The emergence of writing can be said to be the most useful and valuable invention of human beings, it is an effective way for human beings to communicate, and it can also become a means of preserving and transmitting information. Speaking of writing, the oldest script on the mainland is the oracle bone found in the ruins of Yin Shang.
The oracle bone is also the earliest hieroglyph on the mainland, which is a font created according to the image and connotation of the sun, moon, mountains and rivers and everything in the world. Regarding the creation of hieroglyphs, there has been a legend of "Cangjie making characters" in history, and Cangjie is also known as the "grandfather" of hieroglyphs.
The development of writing from scratch this process is very arduous, not only implies the progress of human thought, but also the most intuitive embodiment of social development. Cangjie also has many anecdotal allusions on the way to making characters, including the saying that "the sky rains and the ghosts cry at night".
Legendary gods
Because the Yellow Emperor period is far away from our current age, many historical facts have been impossible to verify, especially since the text of that era has not yet been born, and many histories cannot be recorded. It wasn't until a man named Cangjie created hieroglyphs that we were able to decipher aspects of the Yellow Emperor's period from these texts.
According to historical records, Cangjie was a left historian during the Yellow Emperor's reign. This official position only appeared when it developed into a feudal dynasty in ancient times, so why is there such a saying during the Yellow Emperor period of primitive society? The reason is that the earliest mention of the character of Cangjie has reached the Warring States period.
The saying "Cangjie Zaozi" began to circulate during the Warring States period, initially in the Xunzi Xiezhi, and later in the "Lü Shi Chunqiu", "Huainanzi", "Shuowen Jiezi" and other classics began to record his examples one after another.
It is said that Cangjie was born with two eyes and four pupils, and in ancient mythological stories, people with this characteristic are generally not ordinary, either gods or saints, so Cangjie is the same. After the Yellow Emperor learned that there was such a figure in his tribe, he hurriedly summoned him to his side as an official.
At first, the Yellow Emperor assigned him to help manage the number of livestock and food, but because there was no writing, everyone recorded it through the method of "stone pile and knotted rope record". In particular, the "knotted rope chronicle" has been widely used in various tribes.
This method of memorization is very cumbersome, and different thicknesses of rope are knotted at different distances, and the knots are also large and small. And the difference in the size, knot, distance and thickness of the rope all represent different meanings. Such a tedious way of remembering needs to be used after training.
When Cangjie was managing livestock and grain, due to the continuous increase of these products, it was too difficult for him to record through knotted ropes, and it was particularly prone to mistakes over time. Therefore, Cangjie has been racking his brains to think of what way to better record it?
Inspiration is reproduced
The time came to the end of primitive society, and the Central Plains had begun to develop under the effective management of the Yellow Emperor, so the method of knotting ropes and keeping notes could no longer meet the needs of the current society. So the emperor asked Cangjie to think of a way to see if there was a better way to replace the knotted rope note.
Cangjie was meditating hard when suddenly a phoenix flew from the sky, and then something fell, just falling next to Cangjie, and he picked it up to see that there was a hoof mark on it. Cangjie looked closely and couldn't identify the hoof prints of any beast.
Just as a hunter passed by, he told Cangjie that it was the hoof print of the cat, and the hoof print of each beast was different. Cangjie thought to himself, since a shaped hoof print represents a beast, can some shape symbols also be used to represent everything in the world?
Inspired, Cangjie was overjoyed and immediately set about creating shape symbols. Everything has its own unique shape characteristics, as long as you look closely, you can find the uniqueness of something, such as the sun, moon, nebula, mountains, rivers, lakes and seas, birds and animals, and daily necessities.
So Cangjie created many pictorial symbols under this inspiration, which is the prototype of hieroglyphs. After accumulating over time, Cangjie also had more hieroglyphs in his hands, and later he dedicated these created words to the Yellow Emperor.
The Yellow Emperor was very happy after reading it, so he immediately popularized it in all the places, and later the world began to use hieroglyphs to record daily life and various types of information.
In today's Cangjie Temple, there is a "Cangsheng Bird Trace Stele", which is a large black stone engraved with 28 strangely shaped symbols, which was once considered to be the world's earliest hieroglyph and the original shape of Cangjie characters.
In order to commemorate the feat of Cangjie character making, new ruins about Cangjie were built throughout the country, including Cangjie Mausoleum, Character Creation Platform, and so on. The most famous is the "Phoenix Book Platform", which is the place where Cangjie was deeply inspired when he encountered the phoenix's hooves.
The place is located in the south of Xinzheng County, Henan, and a temple was built here during the Song Dynasty, named "Fengtai Temple". Of course, there are legends about Cangjie's characters that are not so, and there is also a widespread and mysterious one.
The legend of the ghost god weeping
Since Cangjie is a figure that was passed down from the primitive era, the myths and legends on him will naturally not be less. Cangjie's greatest contribution to mankind was the creation of hieroglyphs, so that future generations of people have a blind worship and belief in Cangjie.
According to one such record in the historical records, it is said that Cangjie was once the leader of a tribe, he was able to write since birth, and later accidentally found the "Spirit Turtle Negative Book" in Luonan County, Henan Province, that is, there was a spirit turtle with many words on it.
After learning these words, Cangjie could suddenly feel the changes in the heavens and the earth, and he could observe astronomy on the top and feel the aura of the mountains and rivers on the bottom, and then he created words.
After Cangjie created the writing, the people cheered and even touched the heavens. The rice fell like rain, and the ghosts and monsters cried uncontrollably. This incident is recorded in the "Huainanzi" that "the sky rains and millet, and the ghosts cry at night".
Why does Cangjie's creation of words cause ghosts to cry? The reason is actually very simple, that is, Cangjie's creation of characters is a great initiative of mankind, ghosts and gods and the like have never thought of the existence of such a big god in the human world, this kind of credit was actually preempted by humans, so they cried loudly.
Although this record is a story made up by later generations to highlight the greatness of Cangjie, it is intended to express the great deeds of Cangjie. This also shows that the mainland actually had the birth of words as early as four thousand years ago, and the initiative of creating words has also become a legendary story of the earth-shattering ghost gods.
Cangjie is known as the ancestor of the invention of Chinese characters, because of the existence of writing, China officially moved from a barbaric society to a civilized society, and this change is of cross-era significance for human beings.
Cangjie's hieroglyphs had such an impact on later generations that the later Xia-Shang-Zhou dynasties used his script without any changes. It was not until the beginning of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period that a unified and normative writing appeared in writing.
It can be said that the Chinese characters we use now also depend on Cangjie's creation of characters, he is the real "wise man" in the history of mainland Chinese characters, and the development of human civilization has moved towards a new era because of him.