Chinese characters began with tao fu, and by the Warring States period, they already had a very mature writing system, and we all now believe that the current Chinese script was unified in the hands of Qin Shi Huang, but this is not the case.
The first unification of writing has nothing to do with the Qin Dynasty, as it dates back to the Shang Dynasty.
During the Shang Dynasty, people obtained some winding cracks by burning on the shell of the turtle, which had a special meaning in people's eyes and was considered to be a revelation given by heaven, but how to understand the meaning of the shell pattern must rely on professional people to interpret it.
▲Oracle
These burning turtle patterns are different every time, so it is necessary to carve its meaning on each turtle shell, these carved symbols are a set of symbol systems invented by the Shang Dynasty from the summary and refinement of many existing symbols, and each symbol has a unique and unified meaning, this set of writing system is: oracle bone.
The emergence of the oracle bone is the first unification of Chinese characters, and since then, any changes in the script are only the evolution of different time periods. From the oracle bone to the Qin Dynasty, the middle has evolved into a golden script and a large seal, but the golden script is only the difference in the text carrier: the difference from the turtle shell to the bronze.
▲ Jin Wen
▲Great Seal
The Great Seal is a large-scale change of the text, why should it be changed? As mentioned earlier, the oracle bone only unified the meaning of the word, but there was no higher aesthetic requirement for the glyph, and later after the establishment of the Zhou Dynasty, it was believed that the official text must be beautiful, so the great seal appeared.
By the time of Qin Shi Huang, there were three fonts in society, namely: Big Seal, Small Seal and Lishu.
Although the font is beautiful, but the writing is too cumbersome, so its simplified "small seal" came out, and although the small seal is indeed more convenient than the big seal, in the eyes of the lower officials, it is still too complicated, so the more free letter is also published.
▲Lishu
Therefore, from the pottery to the Lishu, before the unification of Qin Shi Huang to China, there was only one writing system, and since it is a system, then the differences between them will not be too different.
The writing of the Seven Kingdoms is certainly not the same, but the difference between the characters and the characters will definitely not be worlds apart, the so-called "book with text" of the Qin Dynasty, is not Qin Shi Huang's request that the whole world's writing should be used to replace the other six, but requires all office writing to be written with "small seal", so that the small seal becomes the government of the Qin Dynasty to recognize the text, which is the original meaning of "book with text".
As for what fonts are used by the people, Qin Shi Huang did not have so much energy to manage, and there was no need to care, after all, the writing of the Seven Kingdoms was basically the same.
According to Xu Shen's examination and collection, only about 400 different scripts were written in the seven countries before Qin Shi Huang unified the Six Kingdoms, accounting for less than 5% of all the writings.
And these four hundred words, their differences, is only one more stroke or less stroke, the real reach a word with different ways of writing, adding up to less than fifty.
As for the seven ways of writing in seven countries, there is not one, and there are only three ways of writing at most, and this kind of writing is even rarer, only six.
Before the unification of Qin Shi Huang, the writing of the Seven Kingdoms was really not as different as people thought.
Even without the Qin Dynasty, the Chinese script would not have evolved to the point where the south did not know the north, and the east did not recognize the west, after all, the writing of our nation is inherited from the oracle bone.
The Han Dynasty after the Qin Dynasty also felt that the small seal was also quite complicated, so there was a more simplified Han Li as the official script, and then the cursive, calligraphy, and xingshu were all the evolution of the self-social nature of the text.
But no matter the ever-changing, the inner soul of Chinese characters or the inheritance of China's cultural charm for thousands of years, has become a unique treasure of Chinese civilization, any Chinese, can be in the Chinese rhyme of the text, and the ancestors of a thousand years ago to carry out a spiritual dialogue, we do not have to doubt the inheritance of the text, nor do we need to be conservative retro, as long as we know that no matter what kind of evolution, it is the unique imprint of each era's Chinese on civilization, it is enough.
Note: The picture comes from the Internet, there is no research on the font, if the picture is wrong, please correct it.