Unlike China’s earliest readable texts, the late Shāng 商 (13th-11th c. BCE) ‘oracle bone inscriptions’, preserved mostly on water turtle plastrons and bovine shoulder blades (jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文), which were largely forgotten until their rediscovery at the turn to the last century, bronze inscriptions (jīnwén 金文), attested from the 12th century BCE onwards, seem to have been always known and were occasionally mentioned throughout the classical period. They were first systematically cataloged during the Northern Sòng 宋 dynasty (960-1127). It was already during this initial phase of scholarship already that several authors noticed that some of the most archaic bronze texts include graphs with a strongly “pictograph” character, often clearly distinct in position, size and ductus from the more linear and abstract graph shapes encountered in the texts which they accompany. The famous Chinese paleographer and writer Guō Mòruò 郭沫若 (1892-1978) first called these graphs “lineage symbols” (zú huī 族徽) in a study published in 1930, where he argued that they represent quasi-totemic identity markers of ancient Shāng lineages and polities and stressed their status as proto-writing. While Guō’s theory continues to receive wide support in Western and Chinese studies on the subject, there is no lack of controversies about whether they should be classified and analyzed as “glottographic” writing sensu strictu or rather as “emblems”, i.e. non-linguistic symbol systems, functioning somewhat like heraldic signs or “coats of arms” in various Europan traditions. Nor is there any clear consensus, whether they represent names of individuals, kin-, lineage- or exogamy-based groups, or even other social and political entities. Proceeding from the most recent catalog and study of these signs (Hé Jǐngchéng 2009), I will first introduce the extant corpus some 900 simplex graphs, summarize the recent Chinese and Japanese scholarship on their archaeological contexts, distributional patterns and possible relationship towards neolithic pottery marks, and then focus on their combinatory properties, as evidenced in a corpus of some 530 compound graphs known so far. It is hoped that this glimpse into the early history of transitions from non-textual to textual functions of such symbols will allow for the formulation of some more theoretical points, useful for a comparative typology of the emergence of logographic writing. Location:Paris More Info:Conference “Signs of Writing. The Cultural, Social, and Linguistic Contexts of the World’s First Writing Systems III”, Paris, EPHE, 25–27.VII.2016 Organization:EPHE Paris, Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago Conference End Date:Jun 27, 2016 Conference Start Date:Jun 25, 2016