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The writings of the Eastern countries were originally developed from the Western Zhou script, but they took different paths, so that the physical style was getting farther and farther away. In the early Spring and Autumn Period, the text here is the same as that of the late Western Zhou Dynasty, such as Jin Jiang Ding, and it is difficult to judge from the font that it is a work after the Zhou Room moved east. By the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period, the strokes of the text gradually tended to be thick and thin, forming a strong and regular font composed of lines, such as Zeng Bo's inscription, which reflected this eye-catching transformation.
1. Western Zhou Spring and Autumn Period Texts
The western Zhou And Spring and Autumn texts are mainly in jin script.
The Western Zhou Dynasty was the heyday of jinwen. At that time, the nobles popularly wrote memorable things such as records, rewards, honors, military achievements, marriages, festivals, lawsuits, and filial piety into words and cast them on bronze ware, "children and grandchildren yongbao used it", so this period not only had a special number of bronze inscriptions, but also the length of the moon inscription was also very long, and hundreds of words of inscriptions were used. Its famous ones such as "Da Lu Ding", "Xiao Lu Ding", "Wall Disk", "Sanshi Pan", and "Mao Gong Ding", almost every one of which can be compared with the chapters of the "Book of Shang".
The Jin wen in the early Western Zhou Dynasty almost completely followed the style of the late Shang Dynasty Jin Wen, with more square fold strokes and a strong and steep body. During the reigns of King Kang, King Zhao, and King Mu, the glyphs gradually became neat and square. After King Gong and King Yi in the late Zhou Dynasty, Jin Wen underwent relatively large changes.
The main trend of this change is that since the beginning of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the square and round fat pens of the Golden Text have gradually been replaced by uniform lines, and the second is that the original zigzag pictographic lines of the Golden Text have been flattened, and some of the original incoherent strokes have also been connected into one stroke.
This important change in the shape of the character is what some scholars call linearization and straightness.
As a result of the linearization and straightness of the golden text, the posture and arrangement of the text are neater and more uniform than before. The original chinese characters with a high degree of pictogram have been reduced, the symbolism has been enhanced, and writing has been facilitated. In the history of traditional philology, the legendary King Taishi of Zhou Xuan wrote "籀文", which is probably a more regular font of writing compiled on this basis.
In the early Spring and Autumn Period, the princely states generally followed the writing style of the late Zhou Dynasty, and there was no significant difference from the Jin script of the late Zhou Dynasty. However, the number of long inscriptions has been reduced, and the content is mostly "line instrument" and "concubine". After the middle period, although the writing of various countries is still generally similar in glyph structure, the writing style has clearly shown different regional styles. This regional style of differentiation can basically be divided into qin, zhou, jin, Qi, Lu, Chu, Xu, Wu, Yue and other regions. In these areas, except for the Qin, the writing of the rest of the regions gradually abandoned the solemn elegance of the Zhou Dynasty Jinwen and developed in the direction of flowing and fresh.
In the middle and late Spring and Autumn Period, qi in the east and Chu, Xu, Wu, Yue in the south were particularly popular in a narrow and pretentiously curved font, especially Wu Yue in Jiangnan, and sometimes even added bird-shaped and insect-shaped patterns as decorations, which is what later generations called "bird seals" and "insect books". This kind of "bird seal" or "insect book", the tendency to be artistic is very strong, and it is not the same thing as the ancient script bending due to pictograms, so it is particularly difficult to recognize. However, because it is a special beautified font, it is mainly used for the signature or decoration of weapons and so on, and it has little impact on the use of daily text.
Important written materials for the Spring and Autumn period of the Western Zhou Dynasty also include the "Zhou Yuan Oracle Bone" and the "Houma Mengshu".
The "ZhouYuan Oracle" originated from the "ZhouYuan" in the central area of Zhou, that is, in the area of present-day Qishan and Fufeng in Shaanxi, and the content is a divination record before and after the Zhou royal family destroyed the Shang, and its font is close to that of Yin Xu Bu Ci, but the glyph is too small, which is different from the style of Yin Xu Bu Ci.
The "Houma Mengshu" was found at the site of Xintian, the capital of the Eastern Zhou Jin Dynasty in Houma, Shanxi, and was the oath of the nobles of the Jin State in the late Spring and Autumn Period. Most of the words are written on jade and stone tablets with brushes, most of which are Zhu shu, a small part are ink books, and the font is close to the Warring States script. In recent years, Wenxian County, Henan Province, has also found many covenant books of a similar nature, mostly ink books. This kind of mengshu was also found in the 1930s and 1940s, and was called "Qinyang Yujian" at that time, because the Village of Xizhangji, where the mengshu was unearthed at that time, belonged to Qinyang. "Yujian" is named after the material that records the text.
2. The Six Kingdoms of the Warring States
The Six Kingdoms script refers to the script of the Six Kingdoms of the East outside the Qin during the Warring States period.
