The writing of ancient China, which will be briefly discussed in the article, is an ancient phenomenon that has been developing for many millennia and continues to take place in the modern world. The writings of other civilizations that arose in ancient times have long lost their existence. And only the Chinese writing system was able to adapt to the dynamic conditions of the formation of civilization and become a suitable way for the Chinese to transmit information. What was written 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 emergence of Chinese writing in the era of Shen Nun and Fu Xi
The history of Chinese writing began 1500 years BC. e. Ancient myths connect its occurrence with the names of the ancient emperors Shen Nun and Fu Xi. Then, for the transmission of important messages, a system of trigrams was invented, which is a combination of lines of different lengths. So the first characters appeared, denoting individual objects. In fact, there were only two characters - a whole and broken line. Their various unique combinations were linked together in trigrams.
There were eight trigrams that have a specific meaning and vary depending on what needs to be reflected in the letter. They could be combined in pairs and form 64 hexagrams, which formed a couplet expressing a specific event. The meaning of these couplets was deciphered by the seer. This was the first character encoding system that spawned the foundations of Chinese writing, made it clear to the Chinese that combinations of different characters could be used to record messages. It was important to create a system so that each character has a specific meaning.
The Evolution of the Letter of Ancient China under Emperor Huang Di
The next step in the history of Chinese writing was taken during the reign of Emperor Huang Di. Then his court Tsang Jie, examining the bird’s footprints on the river bank, came to the conclusion that each item can be identified with a certain unique sign. So 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 meant "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 data from myths and legends of ancient China. The fact is that according to these data, the emperor and his subjects lived in the XXVI century BC. e. Adherents of this theory believe that Tsang Jie did not lay the foundations of writing, but improved the system that existed before.
Theory of development of writing based on archeology data
According to archaeologists, the origin and development of writing in China leads its history from images on ancient pottery vessels. These vessels belong to the Neolithic era of the country's development. Images were in the form of complex combinations of lines of different lengths. Perhaps these combinations express the first ancient numbers.
Various variations in the composition and graphics of the images suggest that each Neolithic culture had its own written language. A special role in the development of Chinese writing has the foundations laid in the town of Davenkou. Their symbols and signs are more complex in comparison with analogues of later cultures. At their core, 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 in the parking lot of Wucheng, Jiangxi Province. This circumstance is considered by historians as the appearance of the first ancient 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 manual notches to intricate hieroglyphs made with stamps. Gradually, the simplest images, having nothing to do with the language, turned into real letter characters.
There came a period of development of society when it became necessary to clearly convey your thoughts. The letter appeared as a way of transmitting and storing information necessary at this stage of the development of civilization.
Guns
The first writing tool in ancient China was a sharp object with which lines were applied. In order for them to appear on the material on which they are applied, its surface had to be smooth and soft enough. In pottery for this purpose clay was used. Animal bones and shells of turtles 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 true linguistic units.
Yin letter
The city of Yin was the capital of the Shang dynasty until 1122 BC. e. During his excavations, many inscriptions on the bones were found, which indicate the active development of writing in this period. The following story proves the same thing.
As a medicine in Chinese pharmacies in those days, dragon bones were sold, which are actually fragments of the bones of various mammals. They were marked with certain symbols. These bones were a frequent find during excavation, people were afraid of them and considered dragon. Enterprising merchants have found beneficial use of these bones: they endowed them with miraculous properties and sales in pharmacies. A study of the inscriptions on these objects showed that these were ancient fortunetelling, predictions and communication with spirits. By the dates and names contained on the bones, it was possible to restore the course of historical events in China in those days.
The symbols in the inscriptions on the vessels and bells made of bronze were also the subject of close attention of those times. With the help of them, the signs of the Yin script were reconstructed, compared with modern ones.
Modern paleographers have made a publication containing Yin inscriptions, which is replenished as we study the issue of Yin script and find new objects of study. 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 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 true. The writing of the South Chinese people is similar to the nose described above. The system was more complex in which each character corresponds to a specific sound. A study of the Yin written language made it clear that the first steps in this direction were already taken at that time.
Since the Chinese language has many equally sounding words, two-syllable and three-syllable words were created to distinguish their meanings. They are present in Chinese now. When reading a text in Chinese, a person should distinguish the meaning of polysyllabic words, relying mainly on his intuition and knowledge.
In Yin script, the designation of one object was expressed by pictograms. Ideograms, consisting of several pictograms, indicated a specific 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 of ideograms is also obvious. For example, numbers were written using horizontal lines, the middle of objects was indicated by a circle divided in half, to express the verb “listen”, a combination of the notation “ear” and “door” was used.
