Acey-deucey
Acey-deucey is a variant of backgammon. Since World War I, it has been a favorite game of the United States Navy, Marine Corps, Merchant Marine; some evidence shows that it was played in the early 1900s aboard U. S. Navy ships; the game is believed to be rooted in the Middle East, Greece, or Turkey, where there were variants in which the game started with pieces off the board. Kenny Lutz is the current champion of the world, resides in San Jose, California. Compared to standard backgammon, acey-deucey is more like a race than a strategy game, it features a differing starting position, opening play, rules for the endgame. Because pieces may be retained in one's opponent's home board, the game offers substantial opportunities for backgame play. Acey-deucey is deliberately riding with one stirrup shorter than the other, it is most seen in racing, where a jockey will lengthen the inside stirrup – some riders believe this helps them. The components of acey-deucey match those of backgammon, including identical boards, number of pieces, dice.
Unlike standard backgammon, all of both players' pieces are off the board. Acey-deucey does not use the doubling cube; the initial play is markedly different from that of standard backgammon. Pieces are entered onto the opponent's inner board. Once a piece has been entered, it can be moved though other pieces haven't been entered. One strategy in the game is to keep one man, called an "Oscar", off the board until it is needed for defensive purposes. Play passes forth, with each player rolling both dice. A player who rolls doubles may move a total of four times, each move traversing as many spaces as the rolled amount. After rolling these doubles, the player takes another turn. If a player rolls an acey-deucey, he plays the 1-and-2. After the opening, gameplay is nearly identical to that of backgammon, with some notable differences: After rolling and playing doubles or acey-deucey, the player must roll and move again. A roll of acey-deucey counts as a 1-2, as doubles of the player's choice. Upon reaching one's own home board, a piece may not be moved again.
An exact roll is required to bear off. A player can move pieces if he has pieces on the bar; the terminology of acey-deucey is somewhat different from that of backgammon. The initial rolling of one die is called the piddle; the bar is the fence, a single man is kicked rather than hit. The opponent's inner table is called the entering table or starting quarter, one's own inner table is the finishing quarter. Variants of the above rules exist that make the game more restrictive. Upon rolling acey-deucey, the player does not choose the doubles for their next move. Instead, they roll one use that number for the doubles choice. If a player rolls acey-deucey but is unable to utilize both the 1 and 2, their turn ends, they do not get any doubles, they do not get another roll. If a player rolls doubles but is unable to utilize all 4 moves, their turn ends, they do not get another roll. This rule holds for doubles following an acey-deucey. Pieces may be moved inside one's home area until all other pieces have arrived.
This is the opposite from the description above. Once all pieces have arrived to the player's home area, they may not move any more. Unlike regular backgammon, players may only bear off pieces that match the dice roll. For instance, if the 6 and 5 points are open and the player rolls a 6-5, they may not use that roll to bear off a checker from the 4-point. Pieces may be only moved from the bar upon rolling doubles; the ability to take extra rolls for doubles and acey-deucey during bearing off have the same rules stated above. If a player rolls an acey-deucey but cannot bear off a checker from both the 1-point and the 2-point, they are not entitled to a roll for doubles or another turn. If a player rolls a 6-6 and only has three checkers on their 6-point to bear off, they may not take another turn. At the beginning of the game, no checker may be put into play. In other words, a player may not enter a checker without first rolling a double. After the initial double, any checker may be entered as per the player's preference
Mehen (game)
Mehen is a board game, played in ancient Egypt. The game was named in reference to a snake deity in ancient Egyptian religion. Evidence of the game of Mehen is found from the Predynastic period dating from 3000 BCE and continues until the end of the Old Kingdom, around 2300 BCE. Aside from physical boards, which date to the Predynastic and Archaic periods, a mehen board appears in a picture in the tomb of Hesy-Ra, its name first appears in the tomb of Rahotep. Other scenes dating to the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt and Sixth Dynasty of Egypt show people playing the game. No scenes or boards date to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt or New Kingdom of Egypt, so it appears that the game was no longer played in Egypt after the Old Kingdom, it is, depicted in tombs of about 700 BCE, because the tomb decorations are copied from Old Kingdom originals. Mehen appears to have been played outside of Egypt, it appears alongside other boards displaying the game of senet in Cyprus. In Cyprus, it sometimes appears on the opposite side of the same stone as senet, those from Sotira Kaminoudhia, dating to 2250 BCE, are the oldest surviving double-sided boards known.