At the turn of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, Chinese society underwent drastic changes. Before the Spring and Autumn Period, the monopoly of politics, economy, and culture by the patriarchal aristocracy created a situation of "learning in the official government". After the Warring States, with the political, economic, and military changes, academic culture broke through the old shackles and flourished, "a hundred schools of thought contended", the use of writing became more and more extensive, more and more people used words, which also made the writing more and more simple, practical and easy to write in the direction of development, so that the writing appeared a situation of drastic changes.
Among the major countries of the Spring and Autumn Warring States, the Qin State accepted more influence from the Western Zhou culture because it was located in the ancestral land of Zong Zhou, and because of its western location, the development of culture was far less rapid and violent than that of the Six Eastern Kingdoms. Therefore, with the cultural changes of the Warring States period, the Warring States script gradually diverged into two systems.
One system is the Western Qin script, which basically maintains the writing style of the late Western Zhou Dynasty in terms of form; the other system is the script of the Six Kingdoms of the East, and the shape and style present a situation that is very different from the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn scripts.
The information in the six languages is very rich. The physical materials found during this period include jinwen (warring states jinwen inscriptions, the content is mostly "wule gong name"), pottery, seal script (including sealing clay), currency text, shushu and bamboo Jane, in addition, "Shuowen Jiezi", "Three-body Stone Classic" and other books and remnants also retain some of the scriptures written by people in the Six Kingdoms during the Warring States period, that is, the "ancient text" often said in traditional philology.
There are many pamphlets of the Warring States period found in ancient times on the mainland, and their famous ones such as the Confucius Bizhongshu discovered in the early Han Dynasty (including the Book of Shang, the Biography of the Left Clan in Spring and Autumn, etc.), the Bamboo Book Chronicle and the Biography of Mu Tianzi discovered by wei Ji of the Warring States of Ji County (present-day Ji County, Henan), etc., are all important documents that are very influential in history.
The "ancient text" in the "Explanation of Texts" is a record of the confucius wall book, so in fact it is also a bamboo script, but because it was found earlier, after repeated copying, the glyphs may have been quite wrong. Compared with the Western Zhou And Spring and Autumn scripts, the Six Kingdoms script has the following significant characteristics:
1. Simplified characters are prevalent.
as:
Simplified characters are a kind of "vulgar" characters that are different from the "orthodox" form of simplified province. As the use of writing is becoming more and more frequent and the scope of use is becoming more and more extensive, the text has to develop in the direction of simplification and introspection. In addition to the reduction of structure and strokes, the strokes are also straighter than those of the Western Zhou And Spring and Autumn scripts, which is also a step in the reduction of characters.
The Six Kingdoms script also has some more elaborate phenomena than before. Like the original relatively simple flat writing ping, but this was not the mainstream of the writing trend at that time.
2. Due to the simplicity of the script at that time, the degree of change and the style of change in various countries, the regional characteristics were more prominent, and the situation of "character alienation" was more serious.
The so-called "character alien" means that the six kingdoms are not only very different from the Qin script, but also have great differences in the writing appearance of the six countries. For example:
In addition, the same script, different countries, the use of sides is often very different. For example, the word "kitchen" of "cook", Qin Guo as a cook, from the "factory" sound; Chu Guo as "脰", from the sound of "meat" and "beans"; Sanjin Zuo (Factory Zhu), sounding from "meat" or "factory", "Zhu". The "door" character of "portal" is replaced by the false "smell" of qi guo, and the false "min" of Yan Guo and Zhongshan. These situations reflect the differences in regional writing during the Warring States period.
The "special shape of the characters" caused by the vigorous simplification of the shape and regional differences of the six kingdoms of the chinese characters made the appearance of the Warring States script very different from the Western Zhou Spring and Autumn scripts, showing a chaotic and complicated situation. The formation of this chaotic situation is related to the fact that "the princes are strong in government and not unified with the king", and it is also related to the increasing pursuit of practicality and simplicity in writing. The scope of use of warring states script is extremely wide, many characters are from the hands of the lower people (like the Warring States golden text is mostly carved by craftsmen, pottery is mostly carved by handicraft craftsmen), sloppy province is commonplace, not pay much attention to deliberate refinement, because yes, the "vulgar" text has been vigorously developed, and the "orthographic" text has been greatly impacted. We usually think that the six-language script is very difficult to recognize, because it is too different from the "orthographic" script.
Of course, when we say "character aliens", we do not mean that each country in the Warring States period was different, nor did we mean that the words of various countries did not have a mutual influence, but that the situation in which the scripts of this period varied from place to place was very serious. In fact, Qin Shi Huang unified the script, only "to dismiss those who do not merge with the Qin script", and the abolition of variant characters is not the abolition of the Six Kingdoms script. Therefore, although the Liuguo script has almost a sense of complete unrecognizability with the Western Zhou And Spring and Autumn script, from the overall situation, it is still a period of tortuous development of Chinese characters, and we should have a correct understanding of this.
3. The Qin script
The Qin script refers to the Qin script of the Warring States period and the small seal of the Qin Dynasty.
