Readers who have watched costume dramas know that when the ancient Yamen interrogated prisoners, once the prisoners confessed, there would be a process of signing and drawing a pledge. After all, verbal statements are easy to play tricks, and only those recorded in black and white look convincing.
Moreover, it is not only the prisoner who signs the pledge when he confesses guilt, but also the signature of the pledge in the approval of official documents or the transaction of land titles. Here, I don't know if the reader found a loophole, the purpose of signing the pledge is nothing more than to let the fingerprints of the painter stay on it. If the poster does not recognize the account in the future, his fingerprints are the best physical evidence.
However, in ancient times, there was no fingerprint recognition technology, fingerprint is a relatively complex biological pattern, and it is difficult to find the details of it only by comparing it with the naked eye. Moreover, if the documents of the painting are turned over again, they have generally experienced a long period of time, and whether the fingerprints can be preserved or not is two things, what is the significance of the ancient paintings?
In fact, the author underestimated the ability of the ancients to identify fingerprints. As early as the Western Zhou Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago, the ancients in China had already discovered the hidden secrets of this human body. However, at the earliest, it was not applied to the signature drawing, but to another function that we are familiar with. Modern medicine proves that the repetition rate of human fingerprints is very low, and there may be 1 case of repetition in 15 billion people. Therefore, different fingerprints, in the Western Zhou Dynasty, determined different fates.
It was not until the Qin Dynasty that fingerprints finally began to be used to solve cases. Among the large number of paper cultural relics unearthed in the Tang Dynasty, many land titles and wills were printed with fingerprints or palm prints. Before the ancients painted, they often concocted a special kind of cinnabar, which as long as it was dried, even in the past thousand years, the traces were difficult to remove.
After the Song Dynasty, fingerprint judgment has become the basic common sense of officials. As the world's first ancient book of legal cases, the Song Dynasty's "Record of Washing Injustices" recorded several examples of solving cases by fingerprints. It was also introduced that at that time, the government had a kind of technical personnel who specialized in screening and identifying fingerprints, which showed that the fingerprint cracking system was already quite mature.
During the Southern Song Dynasty, an ancient book called the Jidou Book was unearthed, which is a book similar to the household registration. Not only are there people's names, ages, and home addresses, but everyone has fingerprints under the corresponding entries. This "Ji Dou Book" can also be regarded as the earliest "fingerprint registration system" in China.
It is worth mentioning that due to the existence of such things as the "Midou Book". As long as the prisoner at that time escaped from crime, Yamen would find his fingerprints, print them on the wanted list, and then distribute them to various regions. In this way, the prisoner will be locked, no matter where he flees, as long as he leaves a fingerprint clue, he can be arrested and arrested immediately.
To put it bluntly, the reason why ancient paintings flourished was fingerprints. The first is to leave strong physical evidence to prevent others from denying it in the future or to facilitate the government's handling of the case. Another reason is that there are too few cultural people, the level of education in ancient times is not as good as it is now, most people have not attended school, and they cannot even write their own names. Fingerprinting is the most efficient way for them to sign official deeds.
To this day, with the help of fingerprint recognition technology, the method of signing documents according to fingerprints still has legal effect. This technology, which is now seen by all mankind, has been perfectly mastered by the ancients in our country more than 2,000 years ago, and it has to be said that the wisdom of the ancients is really breathtaking. Dear readers, do you still know what kind of black technology the ancients had? Feel free to leave a message in the comments section.