These pictographs are reputed to be similar to the earliest characters confirmed to be written Chinese.

Farming gave rise to the Jiahu culture (7000 to 5800 BC).Īt Damaidi in Ningxia, 3,172 cliff carvings dating to 6000–5000 BC have been discovered, 'featuring 8,453 individual characters such as the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing'. Early evidence for proto-Chinese millet agriculture is radiocarbon-dated to about 7000 BC. The earliest evidence of cultivated rice, found by the Yangtze River, is carbon-dated to 8,000 years ago. Agriculture in China developed gradually, with initial domestication of a few grains and animals gradually being expanded by the addition of many others over subsequent millennia. One of the defining traits of the Neolithic is agriculture. The Neolithic age in China can be traced back to about 10,000 BC. With thousands of years of continuous history, China is among the world's oldest civilizations and is regarded as one of the cradles of civilization. These Yellow River and Yangtze civilizations arose millennia before the Shang. However, Neolithic civilizations originated at various cultural centers along both the Yellow River and Yangtze River. The Shang ruled in the Yellow River valley, which is commonly held to be the cradle of Chinese civilization.

2070–1600 BC) before the Shang, but no writing is known from the period, and Shang writings do not indicate the existence of the Xia. 91 BC) mention and describe a Xia dynasty (c. 296 BC) and the Records of the Grand Historian (c. Ancient historical texts such as the Book of Documents (early chapters, 11th century BC), the Bamboo Annals (c. 1600–1046 BC), during the king Wu Ding's reign, who was mentioned as the twenty-first King of Shang by the same. |a Includes bibliographical references (pages 749-788) and index. |a The search for modern China / |c by Jonathan D.

Life in Early China by J.A.G. Roberts