Oracle bone inscriptions are carved onto tortoise shells. Their exquisite carving and elegant calligraphy never fail to captivate us descendants thousands of years later.
The ancient ancestors created characters by drawing shapes of all natural things with the simplest strokes. The character for mountain depicts rolling ridges; water captures flowing curves; wood draws trunks, branches and roots. By stripping away trivial details and retaining core forms, they used minimal lines to represent everything in nature, forming the most sophisticated visual abstract art of ancient times.
— Guo Moruo (Dingtang, one of the Four Masters of Oracle Bone Studies)
Among all writing systems worldwide, only Chinese characters evolved from oracle bone script preserve the original pictographic abstract genes. The structural frameworks of oracle bone characters for mountain, river, tree, field and hand have barely changed over three thousand years.
Ancient people captured the core essence of objects with the fewest possible strokes. This highly concise logic of character creation serves as the fundamental cornerstone for the stable inheritance of Chinese civilization’s writing system.
— Huang Tianshu, Chief Expert of Oracle Bone Research, Tsinghua University
