Symbols on painted pottery can be dated back to the Stone Age about 5,000 years ago. These symbols are the prototypes of Chinese characters.

Oracle bone inscriptions ap-peared in the fourteenth century B.C. Of the 4,600 distinct inscriptions discovered so far, about 1,000 have been deciphered. They had been used to record events in considerably details. Since then, Chinese char-acters have evolved in several sta-ges: the great-seal script, the small-seal script, the clerical script, and the regular script. By the Eastern Han era, about two thousand years ago, this factor of printing had been in place.

A diagram of  the origin and development of Chinese charactrs	Symbols (late stone Age)	Inscriptions on oracle bones  (earliest Chinese characters, 13th Century BC)

Inscriptions of tripod ding	Inscriptions on drum-shaped stone blocks (stone inscriptions fron the 7th Century BC)	Langya carved stone form Qin Dynasty (in small-script)	Eaves tile