Mehen survived in Cyprus longer than in Egypt, showing that the game was indigenized upon its adoption into the island's culture. The rules and gameplay of Mehen are unknown. In Egypt, the gameboard depicts a coiled snake. Several boards have been found with different numbers of segments, without distinguishing marks or ornamentation. In Cyprus and the Levant, the games take the form of a spiral of depressions, sometimes with the central or outer depressions differentiated by their larger size; these display a variable number of depressions. The variability suggests. Objects associated with the board may not be playing pieces. From archaeological evidence, the game seemed to have been played with lion- or lioness-shaped pieces, in sets of three or as many as six, a few small spheres. Senet Hyena chase, North African race game using near identical equipment Piccione, Peter A.. Mehen and Resurrection. Pp. 43–52. Rothöhler, Benedikt. Ägyptische Brettspiele außer Senet, unveröffentlichte MA-Thesis. Philosophische Fakultät I der Würzburg.
Pp. 10–23. Pdf file Tyldesley, Joyce A.. Egyptian Games and Sports. Osprey Publishing. Pp. 15–16. ISBN 0747806616. Tyldesley, Joyce A.. The Penguin Book of Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt. Penguin UK, Oxford. Pp. 92–93. ISBN 014196376X. Mehen at BoardGameGeek
Senet
Senet is a board game from ancient Egypt, whose original rules are the subject of conjecture. The oldest hieroglyph resembling a senet game dates to around 3100 BC; the full name of the game in Egyptian is thought to have been zn.t n.t ḥˁb, meaning the "game of passing". Senet is one of the oldest known board games. Fragmentary boards that could be senet have been found in First Dynasty burials in Egypt, c. 3100 BC. A hieroglyph resembling a senet board appears in the tomb of Merknera; the first unequivocal painting of this ancient game is from the Third Dynasty tomb of Hesy. People are depicted playing senet in a painting in the tomb of Rashepes, as well as from other tombs of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties; the oldest intact senet boards date to the Middle Kingdom, but graffiti on Fifth and Sixth Dynasty monuments could date as early as the Old Kingdom. At least by the time of the New Kingdom in Egypt, senet was conceived as a representation of the journey of the ka to the afterlife; this connection is made in the Great Game Text, which appears in a number of papyri, as well as the appearance of markings of religious significance on senet boards themselves.
The game is referred to in chapter XVII of the Book of the Dead. Senet was played by people in neighboring cultures, it came to those places through trade relationships between Egyptians and local peoples, it has been found in the Levant at sites such as Byblos, as well as in Cyprus. Because of the local practice of making games out of stone, there are more senet games that have been found in Cyprus than have been found in Egypt; the senet gameboard is a grid of 30 squares, arranged in three rows of ten. A senet board has two sets of pawns. Although details of the original game rules are a subject of some conjecture, senet historians Timothy Kendall and R. C. Bell have made their own reconstructions of the game; these rules are based on snippets of texts that span over a thousand years, over which time gameplay is to have changed. Therefore, it is unlikely, their rules have been adopted by sellers of modern senet sets. In a presentation to the XX Board Games Studies Colloquium at the University of Copenhagen, Espen Aarseth asked if the game Senet could be said to still exist, given that the rules were unknown.
In response, Alexander de Voogt of the American Museum of Natural History pointed out that games did not have a fixed set of rules, but rules varied over time and from place to place. Moreover, many players of games today, do not play the "official rules". Games historian Eddie Duggan provides a brief resume of ideas related to the ancient Egyptian game of senet and a version of rules for play in his teaching notes on ancient games. Mehen – another ancient Egyptian game Patolli – a game of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures Tâb – a Middle Eastern game, sometimes confused with senet Crist, Walter. Ancient Egyptians at Play: Board Games Across Borders. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Pp. 41–80. ISBN 978-1-4742-2117-7. Kendall, Timothy. Passing Through the Netherworld: The meaning and play of Senet, an ancient Egyptian funerary game. Belmont, Massachusetts: Kirk Game Company. Piccione, Peter A.. Finkel, Irving L. ed. Ancient Board Games in perspective. London: British Museum Press. Pp. 54–63. ISBN 978-0-714-11153-7.
