What do you suppose This palace structure looked like?
The Liangzhu Ancient City is located in a wetland environment on the plain of river networks between Daxiong Mountain and Dazhe Mountain of the Tianmu Mountain Range. This ancient city is said to be the largest city during this time period. Its interior area is 290 hectares, surrounded by clay walls which had six city gates. Two gates were located in the north, east and south walls. At its center was a palace site that spanned 30 hectares and there was also evidence of an artificial flood protection design implemented within the city. Both of these constructions are said to be indicators of the social complexity developing in Liangzhu at the time. A granary may have been in place containing up to 15,000 kg of rice grain. There are numerous waterway entrances both inside and outside of the city, linking it to the river networks. Inside the city were artificial earth mounds and natural hills. Outside of the walled area, remains are found for 700 hectares, the residences are said to be built in an urban planning system. 8 kilometers to the north various dam-like sites were found and are speculated to be an ancient flood protection system. Also discovered inside and outside the city are a large number of utensils for production, living, military and ritual purposes represented by numerous delicate Liangzhu jade wares of cultural profoundness; the remains including city walls, foundations of large structures, tombs, altars, residences, docks and workshops. The Liangzhu city-site is said to have been settled and developed with a specific purpose in mind since this area has very few remains that can be traced back to earlier periods.[11]
There’s a lot of interesting things here: 8,600-year-old Tortoise Shells in Neolithic graves in central China have Early Writing and Shamanism | Damien Marie AtHope
The symbols were laid down in the late Stone Age, or Neolithic Age. They predate the earliest recorded writings from Mesopotamia – in what is now Iraq – by more than 2,000 years. The archaeologists say they bear similarities to written characters used thousands of years later during the Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1700-1100 BC. But the discovery has already generated controversy, with one leading researcher in the field branding it “an anomaly”. The archaeologists have identified 11 separate symbols inscribed on the tortoise shells. The shells were found buried with human remains in 24 Neolithic graves unearthed at Jiahu in Henan province, western China. The site has been radiocarbon dated to between 6,600 and 6,200 BC. The Neolithic markings include symbols that resemble the characters for “eye” and “window” and the numerals eight and 20 in the Shang script. The persistence of sign use at different sites along the Yellow River throughout the Neolithic and up to the Shang period, when a complex writing system appears. Shaman rituals, with indications the Neolithic culture at Jiahu may not have been complex enough to require a writing system. But the signs appeared to be highly “schematized” or stylised. This is a feature of Chinese written characters.
Chinese scripts are the most like early cuneiform - writing is top to bottom.
Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbols. The best-known examples are:
- “Token system”, a recording system used for accounting purposes in Mesopotamia c. 9000 BC[9]
- Jiahu symbols, carved on tortoise shells in Jiahu, c. 6600 BC
- Vinča symbols (Tărtăria tablets), c. 5300 BC
- Proto-cuneiform c. 3500 BC[10]
- Possibly the early Indus script, c. 3500 BC, as its nature is disputed[11][ better source needed ]
- Nsibidi script, c. before 500 AD[ citation needed ]
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age (following the late Neolithic) in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script closely followed by the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that the historically earlier Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion.[12]
A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC.[13][14] The Chinese script is probably an independent invention, because there is no evidence of contact between China and the literate civilizations of the Near East,[15] and because of the distinct differences between the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches to logography and phonetic representation.[16]