Writing

=** Writing in Bronze Age China **=

Writing began in China as a tool for record-keeping, and was later developed for divination and occult.


Current theories and evidence pinpoints that the first emergence of Chinese writing in the East Coast between the Late Neolithic and the early Bronze (aka Dynastic) periods. The culture which occupied this area was characterized by a high degree of social organization, particularly in pottery production--parts of their pots were made separately and later assembled together. It could be that this "standardization" led to the necessity of recording dimension of pots as well as the number of pots produced, thus it became advantageous to create a systematic way of recording number and objects. The precursor to Chinese writing is still poorly understood. In many pots, jades, and bronzes ranging from the late third millenium BC to as late as Shang and Zhou Dynasties, bird and sun motifs appear together, often joined, and possibly can be read as "yang niao," or "sun birds", the name of a local eastern Yi group which had settled in the Lower Yangtze valley. This very common reference could be an example of one of the precursors to Chinese writing.

Since it's not entirely set in stone, whatever the obscure initial phase of written Chinese was, its appearance during the Shang Dynasty shows sign of a very complex writing system. Phoneticism was all over the place, in the form of the "rebus principle," which means many words with the same sound can be, and were, written with the same sign. A most common example in English is to use pictures of a bee and a leaf to write 'belief.' This leads to ambiguity in written text, and is a bit more complicated with the Chinese language. To alleviate the ambiguity, scribes started to attach additional symbols to clarify the meaning; in modern Chinese, these signs are called "radicals". Also, the phonetic spelling of words was to be standardized, so that--while previously two signs represented the same sound--only one of them continued to be used while the other slowly became obsolete.

From the early Zhou Dynasty to early Warring States period, the majority of writing that has been unearthed from the Bronze Age of China has been in the form of bronze inscriptions. As a result, it is common to refer to the variety of scripts of this period as "bronze script," even though there is no single such script. It's an all-encompassing term. This umbrella of a category usually includes bronze inscriptions of the preceding Shang (商) Dynasty as well. Even among this loose terminology is script that wasn't inscribed in bronze at all; due to the time period, however, it is still labelled as "bronze script". The earliest recognizable examples of written Chinese date from 1500-950 BCE (falling exactly in the Shang Dynasty).

In general, there are great differences between the highly pictorial Shang symbols (also known as identificational) characters on bronzes, more typical Shang bronze graphs, writing on bronzes from the middle of the Zhou Dynasty, and those written through the late Zhou to Qin, Han, and other subsequent period bronzes. Even further studied, the writing in each region gradually evolved in very different directions, such that the script styles in the Warring States of Chu, Qin, and the eastern regions, for instance, were strikingly divergent. If needed to be more precise, more specific references may be made to a certain script by naming it after one of the periods, areas, or script styles: Western Zhou bronze script, seal script, et cetera. Despite the major differences, it is all still generally labelled "bronze script" amongst scholars, and I will continue to do so throughout my entire report.

Included in this is a subcategory called oracle bone script ( jiaguwen//)//. This refers to the ancient Chinese characters found on bones used by oracles; these bones tend to be animal bones or turtle shells that specifically are used in divination. Because of this use of shells alongside the bones, it's sometimes also called "shell and bone script". The discovery of the oracle bones in China goes back to 1899, when a scholarly man from Peking named Wang Yirong was prescribed a remedy containing "dragon bones" for his illness. "Dragon bones" were widely used in Chinese medicine during that time, and usually refer to the fossils of dead animals. The man noticed some carvings that looked like a kind of writing on the bones that he had acquired from the local pharmacy; this find led eventually to the discovery of Anyang, the last capital of Shang Dynasty where archeologists have found an enormous amount of these carved bones. And even after these discoveries, any more "oracle bones" were found in the north of Henan province.

Most of the things written and recorded used in this style take note of the pyromantic divinations, or gaining insight through ritual of fire. In ancient China, pyromancy was practiced in the Neolithic period and Shang and Zhou Dynasties in the form of burning or heating their oracle bones--usually the scapulae (shoulder blades) of oxen or the previously-mentioned turtle shells--to produce cracks which were then read as portents. Inscriptions on such oracle bones from the late Shang Dynasty are important, as the earliest significant corpus of written Chinese ever found. It appears that while divination and ritual was happening far before writing had been incorporated, including written text became a constant once it had been started; this expression became an aide for the divinations themselves. Most of these divinations referred in general to hunting, warfare, weather, religious practices, selection of auspicious days for ceremonies, etc.