Bell, R. C.. Board and Table Games From Many Civilizations. I. Dover Publications Inc. pp. 26–28. ISBN 978-0-671-06030-5. Bell, R. C.. "Senat". The Boardgame Book. Exeter Books. Pp. 82–83. ISBN 978-0-671-06030-5. Falkener, Edward. "§V. The Game of Senat". Games Ancient and Oriental and How to Play Them. Dover Publications Inc. pp. 63–82. ISBN 978-0-486-20739-1. Grunfeld, Frederic V.. "Senat". Games of the World. Holt and Winston. Pp. 53–55. ISBN 978-0-03-015261-0. Senet at BoardGameGeek Senet: Review of versions rules speculation at BoardGameGeek Variations in the rules at BoardGameGeek Senet compared with the Royal Game of Ur at Eurogamer Freeware Windows Senet program at SourceForge
Mario Party
Mario Party is a party video game series featuring characters from the Mario franchise in which up to four local players or computer-controlled characters compete in a board game interspersed with minigames. The games are developed by NDcube and published by Nintendo being developed by Hudson Soft; the series is known for its party game elements, including the unpredictable multiplayer modes that allow play with up to four, sometimes eight, human players or CPUs. After the development of Mario Party 8, several of Hudson Soft's key designers left to work for Nintendo subsidiary NDcube, developers of Wii Party. Starting in 2012 with Mario Party 9, NDcube has taken over development of the series from Hudson Soft; the latest instalment in the series, Super Mario Party, was released on October 5, 2018 for the Nintendo Switch. The series holds the record for the longest-running minigame series; as of December 2014, Nintendo reported cumulative worldwide sales of 39.6 million game copies in the Mario Party franchise.
Over the course of the Mario Party series, gameplay has changed to suit the technology of the hardware. There are several game modes available in each of the games, each of which provides its own rules and challenges; every game in the main series has a standard Party Mode in which up to four players play through a board, trying to collect as many stars as possible. In every turn, each player rolls a die and progresses on the board, which has branching paths. Coins are earned by performing well in a minigame played at the end of each turn. On most boards, players earn stars by reaching a star space and purchasing a star for a certain amount of coins; the star space appears randomly on one of several pre-determined locations and moves every time a star is purchased occupying a blue space. Every Mario Party game contains at least 50 to 90 minigames with a few different types. Four-player games are a free-for-all. In 2-vs-2 and 1-vs-3 minigames, players compete as two groups, cooperating to win though they are still competing individually in the main game.
Some minigames in Mario Party are 4-player co-op though it doesn't say it. In most situations, winners earn ten coins each. Battle minigames first appeared in Mario Party 2; these games are like the four-player games, but instead of winners earning ten coins each, each player contributes a randomly selected number of coins. The winner of the minigame receives 70% of the pot, the second-place winner receives the other 30%, a random player gets coins left over from rounding. Duel minigames debuted in Mario Party 2, were omitted in Mario Party 4 but return again in Mario Party 5. Duel games pit two players against each other. In Party Mode, one player initiates the duel, wagering coins or a star against another player; the winner of the duel receives all stars wagered. Starting with Mario Party 7, the player no longer chooses the wager in a duel, the duel takes place and the prize to the winner, if any, is randomly determined. Bowser minigames are introduced in Mario Party 4 in which players try to avoid being burned by Bowser's fire breath if they lose.
When this happens, players must give up stars, or items. In Mario Party 7, a single-player version of the games were introduced and only one person can play. Mario Party 9 introduced a new set of Bowser Jr.-related minigames. In these minigames, Bowser Jr. challenges two players to compete in a minigame to battle him. If they defeat him, both players will receive five Mini Stars. If not Bowser Jr. will take five from each player. Mario Party 9 introduced a car mechanic. In Mario Party 9 and Mario Party 10, every player navigates the board in a car rather than move independently of one another. Mario Party 9 has a lesser focus on strategy, its minigames do not impact the board game in ways that the previous Mario Party games did. Critics censured the car mechanic; the car mechanic was kept in Mario Party 10, although Super Mario Party lets players move individually on the board again. In most Mario Party games, at the end of a board game, bonus stars can be awarded to players. Three specific stars are awarded in Mario Party through Mario Party 6.
