These hieroglyphs, called Dawenkou Pottery Inscriptions by the archaeologists, predate the inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells unearthed in the Yin Ruins and the remains of the late Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 B.C.) in Anyang in central China's Henan Province, which have long been considered the oldest Chinese characters.

"This pushes back the history of the Chinese script by some 2,000 years," Wang Shuming, a research fellow with the Shandong Institute of Relics and Archeology in charge of the excavation, told Xinhua Thursday.

The pottery inscriptions first came to light in the early 1960s when an ancient pottery wine vessel bearing several strange drawings was discovered by farmers in Juxian, the center of the ancient Ju culture in southeastern Shandong Province.

Tang Lan, a well-known Chinese paleographer, at that time regarded the drawings as pictographs, though his view was neglected because there was a lack of supporting evidence.

CLUES WERE IN TOMBS

In the 1980s, more than 30 tombs belonging to the late period of the Neolithic Dawenkou Culture (4500-2500 B.C.) were excavated in Juxian, where pottery wine vessels with 20 stylized pictures of some physical objects were unearthed, providing more clues to an earlier form of Chinese characters.

Archaeologists and paleographers have since recognized 14 of the more than 20 drawings as pictographs and deciphered them as seven characters, including "fan" (ordinary), "nan" (south), and "xiang" (enjoy).

"A script must have regular forms and given pronunciations and express certain meanings," Wang said. "The pottery hieroglyphs evidently satisfy this criteria."

Many archaeologists agree that the pottery inscriptions were created by Taihao people, a legendary tribe inhabiting Juxian which worshipped the wine god and the god of the land.

SACRIFICIAL RITES

The pottery inscriptions, they said, reflect sacrificial rites at that time, just as other ancient writings did. For example, the pictograph "nan" looks like people forming an altar to worship a young tree, signifying the rite of praying to the god of the land for good harvests.

Similar pottery wine vessels with inscriptions were also discovered in Anhui and Zhejiang provinces, both in east China, in the 1990s.

Jiao Zhiqin, an associate research fellow with the Anyang Museum, said this was the result of the tribe's migrations, adding that such migrations are recorded in Chinese histories.

"This demonstrates that the writing was used over a large area, with Juxian at the center," said Jiao at a forum on Ju Culture held here recently.

CRADLE OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION

Yin Junke, a research fellow with the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, said the creation of the writing was not sudden, because this area was one of the cradles of Chinese civilization.

Archaeologists have also found some similarities between these pottery inscriptions and those on bones and tortoise shells, in terms of both form and meaning.

They said this indicates that the latter had evolved from the former.

Chinese archaeologists have long held that the inscriptions found at the Yin Ruins were not the oldest, and there must have been a previous period of origin and development of the language.

The first bones and tortoise shells with character inscriptions were discovered in 1899 in a village in Henan Province, where the capital of the Shang Dynasty was located. Since then, more than 160,000 pieces of inscribed bones and tortoise shells with about 10,000 characters have been unearthed, some 1,000 of which have been deciphered.

These inscriptions, like the cuneiform writing of the ancient Near East and the hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt, are one of the world's oldest scripts. Their descendants, the "han zi" (modern Chinese characters) are still in use by one-fourth of the world's population.