When was the era of the creation of Chinese characters?

Regarding the origin of Chinese characters, there are various sayings in ancient Chinese literature, such as "knotted rope", "gossip", "pictures", "book deeds", etc., and the legend of the Yellow Emperor's historian Cangjie making characters is also widely recorded in ancient books. Modern scholars believe that a systematic writing tool cannot be created entirely by a single person, and that Cangjie, if there is one, should be the compiler or promulgator of the text. The earliest carved symbols are more than 8,000 years ago In recent decades, the Chinese archaeological community has released a series of excavated materials related to the origin of Chinese characters earlier than the Yinxu oracle bone inscription.

These materials mainly refer to the carved or painted symbols that appeared on pottery in the late primitive society and the early historical society, and also include a small number of symbols engraved on oracle bones, jade, stone tools, etc. It can be said that together they provide a new basis for explaining the origin of Chinese characters.

Chinese characters have undergone more than 6,000 years of change, and their evolution process is as follows:

Oracle bone inscription, golden inscription, small seal, official script, regular script, line script.

It was the era of the Yellow Emperor, 5,000 years ago.

An oracle bone inscription dating back to the Shang Dynasty around 1300 BC.

During the reign of the Yellow Emperor, an invention called Cangjie was made.

The Chinese character code should be produced in ancient times in the Hong Dynasty, and the "Historical Records" record is Cangjie to create words, so to speak, it should be in the Huang Di period, which has been 5000 years ago.

In the Song Dynasty, with the development of printing, what was the perfection and development of Chinese characters? It is the uneven thickness of the lines in the early stage that becomes uniform and soft, and the lines drawn with the real thing are very simple and vivid; It is standardized, the font structure tends to be neat, and gradually leaves the original shape of **, laying the foundation of square characters. There is ample documentation that Chinese characters, or Chinese characters, were produced in the late Yin Shang period in the 14th century BC.

At this time, a preliminary stereotype, the oracle bone inscription, was formed. The oracle bone script is both hieroglyphic and phonetic. To this day, there are still some hieroglyphs that resemble pictures in Chinese characters, which are very vivid in the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the development of Chinese characters evolved into the Great Seal.

Li Si, the prime minister of the <> Qin Dynasty, simplified the large seal and changed it to a small seal. In addition to simplifying the shape of the large seal, the small seal has reached a perfect level of lines and standardization, almost completely detached from **, and has become a neat, harmonious and beautiful square font. However, the small seal also has its own fundamental drawback, that is, its lines are very inconvenient to write with a pen, so almost at the same time, it also produces an official body that spreads the shape to the sides, making it a flat square.

The initial stage of the development of Chinese characters has changed for more than 6,000 years. Its evolution process is: from oracle bone script, golden script, small seal, li, regular script, line script, cursive script, the above seven kinds of "jia jin seal, li, cursive" fonts are collectively called "seven-body Chinese characters".

There is ample literature to prove that the appearance of Chinese characters was in the late Yin Shang period in the 14th century BC, when a preliminary stereotyped Zheng imitation of the original character was formed, that is, the oracle bone inscription. The oracle bone inscription is both a large dismantling script and a pinyin script. To this day, there are still some hieroglyphs, such as Chinese characters**, which are very vivid.

It was an ancient time. If people want to survive, they have to live together, cooperate with each other, work together, live together. In the process of people's labor and cooperation, in order to facilitate communication, human beings began to have language.

At first, people's language was only a way of expressing a certain meaning through words. However, this can only facilitate communication between people to a limited extent. With the expansion of people's communication range and the enrichment of shouting and gesturing communication content, the original spoken language has exposed many defects.

The spoken words disappear as soon as they are finished and cannot be saved or recorded.

1. From the oracle bone inscriptions engraved on tortoise shells and animal bones in the Shang Dynasty, to the golden inscriptions carved on bronzes in the Shang and Zhou dynasties, to the large seals that evolved in the later years of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and then to the small seals that appeared in the writing reform after Qin Shi Huang unified the six countries.

2. Later, the small seal was gradually replaced by the more convenient and simplified official script, which later evolved into cursive script, and the regular script and cursive script that appeared at the same time. So far, Chinese characters have been stereotyped, and they are presented in front of the world together with China's brilliant civilization.

3. Since ancient times, China has a saying that "calligraphy and painting have the same origin", this is because the earliest text is pictures, and calligraphy and painting are like brothers, born from the same root, and there are many internal connections. The origin of Chinese characters is the original picture of the sedan chair, which primitive people used to express themselves in life.

From the ancient legend of Cangjie to the discovery of the oracle bone inscription more than 100 years ago, Chinese scholars have been committed to unraveling the mystery of the origin of Chinese characters.

Regarding the origin of Chinese characters, there are various sayings in ancient Chinese documents, such as "knotted rope", "gossip", "pictures", "book deeds", etc., and the legend of the Yellow Emperor's historian Cangjie making characters is also widely recorded in ancient books. Modern scholars believe that a systematic writing tool cannot be created entirely by a single person, and that if there is one, it should be the compiler or promulgator of the text.

Judging from the written materials unearthed from archaeological excavations, China already had a formal written language at least during the Yuxia period.

The Shang Dynasty script reed skin materials are mainly based on oracle bones and bronze ritual vessels used in Yinxu Bu, which are the earliest mature scripts found in China so far.

1. Chinese characters in the true sense of the word (i.e., the earliest oracle bone inscriptions) originated in the Yin Shang period in the 14th century BC.

2. The origin of Chinese characters.

Regarding the origin of Chinese characters, there are various sayings in ancient Chinese literature, such as "knotted rope", "gossip", "pictures", "book deeds", etc., and the legend of the Yellow Emperor's historian Cangjie making characters is also widely recorded in ancient books.

According to Chinese paleographers, the oracle bone inscription is "the earliest and relatively complete script that can be seen so far". It is already more complex, with more than 3,000 words found. "Oracle" is considered to be the first form of "kanji", and to this day, various fonts have been born.

3. Introduction to Oracle.

The oracle bone inscription is written or engraved in the late Shang Dynasty, and the text left on the tortoise shell and animal bones is mostly there"Divination", there are a few for"Memoirs"。Most of the oracle bone inscriptions conform to the principle of pictographic and ideographic character formation, and only 20% of the glyphs and sounds are written. Some of its characters are carved with knives, some are filled with cinnabar, and some are written directly in ink and calligraphy.

Because most of the characters are evolved from pictorial texts, the degree of pictogram is high, and there are many characters in one word, and the strokes are indefinite. This shows that Chinese writing was not yet unified during the Yin Shang period.

The origin of Chinese characters began with the ancient knotted rope chronicles, and slowly evolved into carving marks on wood or bamboo chips, and then to the eight trigrams. However, there are very few things that can be expressed through yin and yang, so people use various shapes to express their meanings by observing things between heaven and earth.

Thus the oracle was created. The oracle bone inscription evolved into a seal script in the pre-Qin period, which greatly increased the amount of characters, but the writing was too complicated, and in the Qin Dynasty, it gradually evolved into the Lihuai jujube script, which became the Chinese character we are familiar with today.