Si sa che si tratta dei più antichi segni di scrittura usata in modo continuativo, incisi su gusci di tartaruga e su ossa di animali. I primi furono trovati circa 110 anni fa.
Datano al 1600 - 1046 a.C. (Dinastia Shang).
I nuovi caratteri sono stati trovati in un museo - il Museo Lyushun - in un gruppo di 1800 pezzi facenti parte di un antica raccolta.
Ad oggi, sono stati riconosciuti circa 4.000 segni grafici differenti - da un
totale di circa 130.000 reperti - ma solamente circa la metà è stata decifrata.
Alcuni ricercatori hanno notato che certi segni sono esattamente uguali ai 'rovesciati' rinvenuti nelle 'domos de janas' sarde ed al 'segno di Tanit' osservato in molti luoghi in Sardegna: si sta pertanto lavorando sull'ipotesi che colonizzatori Shardana provenienti dall'Anglona siano stati nella regione ed abbiano ivi dato inizio alla Dinastia Shang (Shardana+Anglona).
New oracle bone characters discovered in Liaoning
Chinese archaeologists have discovered 34 new characters and glyphs from oracle bones housed in a museum in Lyushun, a city in northeast China's Liaoning province.
Oracle bone characters [Credit: Xinhua]
Song Zhenhao, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who is leading a team that has been researching the inscriptions since 2011, said on Thursday that the new findings are another breakthrough since such inscriptions were discovered over 110 years ago.
Inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones represent the original characters of the Chinese written language.
They date back to the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC).
The new characters and glyphs, which involve names of nations, places, persons and sacrificial rituals, were found among a 1,800-piece collection of bone inscription relics in the Lyushun Museum.
Song said the team took rubbings from the text images of the 1,800 pieces and photographed them, which led to the characters being identified.
To date, archaeologists around the world have identified 4,000 bone inscription characters from studying 130,000 relics, but only half of the characters have been deciphered, he added.
Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world.
The graphic logograms of the characters convey both meaning and pronunciation.
Oracle bone inscriptions were first discovered in 1899 by Beijing academic and antiquarian Wang Yirong, although farmers had been unearthing the relics in Anyang, Henan Province, for many years.
Wang noticed symbols that looked like writing on animal bones and tortoise shells.
Source: Xinhua [October 16, 2014]
