East Asian Writing Systems

General History of Chinese Scripts
• A good overview of the history of Chinese (and related) scripts on Wikipedia.

• A nice webpage that displays the different types of Chinese scripts.

• Gallery examples of the different types of Chinese scripts.

• A webpage with some references and materials about early Chinese bamboo books (pre-paper / pre-AD 100).

• Wieger, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Significance. Dover Publications, 1927, 1965. Amazon.com link (recommended by David Djerum - thanks David!)

• A nice Chinese translation page. (submitted by David Djerum - thanks again David!).


The "Jiahu Script" (written on tortoise shell) found in China, dated to ca. 6,600 - 6,200 BC
• BBC News overview of the discovery


Chinese "Oracle Bone Script" - 1,200 - 1,050BC
• A nice website that describes the orthography and history of Chinese Oracle Bone Script and Modern Chinese Script. A quote from the author regarding the independent innovation of writing in China:
"There is involved here a sort of chauvinistic scholarship that seeks to prove an independent invention for Chinese writing by methodologically suspect means."

• Keightley, David N. Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. Univ of California Press, 1999. Amazon.com link


Japanese Scripts
Katakana - a syllabary often used for spelling (foreign words)
• An interesting Wikipedia list of Japanese Katakana transcriptions of foreign words and names.

Kanji - logograms borrowed from Chinese scripts; representing word stems
• A small introductory list of Japanese Kanji stems
• An immense Wikipedia inventory of Kanji (ordered by the number of 'strokes').
Note: The root "mirror/reflect" has 23 strokes!

Family Tree (download)
Here's a downloadable 'family tree' I generated of this writing system family - this tree only represents a small number of the writing systems that constitute this family. Click on the image to enlarge, then right-click to download.