All games have six possible bonus stars, but only three of those stars are awarded per game. These stars add to the player's overall total. In addition to Party Mode, every Mario Party has a minigame mode in which minigames are played without the board game. Minigame modes vary from game to game, but games have many different variations. In one such example from Mario Party 5, each player tries to fill a board with as many spaces as possible in his or her colour by winning minigames. In Mario Party 6 and onward, there is one game in Minigame mode intended for single-player; the following characters appear in all eleven console Mario Party games and, except where noted, all five handheld instalments: Mario Luigi Princess Peach Yoshi Wario The first four games add Donkey Kong to this roster. In Mario Party 5, he is relegated to the Super Duel Mode, he was omitted from subsequent games until Mario Party 10. Princess Daisy Waluigi RosalinaThe default sorting is by first appearance by number of appearances.
For alphabetical order, click on "Character". A yellow tick means that the character is an unlockable character and is not unlocked from the start; these games were released for home game consoles, including the GameCube, Wii U
Royal Game of Ur
The Royal Game of Ur known as the Game of Twenty Squares or the Game of Ur, is a two-player strategy race board game, first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC. The game was popular across the Middle East among people of all social strata and boards for playing it have been found at locations as far away from Mesopotamia as Crete and Sri Lanka. At the height of its popularity, the game acquired spiritual significance, events in the game were believed to reflect a player's future and convey messages from deities or other supernatural beings; the Game of Ur remained popular until late antiquity, when it stopped being played evolving into, or being displaced by, an early form of backgammon. It was forgotten everywhere except among the Jewish population of the Indian city of Kochi, who continued playing a version of it until the 1950s when they began emigrating to Israel; the Game of Ur received its name because it was first rediscovered by the English archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley during his excavations of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934.
Copies of the game have since been found by other archaeologists across the Middle East. The rules of the Game of Ur as it was played in the second century BC have been preserved on a Babylonian clay tablet written by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu. Based on this tablet and the shape of the gameboard, British Museum curator Irving Finkel reconstructed the basic rules of how the game might have been played; the object of the game is to run the course of the board and bear all one's pieces off before one's opponent. Like modern backgammon, the game combines elements of both luck; the Game of Ur was popular across the Middle East and boards for it have been found in Iran, Egypt, Sri Lanka and Crete. Four gameboards bearing a close resemblance to the Royal Game of Ur were found in the funeral chamber of the Tomb of Tutankhamun; these boards came with small boxes to store dice and game pieces and many had senet boards on the reverse sides so that the same board could be used to play either game and had to be flipped over.
The game was popular among all social classes. A graffito version of the game carved with a sharp object a dagger, was discovered on one of the human-headed winged bull gate sentinels from the palace of Sargon II in the city of Khorsabad; the Game of Ur acquired superstitious significance and the tablet of Itti-Marduk-balāṭu provides vague predictions for the players' futures if they land on certain spaces, such as "You will find a friend", "You will become powerful like a lion", or "You will draw fine beer". People saw relationships between a player's success in his or her success in real life. Random events such as landing on a certain square were interpreted as messages from deities, ghosts of deceased ancestors, or from a person's own soul, it is unclear. One theory holds. At some point before the game fell out of popularity in the Middle East, it was introduced to the Indian city of Kochi by a group of Jewish merchants. Members of the Jewish population of Kochi were still playing a recognizable form of the Game of Ur by the time they started emigrating to Israel in the 1950s after World War II.
The Kochi version of the game had twenty squares, just like the original Mesopotamian version, but each player had twelve pieces rather than seven and the placement of the twenty squares was different. The British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley discovered five gameboards of the Game of Ur during his excavation of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934; because the game was first discovered in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, it became known as the "Royal Game of Ur", but archaeologists uncovered other copies of the game from other locations across the Middle East. Each of the boards discovered by Wooley date to around 3000 BC. All five boards were of an identical type, but they were made of different materials and had different decorations. Woolley reproduced images of two of these boards in The First Phases. One of these is a simple set with a background composed of discs of shell with blue or red centers set in wood-covered bitumen; the other is a more elaborate one covered with shell plaques, inlaid with red limestone and lapis lazuli.
Other gameboards are engraved with images of animals. When the Game of Ur was first discovered, no one knew. In the early 1980s, Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, translated a clay tablet written c. 177 BC by the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu describing how the game was played during that time period, based on an earlier description of the rules by another scribe named Iddin-Bēl. This tablet was written during the waning days of Babylonian civilization, long after the time when the Game of Ur was first played, it had been sold to the British Museum. Finkel used photographs of another tablet describing the rules, in the personal collection of Count Aymar de Liedekerke-Beaufort, but had been destroyed during World War I; this second tablet was undated, but is believed by archaeologists to have been written several centuries earlier than the tablet by Itti-Marduk-balāṭu and to have originated from the city of Uruk. The backs of both tablets show diagrams of the gameboard indicating which game they are describing.
