The oldest examples of written Chinese are essentially small pictures or hieroglyphs of the objects or concepts they represent. For instance, the word "light" was depicted by drawing a picture of the sun and moon. The word "compare" was represented by drawing two people standing next to each other to see who was taller. Some of these early pictures can still be seen in greatly changed form in modern Chinese characters, but in most cases the characters have developed so much over the centuries that the pictures out of which they were originally built cannot easily be seen.
The Shang Dynasty was one of the earliest historical cultures of ancient China, flourishing between the 17th and 11th centuries BCE. The people of the Shang Dynasty had a custom of performing divinations to obtain oracles about the future. The oracles were carved into bones or tortoise shells and colored red for good luck or black for bad luck. The oracle bone inscriptions could be considered the earliest examples of Chinese calligraphy.
The Bronze Age in Chinese history includes the Zhou Dynasty, the Spring and Autumn Period, and the Warring States era. The Zhou Dynasty began around 1100 BCE. During this dynasty and the unsettled periods that followed it, Chinese script was carved into bronze vessels to commemorate major events and military encounters. By the time the Qin Dynasty ended the Warring States period and unified China, there were eight major regional styles of Chinese calligraphy. The Qin abolished the regional styles along with the states that had used them, and made the Qin Dynasty Seal Script a national standard.
Despite the Qin attempt to standardize Chinese calligraphy, new styles began to develop again almost immediately. Clerical Script developed out of a simplified writing style used by commoners. Cursive Script developed out of the methods used when writing the Clerical script quickly or informally. The Standard Script developed from a modification of the Clerical Script, while the so-called Crazy Cursive Script was a special form of script used only for artistic works because it was too stylized to be read. Running Script was another variation on Cursive, but was more readable than Crazy Cursive. These styles of Chinese calligraphy are still in existence today.