Pictographs are the oldest form of handwriting yet discovered. The Chinese aren't the only ancient civilization to have developed them -- Egyptian hieroglyphics are another very early form -- but more than 5,000 years ago the Chinese started using simple stylized drawings of common objects to convey meaning, painting them carefully onto pottery, stone or other materials.
Continuity
The extraordinary thing about Chinese pictography is that it has survived and is still in use. Although there are only about 300 pictographs known to exist, there is clear continuity between these ancient symbols and modern Chinese.
The earliest Chinese pictographs discovered so far date from the Shang dynasty which lasted from about 1200 to 1045 B.C. That script was already highly developed, which can only mean the origins of Chinese pictography lie much further back in time.
Abstract
Over the centuries pictographs have become simplified and abstract, and the modern characters clearly differ from the ancient drawings. But equally clear is the visual connection between the two.
The process of abstraction has hindered the growth of pictographs, and that is why their number is limited. However, pictography remains central to composing Chinese characters.
Culture
The evolution of Chinese characters is closely connected to the development of Chinese culture and, for the Chinese, written characters are the basic carriers of traditional culture. As such, they have played a critical role in the long history of the Chinese nation.
These ancient building blocks of Chinese writing are unitary -- that is, they are complete in themselves and cannot be divided to create other characters with different meanings. But they have sometimes been merged with other writing styles employed by the Chinese. One of these is ideographs, which are graphical representations of abstract ideas.
Combined
Pictographs and ideographs can be combined to form new compound characters that draw meaning and even pronunciation from both. Semantic-phonetic compounds represent around 90 percent of all existing characters, with the semantic component sometimes suggesting the meaning of a character and the phonetic component its pronunciation.
