Historic China, and other sketches - University of Macau Library

THE CHOWS. 13
forgery of that date. Dismissing, therefore, this and
other similar attempts, the great antiquity of Chinese
writing remains beyond a doubt; and, far back as we
can go, there is a great gulf between us and the be-
ginnings of the art. It would seem that the rude
delineation of a few dozen of the more prominent
objects in nature, such as the sun, moon, stars, etc.,
was followed, contrary to all analogy, by a sudden
inspiration — the use of signs to represent spoken
sounds; and that then, by a process of combination,
a host of composite characters was produced, each one
made up of two parts, guiding the eye to the sound and
sense, respectively. It is, at any rate, pretty certain that
eight centuries before Christ elaborate symbols of the
kind, approximately those of modern times, were traced
upon tablets of bamboo with a sharp -pointed metal
stylus ; and there are now in Peking ten irregular-shaped
blocks of stone, called 'stone drums,' bearing inscrip-
tions in the same form of character as that employed
under the Chow dynasty, to which period they may
without exaggeration be referred. We have also plenty
of inscriptions said to be copied from vases or bells
dating from the pre-historic dynasties; but many of
these are evidently spurious and the rest doubtful. Of
the bamboo tablets in use among the Chows, not one is
known to be in existence npw ; and on papef, which was
not invented until several centuries later, there are pro-
bably no manuscript remains more than six or seven
hundred years old.
Near about the middle of the Chow dynasty was born