Chinese for travellers [antikvár]

Chinese characters Several thousand years ago, while still in the Stone Age, China had already developed good pictorial techniques. Though the designs used in this era in a certain way constituted the dawn of writing, they were virtually limited to representation of men, animals and objects; feelings and other abstract ideas could not as yet be expressed in this manner. The ancient hunting and gathering societies gradually gave way to more sophisticated agricultural ways of life, with a settled, rather than a nomadic mode of existence. Little by little, clans and tribes coalesced into something more like small states. Human relations were expanded and languages merged. By this stage, it would have been quite clear to those in the know that the human figure in the drawing shown below was meant to represent "man" in general. Art was put to the service of language, giving rise to an ideographic system of writing in which drawings were progressively reduced to their basic elements.