Based on these rules and the shape of the gameboard, Finkel was able to
Monopoly (game)
Monopoly is a board game, published by Hasbro. In the game, players roll two six-sided dice to move around the game board and trading properties, developing them with houses and hotels. Players collect rent with the goal being to drive them into bankruptcy. Money can be gained or lost through Chance and Community Chest cards, tax squares; the game has numerous house rules, hundreds of different editions exist, as well as many spin-offs and related media. Monopoly has become a part of international popular culture, having been licensed locally in more than 103 countries and printed in more than 37 languages. Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game created by Lizzie Magie in the United States in 1903 as a way to demonstrate that an economy which rewards wealth creation is better than one where monopolists work under few constraints, to promote the economic theories of Henry George—in particular his ideas about taxation, it was first published by Parker Brothers in 1935. The game is named after the economic concept of monopoly—the domination of a market by a single entity.
The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903, when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game which she hoped would explain the single tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies, she took out a patent in 1904. Her game, The Landlord's Game, was self-published, beginning in 1906. Several variant board games, based on her concept, were developed from 1906 through the 1930s. Cardboard houses were added, rents were increased as they were added to a property. Magie patented the game again in 1923. According to an advertisement placed in The Christian Science Monitor, Charles Todd of Philadelphia recalled the day in 1932 when his childhood friend, Esther Jones, her husband Charles Darrow came to their house for dinner. After the meal, the Todds introduced Darrow to The Landlord's Game, which they played several times; the game was new to Darrow, he asked the Todds for a written set of the rules.
After that night, Darrow went on to distribute the game himself as Monopoly. Because of this act the Todds refused to speak to Darrow again. After the game's excellent sales during the Christmas season of 1934, Parker Brothers bought the game's copyrights from Darrow; when the company learned Darrow was not the sole inventor of the game, it bought the rights to Magie's patent for just $500. Parker Brothers began selling the game on February 6, 1935. Cartoonist F. O. Alexander contributed the design. U. S. patent number US 2026082 A was issued to Charles Darrow on December 31, 1935, for the game board design and was assigned to Parker Brothers Inc. The original version of the game in this format was based on the streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 1936, Parker Brothers began licensing the game for sale outside the United States. In 1941, the British Secret Intelligence Service had John Waddington Ltd. the licensed manufacturer of the game in the United Kingdom, create a special edition for World War II prisoners of war held by the Nazis.
Hidden inside these games were maps, real money, other objects useful for escaping. They were distributed to prisoners by British Secret Service–created fake charity groups. Economics professor Ralph Anspach published a game Anti-Monopoly in 1973, was sued for trademark infringement by Parker Brothers in 1974; the case went to trial in 1976. Anspach won on appeals in 1979, as the 9th Circuit Court determined that the trademark Monopoly was generic and therefore unenforceable; the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case, allowing the appellate court ruling to stand. This decision was overturned by the passage of Public Law 98-620 in 1984. With that law in place, Parker Brothers and its parent company, continue to hold valid trademarks for the game Monopoly. However, Anti-Monopoly was exempted from the law and Anspach reached a settlement with Hasbro and markets his game under license from them; the research that Anspach conducted during the course of the litigation was what helped bring the game's history before Charles Darrow into the spotlight.
In 1991, Hasbro acquired Parker Bros. and thus Monopoly. Before the Hasbro acquisition, Parker Bros. acted as a publisher only issuing two versions at a time, a regular and deluxe. Hasbro moved to involve the public in varying the game. A new wave of licensed products began in 1994, when Hasbro granted a license to USAopoly to begin publishing a San Diego Edition of Monopoly, which has since been followed by over a hundred more licensees including Winning Moves Games and Winning Solutions, Inc. in the United States. In 2003, the company held a national tournament on a chartered train going from Chicago to Atlantic City. In 2003, Hasbro sued the maker of Ghettopoly and won. In February 2005, the company sued RADGames over their Super Add-On accessory board game that fit in the center of the board; the judge issued an injunction on February 25, 2005 to halt production and sales before ruling in RADGames' favor in April 2005. In 2008, the Speed Die was added to all regular Monopoly set. After polling their Facebook followers, Hasbro Gaming took the top house rules and added them to a House Rule Edition released in the Fall of 2014 and added them as optional rules in 2015.
