A number of marks have been found incised on Yangshao pottery vessels: these appear to be the earliest precursors of Chinese pictographic writing. Some of these marks resemble modern Chinese characters for numbers and words such as bamboo, net and jade.
These marks are located either inside or just below the black decorative bands which were painted immediately under the rim on the outside of the pots. One hundred and thirteen such pieces of pottery were found at Banpo, bearing twenty-two varieties of pictograph. Over 200 marks were found on pots at the Yangshao settlement of Jiangzhai, some of which were complex in structure.
Similar marks are subsequently found on pottery vessels from later Neolithic cultures, notably Dawenkou, Longshan and Liangzhu. One black Liangzhu pottery basin had seven pictographs around the rim. Although these pottery marks are limited, they are clearly ancestral to the later pictographs that appear on oracle bones and bronzes from the Shang period onward and from which Chinese script developed.
