the Damaidi carvings have begun to discern recognizable pictographs dating from about 8000 years ago. These symbols, they claim, strongly resemble early Chinese writing. If the researchers are correct, then these pictographs would be by far the earliest extant examples of proto-Chinese characters.
According Li Xiangshi, a researcher at the North Universities of Nationalities in Ningxia who has worked at the site for many years:
“We have found some symbols shaped like both pictures and characters,” Li Xiangshi, a cliff carving expert at the North University of Nationalities in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, told Xinhua news agency.“The pictographs are similar to the ancient hieroglyphs of Chinese characters and many can be identified as ancient characters.”
Other experts have concurred with Professor Li’s findings:
“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.
Unfortunately, the article didn’t say whether or not Professor Liu found any similarities between the Damaidi pictographs and those found in the Oracle Bone inscriptions.
(Oracle Bone pictographs dating from about 3000 years ago)
Previously, the earliest extant examples of proto-Chinese characters came from pottery dating back about 4,500 years ago discovered in Henan and the Oracle Bones which date from the late-Shang (about 1300 B.C.E.)
Now there is a big leap from ‘pictographs’ to proto-Hanzi and I understand the temptation to push back the start date of “Chinese civilization” a few thousand years. Many cultures that existed in what is today China used pictographic writing (one group, the Naxi in Yunnan, still do). I’ve posted some renderings of the Damaidi pictographs taken from a Sina.com article on the site.
(天象）
My initial reaction is that most pictographic representations–because they are images of actual and fairly universal objects–have a tendency to look rather similar. There is also a lot of pressure on the academic community here to rush and shoehorn every archaeological find into a teleology of “Chinese civilization” leading to the present-day state. That said, ancient writing is hardly my field of expertise, and I would be unwise not to defer to Professors Li and Liu and their colleagues in this area. It’s certainly a site worth watching for future developments.
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UPDATE: Mercenary Sinologist Brendan O’Kane backs up my initial reaction with a link to commentary by Tang Huisheng. The money quote:
我再次强调，我这里仅仅针对来自部分新闻媒体的说法。炒作不仅丝毫不会提升我国学术研究的质量，也丝毫不会提升我国的政治文化等影响，反而会贻笑大方， 此风不可长。
“I’ll reiterate, what i say here is aimed at they way things are being reported in some of the media. Hyping things up will not only not help raise the quality of academic research in China, nor will it improve the China’s political or cultural influence or the like. Quite the reverse, we will invite ridicule. This is not a tendency we should be encouraging.”
7 responses so far ↓
1 無名 - wu ming // May 19, 2007 at 2:48 am
while i tend to think little of the folks that love to 吹牛 the antiquity of china for shallow nationalist reasons, i personally would not be surprised if archaeology eventually reveals far deeper roots for chinese civilization (if one can even call shang and earlier “chinese”) than anyone - chinese and western alike - suspected.
much in the same way the harappan and mohenjadaran indus river civilizations must have come out of something even earlier, so too the extremely complex material culture of the shang and xia likely had antecedents going back a long, long ways.
i suppose there’s no hope of a neat little rosetta stone. pity, it’d be neat to read those petroglyphs.
2 Brendan // May 19, 2007 at 2:57 am
I’ve been meaning to blog about this since last night, when someone posted it on Metafilter. The images from the Sina.com article that you posted look a lot more like writing than the images in the articles I saw — the top one looks kinda ilke the early form of 云 or 回; the bottom right one looks like 犬 — but I’m kind of skeptical, since a lot of the early oracle bone forms were (a) pretty much pictographic anyway, and one crude stick figure of a dog looks more or less like another, and (b) I haven’t read any mention of them finding any actual texts written in the pictographs, which is the only thing that would prove any claims of writing-systemhood. May write more later — in the meantime,
3 花崗齋之愚公 // May 19, 2007 at 4:03 am
Wu Ming,
Good point and I’m sure there is much in the archaeological record yet to be discovered. As for the Chinese-ness of the Shang, well that is a point oft debated here and in other spaces as well.
I do think that as more paleolithic and neolithic sites like Damaidi are discovered, a more complex picture–a mosaic really–emerges of competing cultural centers in what is today China.
I’m less worried about the “chui niu” tendencies as I am about trying to force everything into a statist teleology.
4 花崗齋之愚公 // May 19, 2007 at 4:05 am
Brendan,
Both excellent points. It does sound like researchers are piecing together some rudimentary means to ‘translate’ the pictographs. We’ll have to wait and see. I’m eager to read what they come up with.
5 Brendan // May 19, 2007 at 11:19 pm
Tang Huisheng calls bullshit. Excerpted from my friend Jim’s translation:
“我再次强调，我这里仅仅针对来自部分新闻媒体的说法。炒作不仅丝毫不会提升我国学术研究的质量，也丝毫不会提升我国的政治文化等影响，反而会贻笑大方，此风不可长。” (”I’ll reiterate, what i say here is aimed at they way things are being reported in some of the media. Hyping things up will not only not help raise the quality of academic research in China, nor will it improve the China’s political or cultural influence or the like. Quite the reverse, we will invite ridicule. This is not a tendency we should be encouraging.”)
6 花崗齋之愚公 // May 20, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Brendan,
Thanks for the link and the great quote which confirm my earlier suspicions.
In some ways I think Damaidi as an example of a separate cultural center in the Northwest is as interesting as any attempt to push back the start date for “Chinese civilization.”
7 無名 - wu ming // May 20, 2007 at 9:47 pm
now that i think of it, when you take into consideration the radically different neolithic north chinese climate posited by elvin in retreat of the elephants, it is less counterintuitive than it initially seems when you think of northwest china today.
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