It is generally well-known within the studies of this script that the Shang people also wrote with your classic brush and ink combination, as brush-written symbols have been found on a number of pottery, bone and shell, jade, and quite a few other stone items. There is also evidence that they wrote on bamboo (or wooden) books, just like those which have been found from the late Zhou and Han periods; the graphs for a writing brush (聿) and bamboo book (冊) are present in oracle bone script. Since it is far easier to write with a brush than to do so with a stylus in wet clay, it is generally assumed that the style and structure of Shang graphs on bamboo were similar to those on the bronze pieces, and also that the majority of writing occurred with a brush on such books. Additional support for this idea includes the reorientation of some of the symbols and graphs, by turning them 90 degrees as if to better fit on tall, narrow slats; this style must have developed on bamboo or wood slat books and then carried over to the oracle bone script. To add onto this, the writing of glyphs in vertical columns, from top to bottom, is--for the most part--carried over from the bamboo books to the inscriptions in oracle bone. In some cases, lines are written horizontally so as to match the text to divinatory cracks, or columns of text rotate a halfway 90 degrees in mid-stream, but these are exceptions to the normal pattern of writing. Inscriptions were never read bottom to top. The vertical columns of text in Chinese writing are traditionally ordered from right to left; this pattern is found on bronze inscriptions from the Shang dynasty and then onward. Oracle bone inscriptions, however, are often arranged so that the columns begin near the centerline of the shell or bone, and then move toward the edge, such that the two sides are ordered in mirror-image sort of fashion.

To summarize: characters on ancient Chinese bronze inscriptions were arranged in vertical columns, written top to bottom, in a fashion thought to have been influenced by the bamboo books, which are believed to have been the main medium for writing in the Shāng and Zhou Dynasties. The very narrow, vertical bamboo slats of these books were not suitable for writing wide characters, and so a number of graphs were rotated the 90 degrees that one can also see done in mid-stream; this style then carried over to the Shang and Zhou oracle bones and bronzes.

Over ten thousand (10,000) inscribed bronze pieces have been recovered, which date to before even the Qin Dynasty; roughly a quarter of them date to the Shang and the rest of the three-quarters date to the Zhou Dynasty. These have been variously and periodically unearthed even ever since their creation, and have been systematically collected, studied, researched, and documented since at least the Song Dynasty. The inscriptions tend to grow in length over time, from only one to six characters for the earlier Shang examples, to forty or so characters in the longest, late-Shang cases, and frequently a hundred or more on Zhou bronzes. The longest found has up to around five-hundred (500). Recently, archaeologists in China have uncovered many, many fragments of neolithic pottery, the oldest of which date from about 4800 BCE, inscribed with symbols which could be a form of writing. None of these symbols resemble any of the Shang characters, though, and the likelihood of deciphering them is slim to none, given the scarcity of material able to be analyzed.

Seal script (written 篆书 in Chinese) is another ancient style of Chinese calligraphy. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty script, or what was the first generation of "bronze script", arising in the Warring State of Qin. The Qin variant of seal script became the standard and was adopted as the formal script for all of China in the Qin Dynasty. It was still widely used for decorative engraving, seals, name chops, and signets in the Han Dynasty. Ever since, its predominant use has been primarily in seals, hence what we now know as its English name. The literal translation of its Chinese name, zhuanshu, is "decorative engraving script," because by the time this name had been coined in the Han Dynasty, its role had been reduced to exactly what the name said rather than as the main script of the day. For purposes of my report, it is still considered under that great umbrella of "bronze script", but is the first step toward its later witing evolution.

A major historical event in the origination of Chinese script is the standardization of writing by the First Emperor of Qin, the one who unified China in 221 BCE. Before that particular time, each of the many states in China had been developing their own style and peculiarities which meant that--although mutually understandable--the scripts had many deviations. The First Emperor introduced the Qin script as the official writing and, from there on, all the unified states had to use it in their daily lives. The calligraphic style of this period is the "clerical script" or "lishu" which is easily readable today, even to the generally uneducated.

= Bibliography =

Boltz, William G. "Early Chinese Writing." (1986) http://www.jstor.org/pss/124705

Falkenhausen, L. Von. "On the historiographical orientation of Chinese archaeology." (1993) http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/Ant/067/0839/Ant0670839.pdf

Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. __Ancient China and its Anthropological Significance__. (1991) http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=uc3ZokKnaQYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA155&dq=bronze+age+china+writing&ots=W58O3M-k8R&sig=IrG1ANxxxc0v-dJykE0pRl9fdUE

Lewis, Mark Edward. __Writing and Authority in Early China__. (1999) http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rZT87hTwZRwC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=bronze+age+china+writing&ots=Oiln_Dm0LS&sig=Vbqi3vULsr8pTwaNsohXASehHRY

Postgate, N. Wang, T. Wilkinson, T. "Evidence for early writing: utilitarian or ceremonial?" (1995) http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/Ant/069/0459/Ant0690459.pdf Zhimin, An. "Archaeological research on neolithic China" (1988) http://www.jstor.org/pss/2743616