In January 2017, Hasbro invited Internet users to vote on a new set of game pieces, with this n
China
China the People's Republic of China, is a country in East Asia and the world's most populous country, with a population of around 1.404 billion. Covering 9,600,000 square kilometers, it is the third- or fourth-largest country by total area. Governed by the Communist Party of China, the state exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities, the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. China emerged as one of the world's earliest civilizations, in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies, or dynasties, beginning with the semi-legendary Xia dynasty in 21st century BCE. Since China has expanded, re-unified numerous times. In the 3rd century BCE, the Qin established the first Chinese empire; the succeeding Han dynasty, which ruled from 206 BC until 220 AD, saw some of the most advanced technology at that time, including papermaking and the compass, along with agricultural and medical improvements.
The invention of gunpowder and movable type in the Tang dynasty and Northern Song completed the Four Great Inventions. Tang culture spread in Asia, as the new Silk Route brought traders to as far as Mesopotamia and Horn of Africa. Dynastic rule ended in 1912 with the Xinhai Revolution; the Chinese Civil War resulted in a division of territory in 1949, when the Communist Party of China established the People's Republic of China, a unitary one-party sovereign state on Mainland China, while the Kuomintang-led government retreated to the island of Taiwan. The political status of Taiwan remains disputed. Since the introduction of economic reforms in 1978, China's economy has been one of the world's fastest-growing with annual growth rates above 6 percent. According to the World Bank, China's GDP grew from $150 billion in 1978 to $12.24 trillion by 2017. Since 2010, China has been the world's second-largest economy by nominal GDP and since 2014, the largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity.
China is the world's largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. China is a recognized nuclear weapons state and has the world's largest standing army and second-largest defense budget; the PRC is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as it replaced the ROC in 1971, as well as an active global partner of ASEAN Plus mechanism. China is a leading member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, WTO, APEC, BRICS, the BCIM, the G20. In recent times, scholars have argued that it will soon be a world superpower, rivaling the United States; the word "China" has been used in English since the 16th century. It is not a word used by the Chinese themselves, it has been traced through Portuguese and Persian back to the Sanskrit word Cīna, used in ancient India."China" appears in Richard Eden's 1555 translation of the 1516 journal of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa. Barbosa's usage was derived from Persian Chīn, in turn derived from Sanskrit Cīna.
Cīna was first used including the Mahābhārata and the Laws of Manu. In 1655, Martino Martini suggested that the word China is derived from the name of the Qin dynasty. Although this derivation is still given in various sources, it is complicated by the fact that the Sanskrit word appears in pre-Qin literature; the word may have referred to a state such as Yelang. The meaning transferred to China as a whole; the origin of the Sanskrit word is still a matter of debate, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The official name of the modern state is the "People's Republic of China"; the shorter form is "China" Zhōngguó, from zhōng and guó, a term which developed under the Western Zhou dynasty in reference to its royal demesne. It was applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and to China's Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state under the Qing, it was used as a cultural concept to distinguish the Huaxia people from perceived "barbarians". The name Zhongguo is translated as "Middle Kingdom" in English.
Archaeological evidence suggests that early hominids inhabited China between 2.24 million and 250,000 years ago. The hominid fossils of Peking Man, a Homo erectus who used fire, were discovered in a cave at Zhoukoudian near Beijing; the fossilized teeth of Homo sapiens have been discovered in Fuyan Cave in Hunan. Chinese proto-writing existed in Jiahu around 7000 BCE, Damaidi around 6000 BCE, Dadiwan from 5800–5400 BCE, Banpo dating from the 5th millennium BCE; some scholars have suggested. According to Chinese tradition, the first dynasty was the Xia, which emerged around 2100 BCE; the dynasty was considered mythical by historians until scientific excavations found early Bronze Age sites at Erlitou, Henan in 1959. It remains unclear whether these sites are the remains of the Xia dynasty or of another culture from the same period; the succeeding Shang dynasty is the earliest to be confirmed by contemporary records. The Shang ruled the plain of the Yellow River in eastern China from the 17th to the 11th century BCE.
Their oracle bone script
