The history of Chinese characters is thousands of years long, so how did Chinese characters evolve?

The origin of Chinese characters, according to records is the Yellow Emperor's historian Cangjie created, according to legend he had four eyes, according to the shape of the sun and the moon, the footprints of birds and beasts, look at things, and use them in the heart, to create "pictograms" as the main feature of Chinese characters. In "Xunzi Unmasking", it was said: "There are many good books, and Cangjie is the only one."

From the above, it can be seen that Cangjie's expression is a bit absurd, so let's take a look at the evolution of real Chinese characters.

Most of the oracle bone inscriptions seen today are from the Shang Dynasty, and because they were written on turtle shells or bones, they are already the dust of history. The oracle bone script is a kind of hieroglyph with simple strokes, unfixed writing style, flexible strokes, directions and sides, and no unified glyphs.

Both the gold and oracle bone inscriptions are hieroglyphs, and the gold inscription is a text engraved on bronze objects, which is very easy to confuse with the oracle bone inscription. Compared with the oracle bone inscriptions, the shape and size of the golden characters are relatively consistent, and the arrangement is relatively neat. The small seal evolved from the Chinese characters of the Qin State during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, and compared with the oracle bone inscription and the golden inscription, it is simplified and very much, and the degree of reduction and pictogram is more neat.

Lishu is written in small seal cursive, the small seal bends and turns many times, and is directly straightened to Lishu, which greatly improves the writing efficiency of the text, and plays an absolute role in the standardization and stereotyping of Chinese characters. Lai evolved from Lishu, cursive is characterized by simple strokes, continuous strokes, fast writing, independent characters, not even writing. Regular script originated in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, writing characteristics:

The strokes are straight and the shape is square, and the largest school in the history of calligraphy is regular script.

Originated in the late Western Han Dynasty and the early Eastern Han Dynasty, the writing characteristics: upright and stable, into the eyes of three points, between regular script and cursive script. Chinese characters (oracle bone inscriptions) are one of the three oldest writing systems in the world.

The other two most famous are the ancient Egyptian scripts and the cuneiform scripts of the Sumerians of the Two Rivers Valley. However, the other hieroglyphs in the world have long since disappeared into the long river of history, but only Chinese characters have been preserved and used today with their infinite charm.

Chinese characters should have evolved slowly through the ancient oracle bone inscriptions, and they should have been done in a simple way. Then more and more abbreviated.

Chinese characters have slowly evolved from the oracle bone script at the beginning to the current script, and have gone through a lot of processes in the middle, going through the evolution of Xingshu, regular script, official script, small seal, cursive script and other characters, and finally developed to the current point.

The evolution of Chinese characters is very complicated, at the beginning of the oracle bone inscription appeared, later Qin Shi Huang unified the text, and then slowly formed a small seal, official script, line script, regular script, etc., until now it has become a very simple Chinese character.