Did the people of the Xia Dynasty know how to speak? What characters did the Xia Dynasty use to record things?

The Xia Dynasty was in the late Neolithic Age and early Bronze Age. Before the Xia Dynasty, the ruling class adopted the "abdication system", that is, the ruler passed the throne to a capable person, rather than a blood relative. Did the people of the Xia Dynasty speak? What kind of writing did the Xia Dynasty use? For a detailed description of these aspects of the Xia Dynasty, see how the following article introduces it.

Contents of this article

1. Could people in the Xia Dynasty speak?

2. What was the writing system used in the Xia Dynasty?

3. What was the population of the Xia Dynasty?

Can people of the Xia Dynasty speak?

The people of the Xia Dynasty could speak, and the language they used was called "Ya Yan", which is different from the Mandarin Chinese of today. The Xia Dynasty was the first hereditary dynasty in Chinese history with written records, which lasted for about 471 years and was finally destroyed by the Shang Dynasty.

Before the Xia Dynasty, the system of succession adopted by the ruling class was the "abdication system", that is, the ruler passed the position of monarch to a capable person rather than a relative with a blood relationship with him.

The Xia Dynasty existed during the late Neolithic Age and early Bronze Age, approximately from 2070 BC to 1600 BC.

What characters were used to record the Xia Dynasty?

The earliest existing characters that have been scientifically confirmed are the oracle bone scripts of the Shang Dynasty. According to existing history, the origin of characters comes from knotting ropes to record events. Later, early pictographic characters were gradually created based on the footprints of birds and animals. After that, there were oracle bone scripts, bronze inscriptions, seal characters, official scripts, and regular scripts. The oracle bone scripts of the Shang Dynasty were already a relatively mature type of writing, so there must have been a long period of historical accumulation. From this perspective, the characters of the Xia Dynasty should be a historical stage of the oracle bone scripts of the Shang Dynasty, so they should be engraved on tortoise shells and animal bones, or on Xia tripods, and other writing tools.

What was the population of the Xia Dynasty?

"Tongdian" records: "Yu leveled the water and soil and divided the country into nine states, which are the present-day Yu tribute. Therefore, the land of the Nine States at that time totaled 24,382,400 hectares, of which 9,362,400 hectares were cultivated and 15,200 hectares were not cultivated. The population was 13,553,923 people." Later, based on the data handed down, scholars in the Ming and Qing dynasties believed that China had a population of about 10 million during the Xia Dynasty.