Tracing it home In recent times researchers came to the realization that the ideographs used in oracle bone inscriptions fall into all the six traditional categories of Chinese characters, such as picot-phonetic, mutually interpretative, phonetic loan, etc .. Hence they must already have been well developed, and were unlikely to have been China's first writing.
近來學者推敲，甲骨文具備形聲、轉注、假借等「六書」，已經是很發達的文字，應該不是中國最早的文字。