Controversy surrounds discovery of ancient writing at Zhejiang graveyard
Researchers are divided over whether characters found on artefacts at Neolithic graveyard are oldest Chinese writing
Mysterious symbols on ancient stone tools dating back five millennia have rekindled a dispute about the first appearance of Chinese characters.
The language may have belonged to the Liangzhu culture - a major civilisation along the Yangtze River that thrived 5,000 years ago with advanced agriculture and urban centres, including an ancient city as large as 2.6 million square metres.
Institute director Li Xiaoning said last week that they were pretty sure the symbols were part of a writing system.
Archaeologists have discovered more than 200 different symbols on many artefacts such as ceramics in numerous Liang-zhu sites, but the experts were not sure whether the civilisation had a written language until they saw the markings on the two stone pieces, which were unearthed between 2003 and 2006.
"They differed from all other symbols we saw before. They featured many vertical strokes with an overall structure similar to modern day characters. One character even appeared three times in a line," Li said.
Worried that their findings would draw fire from other researchers at ancient cultural sites with similar claims to the earliest written Chinese, the institute invited more than 10 palaeography experts to Zhejiang last week, and they all agreed that the markings were characters, Li said.