This article examines this whole issue and concludes that a case may well be made for it. On the face of it, this may well be credible because the unique, non-alphabetic Chinese written language with its intriguing pictograms and ideograms is the oldest written one still in continuous use. Other civilisations admittedly went further back in antiquity - the Sumerians and the Egyptians for example. But the pictographic writing of the Sumerians have long ago passed out of use, and that fate has similarly befallen the Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Writing is a central feature in Chinese civilisation.
Its genesis is remote and little known today, for there is a lack of documentary evidence. These were discovered by one Liu O during a flood in northern China in 1899. Studies of these inscriptions subsequently showed that even by the time of the Shang dynasty, the language had grown to a corpus of 4,500 very complex characters, of which 1,700 have been deciphered so far. This indicates that the Chinese script had already been existence for quite some time prior to it. The various characters were standardised for the first time in 221 BC by the first emperor of united China, Shi Huang Di.