Characters carved into this piece of cow bone tell how the emperor of the Shang Dynasty offered sacrifices to Heaven and rode in a horse-drawn cart to hunt.

Han Chinese characters are among the oldest scripts in the world. Other old scripts include the ancient Sumerian and ancient Egyptian words, knowledge of which has since become extinct.

Han Chinese characters fall into the category of ideographs, and those used today have evolved natu- rally from their ancient forms. The earliest characters were inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells from over 3,000 years ago. Following this, there were inscriptions on ancient bronze objects, seal character, text hand, cursive hand and running hand, as well as other schools of writing.

Of the 56 ethnic groups in China, the Han, Hui and Manchu use Han Chinese characters; 21 other groups created their own scripts, cre- atin~ a total of 27 scripts in use.