How much do you know, from oracle bones to writing on bronzes?

The beauty of Chinese calligraphy is beyond the reach of other chinese characters, and appreciating calligraphy is also a science! First of all, to appreciate calligraphy more deeply, there must be two brushes - "the brush of history" and "the brush of calligraphy". The brush of history contains the history of calligraphy and the history of China (the background of the calligrapher's creation), while the brush of calligraphy contains philological knowledge, writing skills, the ability to identify inscriptions, and artistic qualities. They are all inseparable.

From the oracle bones of Yin Shang to the words seen now, the five thousand years of time are undoubtedly revealed. If you don't know the history of calligraphy when appreciating, and compare lishu with cursive and calligraphy—which one is better than any other—it is like Zhang Fei and Yue Fei appearing in a scene at the same time in a historical movie.

1. The text on the bones of the tortoiseshell

The story begins in Xiaotun Village, a northwestern suburb of Anyang, Henan. At the end of the 19th century, villagers found many bone pieces engraved with patterns in the fields. At first, these large and small bone tablets were sold to pharmacies as calming herbs. The epigrapher Wang Yirong was keenly aware that the strange symbols carved on the bone pieces were an ancient script, and Anyang was the site of the capital city of the late Shang Dynasty (called "Yin Ruins"). These words are inscribed on the bones of the tortoiseshell, hence the name "Oracle".

Before the discovery of the oracle bone, the oldest Chinese script was the gold script engraved on bronze, which was produced about 3,000 years ago. There is no trace of words in previous history. However, the history of letters must be written history, so although Sima Qian described the Shang Dynasty in the "Records of History", most Chinese did not hesitate to believe that this history existed, but until the discovery of the oracle bone, the international academic community still generally believed that the Shang was just a legendary dynasty. These oracle bones are undoubtedly one of the most remarkable historical sources, and they confirm that the Shang Dynasty depicted in the Chronicle of History is not a legend, it really exists.

The function of the oracle bone is divination, and the official in charge of divination in the Shang Dynasty was called "Zhenren". The real people engraved the content of the Shang King's question on the oracle bone, burned the oracle bone, and then inferred the auspiciousness based on the cracks on the oracle bone. The real person holds both duties and is both a "detective" and a "calligrapher" who investigates the will of the gods.

The content of the Shang King's divination is all-encompassing, such as weather, war, agriculture, entry and exit, official appointments, diseases and births, and so on. These oracle bones are historical archives of the Shang Dynasty, reflecting all aspects of national and social life, while conveying the aesthetics of calligraphy. The Wuding Period's "Wang Bin Zhongding · Wang Xiang's "Zhu Bu Orthopedic Dictionary" is engraved on the ox bone. The inscription on the front of the bone plate has more than 100 words, including four words, involving sacrifices, hunting, celestial phenomena and other contents. "The carved dictionary is majestic, the qi rhyme is grand, the characters are generally ended, and the strokes are vigorous, which is a model of the second type of oracle bones of the C ethnic group, and it is also a rare treasure in the oracle orthopedic words of the late Shang Dynasty."

2. Inscription on bronze vessels

The Writing of the Shang Dynasty not only has inscriptions engraved on the bones of tortoise shells and beasts, but also inscriptions engraved on bronze vessels. The ancients called bronze "gold" and pure and beautiful bronze "Jijin". The inscription on the bronze is commonly referred to as "Jinwen" or "Jijin Script". These bronzes should be golden and eye-catching in the new tense. As time passes, they are covered with green rust and become dull and plain. Most of the bronzes of the Shang Dynasty were used for funeral sacrifices, and the inscriptions on them have the title of the ancestors who were buried.

A bronze fangding statue (Fig. 1-7) has also been excavated from the tomb of Nühao, and the inner wall of the abdomen of the Ding has an inscription with the words "Simu Xin" (Fig. 1-8). "Xin" is a good name for women, and this ding was cast by the son of Wu Ding to sacrifice his mother.