The written materials of this system mainly include stone inscriptions (such as "Stone Drum Text", "Curse Chu Wen", Qin Fengshan, Taishan, Yaoyue carved stones, etc.), Jin Wen (mainly inscriptions on weapons, weights, tiger symbols and other utensils), seals, sealing mud, pottery (pottery and bricks, tiles and other utensils printed or engraved text), lacquer script (branded or inscribed on lacquerware), bamboo Jane (in recent years Qin Jian found a lot, like Hubei Yunmeng Sleeping Tiger Land Qin Jian, etc.), Shu Shu ( In 1973, Changsha Mawangdui Hanji unearthed a large number of books, including at least, some of which are Qin manuscripts) and so on.
Books and literature mainly include Xu Shen's "Explanation of Words and Characters" of the Eastern Han Dynasty. The Shuowen Jiezi collects more than 9,000 small seal characters, which is the most systematic Qin script material seen so far, although the shape of it has been some errors and tampering.
The Qin script, from the Spring and Autumn Period to the Warring States, basically followed the style of the late Western Zhou Dynasty. The characteristics of its change are mainly manifested in the continuous improvement of the degree of uniformity of the glyphs. Comparing the Qin script in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Late Western Zhou Dynasty, the changes in symmetry and regularity are relatively clear. Sometimes in order to pursue the regularity and symmetry of the glyph, the original straight stroke can become curved, and the original curved stroke becomes straight. as:
As a result of this change, the text becomes fairly rounded, homogeneous, and less pictographic. This rounded and homogeneous script was called "Seal Book" and "Shuowen" in the history of philology in the past: "Seal, Citation Book". "Introduction" means extension and prolongation. At that time, the text was written with a brush, in order to write the text roundly and symmetrically, the strokes had to be written in a stroke of a stroke to the length, in order to complete its shape, so it was called "seal". After the "seal" Han Dynasty, there were large and small seals. "Great Seal" refers to the Qin script between the Spring and Autumn Warring States, such as the Shigu script and the Qin GongZhong; "Small Seal" refers to the standard seal used to unify the script after the unification of China by the Qin.
Compared with the small seal and the large seal, first, the lines of the text tend to be more straight, and the structural layout is more symmetrical: Second, some of the glyphs have been significantly simplified, and some parts of the original large seal text have been simplified, and some have replaced the complex side with less strokes.
It is not difficult to see that from the "big seal" to the "small seal", this is the result of the further simplification of Chinese characters to adapt to the needs of society. Qin Shi Huang unified the six kingdoms with the "small seal", which is also in line with the general trend of the development of the script.
Regarding Qin Shi Huang's use of small seals to unify the text, the "Records of History" and other books have the following records: "Qin Shi Huang Emperor was the first emperor to be in the world, and Li Si and others were the same, and they were not in harmony with Qin Wen." Li Si composed the "Cangjie Chapter", the ZhongshuFu Ling Zhao Gao composed the "Calendar Chapter", and the Taishi Ling Hu Wujing wrote the "Erudite Chapter", all taking the Shi Li Da Seal, or quite provincial reform, the so-called small seal also". This is worth avoiding. According to the "Records of History", it seems that the unified script of Qin began with Li Si and others as three warehouses, and the small seal used by Qin to unify the text was also created by Li Si and others according to the provincial reform of the "Great Seal of Shi Li", which had never existed before. This is not true. Archaeological data prove that the "Small Seal" font has been formed in the last years of the Warring States period, and it was not changed by the province of "Xiaozhu" (籀文). Some of the texts in qin xiaogong's "Shang Martingale Volume", Qin Zhaowang's "Xiang Xiang Touch Ge" and "Curse Chu Wen" are already small seal shapes. The famous "New Tiger Symbol" and "Du Hu Fu" were cast before Qin Shi Huang became emperor, but the text on it is already a typical small seal.
All this shows that the "small seal" was gradually evolved by the Qin script in the Warring States period, and it did not have a distinct boundary with the Qin script before the unification. In the process of unifying China, Qin Shi Huang had already carried out the work of "writing with the same text" in the newly occupied areas, and after the unification of the Six Kingdoms, Li Si and others used the standard script of the three warehouses as a model for the unified script, and their main work was to sort out and unify in line with the development trend of the Qin script in order to facilitate its implementation, not that they created the small seal.
Of course, no matter what the situation, Qin Shi Huang's merits in unifying the script are indelible. Qin Shi Huang unified the script with a small seal, ending the chaotic situation of "character aliens", and also made a considerable change in the situation of many ancient script variants. From the Shang to the qin before the unification, the structure of the text was very arbitrary, the shape was uneven, and the thickness of the strokes was different.
Qin replaced the jagged characters of the past with a regular small seal composed of flat curves and straight lines, and generally only stipulated a relatively simple way of writing a word, and the side parts were fixed, which made the ancient script that had evolved for nearly two thousand years achieve an unprecedented large-scale unification, becoming the most progressive and final stage of the ancient script.
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