Jiahu symbols

Common card · No. 332020

The Jiahu symbols (simplified Chinese: 贾湖契刻符号; traditional Chinese: 賈湖契刻符號; pinyin: Jiǎhú qìkè fúhào) comprise a corpus of markings on prehistoric artifacts found in Jiahu, a Neolithic site of Peiligang culture in Henan, China. The Jiahu symbols are dated to around 6000 BC. The site was excavated in 1989. Although at first a total of 17 groups of symbols were identified, intensive scrutiny has found there to be only 11 definitely incised signs, of which 9 were incised on tortoise shells and an additional 2 on bone. The archaeologists who made the original finds believed the markings to be similar in form to some characters used in the much later oracle bone script (e.g., similar markings of 目 'eye', 日 'sun; day'), but most doubt that the markings represent systematic writing. A 2003 report in Antiquity interpreted them "not as writing itself, but as features of a lengthy period of sign-use which led eventually to a fully-fledged system of writing". The earliest known body of writing in...

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