Modern people have many ways to output text, you can write, type, handwrite on the screen, and even voice input. There were two main methods for the Shang Dynasty: one was "carved" on the oracle bone; the other was "cast" on bronze. Shangzhou's most advanced and widely used casting process is complex. First use clay to mold the style of the utensils to be cast, the sculpture is decorated with ornaments and inscriptions, and after the yin is dried, it is fired, called "mold". Then press hard and repeatedly on it, and also after yin dry firing, to make an "outer fan". The soil is then used to make an "inner fan" with a volume comparable to the inner cavity of the utensil. Enclose the inner and outer fans, pour copper water into them, and after cooling, break the inner and outer fans to remove the bronze. Hence the word "model", which means an example worthy of taking.

Zaifu Ji is a Shang Dynasty bronze vessel. It is used as a wine vessel. This piece of Zaifu is very beautifully cast, the lid button is in the shape of a mushroom, the ends of the beam are decorated with animal heads, and the lid and belly are decorated with gluttonous and bird patterns. These patterns are the most common parents of Shang Bronze. The lid and the inner wall of the bottom of the vessel each have 3 lines of the same inscription with a total of 23 characters. The number of inscriptions on Shang Dynasty bronzes was generally very small, and it was rare to cast so many inscriptions. They tell the story of this wine vessel. These two inscriptions read " Wang Lai Beast From Dou Lu Cai [衤奚] Shi Wang Xiang Youwang Guang Zai Fu Bei Wu Peng With Cha Bao". The gist of it was that the Shang king returned from hunting in Dulu and held a banquet at which he rewarded Zaifu with five strings of treasures. Zaifu must have felt both grateful and proud, so he cast this bronze to commemorate the event. In this way, his children and grandchildren can share in this glory.

3. The use of brushes

The Shang Dynasty's method of exporting writing was mainly to engrave and cast. So what about them writing without a pen? There is at least two pieces of evidence that the Shang Dynasty already used brushes. First, some of the Relics of Yin Merchants unearthed in Anyang, such as oracle bones, jade pieces and pottery pieces, have ink marks on them. In 1932, the Academia Sinica excavated the Yin Ruins for the seventh time, and a piece of pottery unearthed had the ink book "祀" character on it, about an inch in size, and the dot painting was thick, similar to the Shang zhou Jin style.

In addition to the physical object, there are two Chinese characters that are also evidence. The word "pen" is found in the oracle bone, and the word is "聿", which is the lower part of the traditional character (pen) of "pen".

The Shang Dynasty also recorded the fact of "brush" writing in their writing. For example, the word "shi" in the oracle bone is the yiyi character in the state of writing with a pen in hand. The Shang Shu Zhou Shu Duoshi also records that "only the Ancestors of Yin, there are books and canons", and the oracle bone of the "classic" depicts the appearance of people holding bamboo janes in their hands, indicating that the Shang Dynasty people wrote on bamboo janes. At the same time, there is also the concept of "album" in the oracle bone, that is, writing on the brochure.

At present, the earliest brush was found from a Chu tomb in the Warring States period, and in fact, the brush began to be used in large quantities as early as the Yin Shang period, but so far no actual brush of the Shang Dynasty has been found. Since the Shang Dynasty people already knew how to use brushes, why is it that most of the literature that remains so far is oracle bone?

Divination sacrifices were very important and serious for the shang dynasty authorities, and the oracle bones were an important divination tool they used to evaluate auspiciousness, predict the future, and make major decisions. The "Zhenren" (who specialized in divination) in the Shang Dynasty made a crack in the front of the oracle bone by chiseling a pit, drilling, burning, etc. on the back of the oracle bone, so as to predict the divination event according to the direction of the crack and the morphological characteristics. All information about these divinations, including the timing of the divination, the name of the real person, the divination problem, the results of the divination and the post-verification, etc., is recorded on the oracle bone. The Shang Dynasty attached great importance to these oracle bones full of words, and they perforated and woven together with rope, and sorted them into a file for preservation. What do you think about this?

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