o unimportant exceptions. These early inscriptions are 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 Hsuean 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:
[Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch]--"Shen made [this] precious _ting_." These ancient
bronzes, which mainly take the shape of bells, cauldrons and
sacrificial utensils, were until within the last decade our sole
source of information concerning the origin and early history of
Chinese writing. But recently a large number of inscribed bone
fragments have been excavated in the north of China, providing new and
unexpected matter for investigation. The inscriptions on these bones
have already furnished a list of nearly 2500 separate characters, of
which not more than about 600 have been so far identified. They appear
to be responses given by professional soothsayers to private
individuals who came to them seeking the aid of divination in the
affairs of their daily life. It is difficult to fix their date with
much exactitude. The script, though less archaic than that of the
earlier bronzes, is nevertheless of an exceedingly free and irregular
type. Judging by the style of the inscriptions alone, one would be
inclined to assign them to the early years of the Chou dynasty, say
1100 B.C. But Mr L.C. Hopkins thinks that they represent a mode of
writing already obsolete at the time of their production, and retained
of set purpose by the diviners from obscurantist motives, much as the
ancient hieroglyphics were employed by the Egyptian priesthood. He
would therefore date them about 500 years later, or only half a
century before the birth of Confucius. If that is so, they are merely
late specimens of the "ancient figures" appearing long after the
latter had made way for a new and more conventionalized form of
writing. This new writing is called in Chinese [Ch] _chuan_, which is
commonly rendered by the word Seal, for the somewhat unscientific
reason that many ages afterwards it was generally adopted