Search Results: Chinese language

The Sumerian language was spoken in southern Mesopotamia before the 2nd millennium BCE and was the first language to be written in the cuneiform script. It is an isolate language meaning we know of no other languages that relate to it ancestrally...

Romani is an Indo-European language, belonging to the Indic subbranch which includes Sanskrit and Hindi. Because of the Romani diaspora throughout Europe and West Asia, it developed in close contact with European and Iranian languages. It...

The language of the Etruscans, like the people themselves, has remained somewhat mysterious and has yet to be fully understood. The alphabet used a western Greek script, but the language has presented difficulties to scholars because it is...

Ancient China covered a vast and ever-changing geopolitical landscape, and the art it produced over three millennia is, unsurprisingly, just as varied. Still, despite continuous indigenous technical developments, changes in materials and...

Dragons appear in the mythology of many ancient cultures but nowhere else in the world was the creature quite so revered as in China. There, in marked contrast to other world mythologies, the dragon was almost always seen in a positive light...

Calligraphy established itself as the most important ancient Chinese art form alongside painting, first coming to the fore during the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE). All educated men and some court women were expected to be proficient at...

Ancient Chinese writing evolved from the practice of divination during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE). Some theories suggest that images and markings on pottery shards found at Ban Po Village are evidence of an early writing system but...

Phoenician is a Canaanite language closely related to Hebrew. Very little is known about the Canaanite language, except what can be gathered from the El-Amarna letters written by Canaanite kings to Pharaohs Amenhopis III (1402 - 1364 BCE...

The Indo-European languages are a family of related languages that today are widely spoken in the Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia. Just as languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian are all descended from...

Oracle Bones (also known as Dragon's Bones) were the shoulder blades of oxen or plastrons of turtles (the flat underside of the turtle's shell) which were used in the Shang Dynasty of China (c. 1600-1046 BCE) for divination. The symbols carved...