The order of this native classification is not to be taken as in any sense chronological. Roughly, it may be said that the development of writing followed the course previously traced—that is, beginning with indicative signs, and going on with pictograms and ideograms, until finally the discovery of the phonetic principle did away with all necessity for other devices in enlarging the written language. But we have no direct evidence that this was so. There can be little doubt that phonetic compounds made their appearance at a very early date, probably prior to the invention of a large number of suggestive compounds, and perhaps even before the whole existing stock of pictograms had been fashioned. It is significant that numerous words of daily occurrence, which must have had a place in the earliest stages of human thought, are expressed by phonetic characters. We can be fairly certain, at any rate, that the period of “borrowed characters” did not last very long, though it is thought that traces of it are to be seen in the habit of writing several characters, especially those for certain plants and animals, indifferently with or without their radicals. Thus
“a tadpole” is frequently written
, without the part meaning “insect” or “reptile.”
In the very earliest inscriptions that have come down to us, the so-called
ku-wên or “ancient figures,” all the above-mentioned forms occur. None are wholly pictorial, with one or two unimportant exceptions. These early inscriptions are Styles of writing. found on bronzes dating from the half-legendary period extending from the beginning of the Shang dynasty in the 18th century B.C., or possibly earlier, down to a point in the reign of King Hsüan of the Chou dynasty, generally fixed at 827 B.C. They have been carefully reproduced and for the most part deciphered by painstaking Chinese archaeologists, and form the subject of many voluminous works. The following may be taken as a specimen, in which it will be noticed that only the last character is unmistakably pictorial:
This is read: