The writing of Ancient China, briefly discussed in the article, is an ancient phenomenon that has been developing over many millennia and continues to take place in the modern world. The writings of other civilizations that arose in ancient times have long since ceased to exist. And only Chinese writing managed to adapt to the dynamic conditions of the formation of civilization and become a suitable way for the Chinese to transmit information. What kind of writing was in China in ancient times? What stages of development did she go through? Briefly about the writing of China and will be discussed in the article.
The origin of Chinese writing in the era of Shen Nong and Fu Xi
The history of Chinese writing began 1500 BC. e. Ancient myths associate its origin with the names of the ancient emperors Shen Nong and Fu Xi. Then, to convey important messages, a system of trigrams was invented, which is a combinationlines of different lengths. This is how the first symbols denoting individual objects appeared. In fact, there were only two characters - a whole and an interrupted line. Their different unique combinations were linked together into trigrams.
There were eight trigrams that had a specific meaning and changed depending on what needs to be reflected in the letter. They could be combined in pairs and form 64 hexagrams, which were combined into a couplet expressing a certain event. The meaning of these couplets was deciphered by the seer. It was the first character encoding system that gave rise to the foundations of Chinese writing, made the Chinese understand that combinations of different characters could be used to write messages. It was important to create such a system that each symbol had a specific meaning.
Evolution of Chinese writing under Emperor Huang Di
The next step in the history of Chinese writing was made during the reign of Emperor Huang Di. Then his courtier Cang Jie, looking at bird tracks on the river bank, came to the conclusion that each item can be identified with a certain unique sign. This is how the first simple hieroglyphs appeared. In the future, this system began to improve, become more complicated, new hieroglyphs appeared, consisting of several elementary ones. The first hieroglyphs were called wen, which means "image". More complex characters were called zi. This word was translated as "born" and indicated their origin from several elementary signs.
There is another opinion about when writing appeared in China. It is also based on myths and legends from ancient China. The fact is that according to these data, the emperor and his subjects lived in the 26th century BC. e. Adherents of this theory believe that Cang Jie did not lay the foundations of writing, but improved the system that existed before.
Theory of the development of writing based on archeological data
According to archaeologists, the origin and development of writing in China traces its history to images on ancient ceramic vessels. These vessels belong to the Neolithic era of the development of the country. The images were in the form of complex combinations of lines of different lengths. Perhaps these combinations express the first ancient meanings of numerals.
Various variations in the composition and graphics of images indicate that each Neolithic culture had its own written language. The foundations laid in the town of Davenkou have a special role in the development of Chinese writing. Their symbols and signs are more complex than those of later cultures. In essence, they are images of various objects. According to supporters of this theory, it is these drawings that represent the embryos of future hieroglyphs and are the basis of Chinese writing.
At the beginning of the second millennium BC. e. there were pottery with symbols grouped in several pieces, they were found at the Wucheng site of Jiangxi province. This circumstance is considered by historians as the appearance of the firstancient inscriptions. Unfortunately, it was not possible to interpret them. Their study continues to this day. The evolution of inscriptions on ceramics is clearly visible: from the simplest hand-cuts to intricate hieroglyphs made with stamps. Gradually, the simplest images that had nothing to do with the language turned into real alphabetic characters.
A period of development of society has come when it became necessary to clearly convey one's thoughts. The letter appeared as a way of transmitting and storing information necessary at this stage in the development of civilization.
Writing tools
The first writing instrument in Ancient China was a sharp object used to draw lines. In order for them to appear on the material on which they are applied, its surface had to be even and sufficiently soft. In pottery, clay was used for these purposes. Animal bones and tortoise shells were also used. For better visibility, the scratched lines were filled with black dye. All of the above components are a certain stage in the formation of writing, form the environment for the emergence of real linguistic units.
Yin letter
Yin City was the capital of the Shang Dynasty until 1122 BC. e. During its excavations, many inscriptions on the bones were found, which testify to the active development of writing in this period. The following story proves the same.
As a medicine in Chinese pharmacies in those days, dragon bones were sold, in factwhich are bone fragments of various mammals. They were marked with certain symbols. These bones were often found during earthworks, people were afraid of them and considered them to be draconian. Entrepreneurial merchants found a profitable use for these bones: they endowed them with miraculous properties and sold them to pharmacies. The study of the inscriptions on these objects showed that they were ancient divination, predictions and communication with spirits. According to the dates and names contained on the bones, it was possible to restore the course of historical events in China at that time.
The symbols in the inscriptions on bronze vessels and bells were also the subject of close attention of those times. With the help of them, the signs of Yin writing were reconstructed and compared with modern ones.
Modern paleographers have made a publication containing Yin inscriptions, which is updated as the issue of Yin writing is studied and new objects of research are found. At the same time, specialists are more interested in deciphering the meanings of hieroglyphs. Their pronunciation is still an unexplored issue due to the impossibility of decoding the transcription.
Writing is a way of displaying information that transforms speech into visual images. In the writing of the ancient Mayan tribe, each symbol describes an event, and although there is no exact relationship between the sign and the action, the meaning of the described situation is always correct. The writing of the South Chinese people is similar to the nose described above. More complex was the system in which each sign corresponds to a certain sound. The study of Yin writing gave an understanding ofthat the first steps in this direction had already been taken in those days.
Since there are many similar-sounding words in Chinese, two-syllable and three-syllable words were created to differentiate their meanings. They are present in Chinese today. When reading a text in Chinese, a person must distinguish the meaning of polysyllabic words, relying mainly on their intuition and knowledge.
In Yin writing, the designation of one object was expressed by pictograms. Ideograms, consisting of several pictograms, denoted a certain process or action. It is clearly seen that ideograms are built from pictograms in the same way that sentences are built from words. The meaning that ideograms carry is also obvious. For example, numbers were written using horizontal lines, the middle of objects was indicated by a circle divided in half, a combination of the notation “ear” and “door” was used to express the verb “listen”.
In an effort to best express certain actions, the writer put more dashes on the image, detailing it.
In the Yin script, the hieroglyph was perceived as a whole and was not divided into separate graphic components. So, for example, signs symbolizing the cultivation of the land were drawings of a person with an agricultural tool in their hands and were not divided graphically into a tool and a person.
The writing of Ancient China (which we briefly discuss in the article) is inextricably linked with the fine arts and with the technique of drawing patterns and ornaments. It is based primarily on visual perception. As a result, calligraphy occupies a special place in Chinese, and grammar and syntax are not a strong point.
Zhou letter
The first material sources of evidence of the existence of Zhou writing are vessels and bells made of bronze for sacrifices and other rituals. The inscriptions on these sources explained the essence of the process, they were a kind of document confirming certain rights and powers. The inscriptions on the bells and vessels were made in the same language as the inscriptions on the bones. However, later, during the millennium of the Zhou Empire, the language and writing changed a lot. Territorial dialects, various variants of designation of the same subject in different localities became noticeable. The development of writing went at this time at an intensive pace, as there was competition between individual provinces. The most convenient and progressive forms of signs survived and became common to the empire. It was at this time that correspondence became widespread.
The appearance of the work "The Book of the Historiographer Zhou" belongs to this period. It contained 15 chapters with sequential hieroglyphs. Perhaps, already in those days, the foundations of future reference books and dictionaries were born.
Ancient Chinese characters
Hieroglyphs differ from letters in the complexity of writing and in the fact that there are a great many of them. In the writing and literature of ancient China, there were about fifty thousand of them. The appearance of a large number of hieroglyphic symbols was influenced byduration of existence and development of hieroglyphic writing. Another significant difference between hieroglyphs and alphabetic characters is that each hieroglyph, unlike a letter, has its own meaning.
The meaning of the word depends on the part of the phrase where the hieroglyph is. At the beginning of the sentence, as a rule, there is a subject, after it - a predicate, then there are an object and a circumstance.
The plural was expressed using the symbols "one hundred" or "all". By the way, in modern Chinese, one of the ways to denote the plural is to double nouns - writing two characters instead of one.
The preservation and development of hieroglyphic writing in China also has political reasons. It was a unifying social force, preventing a dialectical split from occurring.
Hieroglyphs in terms of relation to different languages are the most universal. They can express information in any language.
Another feature of hieroglyphs is that one character can have several readings depending on the language. One character can be pronounced in Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. In China itself, it can also be read differently, in relation to the area in which it is used. The “genre” of reading also differs; it can be colloquial and literary. Flexibility in the use of hieroglyphs gives a significant impetus to the development of the language and writing of China. The time frames and restrictions when reading texts are erased, understanding is enhanced, and the perception of information is facilitated.
Ancient Chinese Literature
Ancient Chinese literature is the oldest in the world. The hieroglyphs retain a shadow of the originality and immutability of Chinese culture, its spirituality and we alth. The works of literature of Ancient China are the property of world culture, although they are difficult for our perception in the same way as the Chinese language itself.
One of the first Chinese treatises is the Book of Changes.
For the Chinese, it has the same meaning as the Bible for us. An ancient legend says that the hexagrams from this book were written on the shell of a giant tortoise that once appeared on the surface of the sea.
Ancient Chinese poetry
Chinese poetry is the oldest on earth. It arose at the turn of the 12th-7th centuries. BC e. Poems were considered a combination of words and spiritual impulse. A person sought to turn his feelings, experiences, delights and fears into words and, releasing them into the world, purify his soul.
The first poetry collection of Ancient China is the "Book of Songs". It contains songs of various genres. Along with spells and totem ones, there are funeral and even labor spells. In total, the collection contains about 300 different poems, songs and hymns collected by Confucius. Forbidden topics, according to Confucian censorship, were songs about death, old age and disease, as well as divine beings. There are repetitive expressions and parallelisms in the songs.
Another unusual South Chinese collection of poetry is "Chus stanzas". On the contrary, it contains poems with elements of fantasy, about magic, unusual creatures, unearthly worlds.
The Tang era is the time of great ancient Chinese poets such as Li Bo, Meng Haoran, Du Fu and Wang Wei. In general, during this period in ancient China, there were about 2,000 famous poets. The characteristic features of Tang poetry were the visibility and transparency of images, lightness and clarity of presentation of thoughts. In his lyrics, Wang Wei focused on the beauty of nature, his inspiration was the boundless expanses of the sea and mountain valleys. Li Bo promoted the theme of seclusion, inner freedom, no restrictions.
Zi's poetry is a genre of the Song era, in which lines and words were selected to a certain melody and performed to the music. These poems emerged as a separate literary genre only after some time.
Prose of Ancient China
Chinese prose began with a presentation of historical events and facts. She was greatly influenced by Buddhism and the works of Indian narrators. No wonder the first genre of Chinese prose was chuanqi - stories about miracles. The first collection of ancient Chinese prose was Notes on the Search for the Spirits of Gan Bao, written in the 4th century BC. The latest and at the same time the most successful is Liao Zhai's Tales of the Miracles of Pu Song Ling, collected in the 17th century.
The Ming period is considered the peak of the development of ancient Chinese prose. This is the time of the fascinating democratic tales of the Huaben, which are so loved by people of all walks of life for their sincerity, truthfulness and fascination.
In the 15th century, the genre of the novel began its ascent to the literary Olympus. In ancient China, the following areas of the genre were distinguished:historical, adventure, everyday, critical, love and fantasy.
Due to the absence of the theory of anthropocentrism in the Chinese mind, there are no epics in the literature of Ancient China. The beautiful in the understanding of the Chinese is harmony based on the interaction of nature and society, this concept has nothing to do with the personality of an individual.
Conclusion
According to the point of view of the Chinese, the emergence of writing in China was the result of the transformation of the essence of objects and images, their shadows and traces, a change in being, which reveals the meaning of all objects. This is the power of the interaction of the mind, fantasy and cognition, the factor of the unity of natural phenomena and cultural values. Chinese hieroglyphic writing is an extremely stable and adaptable phenomenon. It has passed a long, multi-stage path of development and yet retained its originality and uniqueness. It is of great interest to study. To understand what kind of writing was in China, you need to study the history and culture of the country, familiarize yourself with the illustrations of Ancient China. Writing in them is often displayed, in addition, the features, life and traditions of the country are clearly conveyed.
