The oldest word in China.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Damaidi rock paintings are the existing ancient characters in China.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions is also called "Wen Qi", "Oracle Bone Inscriptions", "Tortoise Shell", "Yin Ruins" and "Zhen Bu Wen". It is the oldest extant writing in China, named after it was carved on tortoise shell bones. In Shang Dynasty, tortoise shells and animal bones were often used to write Oracle Bone Inscriptions and historical scripts related to divination. Oracle Bone Inscriptions was mostly unearthed in Xiaotun Village, Anyang, Henan Province. It was discovered in the 24th year of Guangxu (1898). In the 30th year of Guangxu, Sun Yirang explained Oracle Bone Inscriptions for the first time and wrote an example of Wen Qi. After 1928, after many archaeological excavations, more than 0/00000 pieces of/kloc-0 were unearthed, which belonged to the period from Pan Geng's migration to Yin to his death in 273. The total number of words is about 4600, and the number of recognizable words is up to-but the strokes and parts of many numbers have not yet been finalized. Pictographs are simple, vigorous and beautiful, and have high artistry. Oracle Bone Inscriptions's nickname, a Wen Qi, got its name because he carved seven lines on tortoise shells and animal bones. The two volumes of Sun Yirang's Wen Qi Case in Qing Dynasty are the beginning of Oracle Bone Inscriptions's textual research.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions is the most important material to study the characters, history and culture of Shang Dynasty, and also the representative of early calligraphy. Oracle Bone Inscriptions is often carved with a knife, which can be divided into two forms: writing first and carving later. From the perspective of calligraphy, we can find that there are businessmen depicting Oracle Bone Inscriptions in the missing parts of Oracle Bone Inscriptions's strokes recorded in Dong Zuobin's Notes on Yin People's Words and Actions and Oracle Bone Inscriptions Cross in Houjiazhuang, Anyang. Oracle Bone Inscriptions has possessed all the elements of later calligraphy, such as brushwork, composition and writing. In terms of brushwork, seal engravers in the Yin and Shang Dynasties used pens with knives, showing some characteristics of calligraphy. At the same time, characters written in ink or cinnabar were found in Oracle Bone Inscriptions, which indicates that there were writing tools similar to brush in this period. These pens with ink and ink marks are sharp at the beginning and end, with different thicknesses, sharp at the two ends and thick in the middle. And expressiveness. From the perspective of composition, Oracle Bone Inscriptions is mostly vertical, with horizontal rows, columns and columns, which are patchwork and varied. In writing, there are the beauty of symmetry, the beauty of stable center of gravity, the beauty of uniform collocation and the beauty of multiple structures in one word. The complex combination embodies diversity and unity, and Fiona Fang's combination embodies the beauty of the original calligraphy art form. Because the knife is different from the pen, it is not easy to turn around for a while.

Wheat field, an inaccessible place in the northern mountainous area of Weining, Ningxia, is a basin-shaped mountainous area with only a few mountain passes. For a long time, the environment here is harsh and desolate, and the most vital thing is the hieroglyphics carved on the mountain ridge rocks. No one knows how long those rock paintings have been sleeping.

1April, 989, Li, who once discovered the rock paintings of Helan Mountain, took his younger brother into the desert. They searched for dry food for dozens of miles in Fiona Fang, Fiona Fang. During this time, they experienced the danger of rollover and finally found rock paintings of barley fields. In the area of Damaidi 15 square kilometers, more than 3,000 groups and 8,000 rock paintings are densely portrayed on rocks, with an average of per square meter.

After 10 years of unremitting research, a greater discovery has been made: the early barley rock paintings in Ningxia can be traced back to the late Paleolithic period, about 20 thousand to 30 thousand years ago. That is to say? These rock paintings predate Oracle Bone Inscriptions by thousands of years!

On those hard stones, people, animals, towers, the sun and the moon, the gods of heaven and earth, male genitalia, footprints of hands and feet, hunting, grazing, dancing, sacrifice and other activities are all vividly outlined. The most common animal in rock paintings is sheep, which reflects the worship of sheep at that time and shows the important position of sheep in life.

Are rock paintings and descriptive symbols the writing form of characters or their predecessors? The latest research shows that the wheat field symbol similar to characters has an important feature: the pictographic nature of early rock paintings is similar to that of pictographs in Chinese characters, so it can be inferred that it is the original characters (the original characters were only pictures, and later pictographs gradually appeared because the meanings expressed by the graphs representing various objects were more complicated). In barley rock paintings, there are not a few symbols and figures, accounting for about one or a group.

At present, no earlier writing than Oracle Bone Inscriptions has been found. These hieroglyphics found in barley fields are undoubtedly of great significance to the study of the origin of hieroglyphics.