In an effort to best express certain actions, the writer applied more dashes to the image, detailing it.
In the Yin script, the hieroglyph was perceived as a single whole and was not divided into separate graphic components. So, for example, the signs symbolizing the cultivation of the land were drawings of a man with an agricultural tool in his hands and were not graphically divided into a tool and a person.
The writing of ancient China (which we discuss briefly in the article) is inextricably linked with the visual arts and 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 strong points.
Zhou letter
The first material sources of evidence for the existence of the Zhou script were vessels and bronze bells for sacrifices and other rites. The inscriptions on these sources explained the essence of the process, they were a kind of document confirming certain rights and authorities. The inscriptions on the bells and vessels were made in the same language as the inscriptions on the bones. However, subsequently, over the millennium of the reign of the Zhou empire, language and writing changed a lot. Territorial dialects, different variants of designating the same subject in different places became noticeable. The development of writing proceeded at that time at an intense pace, as competition between individual provinces appeared. The most convenient and progressive forms of signs survived and became pan-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 successive hieroglyphs. Perhaps, 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 by the duration of the 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 in which part of the phrase the character is. At the beginning of the sentence, as a rule, is the subject, after it is the predicate, then there is addition and circumstance.
The plural was expressed using the characters "one hundred" or "all." By the way, in modern Chinese, one of the ways to designate 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, did not allow a dialectical split to occur.
Hieroglyphics in terms of attitude to various languages are the most universal. They can express information in any language.
Another feature of hieroglyphs is that one character may 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 in different ways, in relation to the area in which it is used. The "genre" of reading is also different; it can be colloquial and literary. The flexibility in the use of hieroglyphs gives a significant impetus to the development of the language and written language of China. Time frames and restrictions are erased when reading texts, understanding is enhanced, and information perception is facilitated.
Literature of Ancient China
The literature of ancient China is the oldest in the world. The hieroglyphs retain the shadow of the primordial and unchanging Chinese culture, its spirituality and wealth. 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 12-7 centuries. BC e. Poems were considered a combination of words and emotional impulse. A man sought to turn his feelings, feelings, delights and fears into words and, having released them into the world, purify his soul.
The first poetic collection of Ancient China is the “Book of Songs”. It contains songs of various genres. Along with spells and totems, there are funeral and even labor ones. In total, the collection contains about 300 different verses, songs and hymns collected by Confucius. The forbidden topic, according to Confucian censorship, was songs about death, old age and disease, as well as divine beings. The songs have repeating expressions and parallelisms.
Another unusual South Chinese poetry collection is Chu Stanzas. On the contrary, it contains poems with elements of fiction, about magic, unusual creatures, unearthly worlds.
The Tang Age is the time of great ancient Chinese poets such as Li Bo, Meng Khaozhan, Du Fu and Wang Wei. In general, during this period in Ancient China, there were about 2000 famous poets. The characteristic features of Tang poetry were the visibility and transparency of images, luminosity and clarity of presentation of thoughts. In his lyrics, Wang Wei was guided by the beauty of nature, his inspiration was boundless sea expanses and mountain valleys. Li Bo promoted the issue of privacy, inner freedom, and the absence of restrictions.
Poetry Tsy - a genre of the Song era, in which lines and words were selected to a specific melody and performed to music. These verses stood out in a separate literary genre only after some time.
Prose of ancient china
Chinese prose began with a presentation of historical events and facts. Buddhism and the works of Indian narrators had a great influence on it. No wonder the first genre of Chinese prose was Chuanqi - stories of miracles. The first collection of ancient Chinese prose was "Notes on the search for the spirits of Gan Bao," written in the 4th century. The latest and at the same time the most successful - "Liao Zhai's Tales of the Miracles of Pu Sung Ling," collected in the 17th century.
The Ming period is considered the peak of the development of ancient Chinese prose. This is a time of fascinating democratic tales of huaben, which are so fond of people of various layers for their sincerity, truthfulness and fascination.
In the 15th century, he began his ascent to the literary Olympus genre of the novel. In Ancient China, the following areas of the genre stood out: historical, adventure, everyday, critical, love and fantastic.
Due to the lack of a theory of anthropocentrism in the Chinese consciousness, there are no epics in the literature of Ancient China . The beautiful thing in the understanding of the Chinese is harmony, based on the interaction of nature and society, this concept is in no way connected with the personality of an individual person.
Conclusion
According to the Chinese point of view, the emergence of writing in China was a consequence of the transformation of the essence of objects and images, their shadows and traces, changes in being, which reveals the meaning of all objects. This is the power of the interaction of the mind, fantasy and cognition, a factor in the unity of natural phenomena and cultural values. The hieroglyphic writing of China is an extremely stable and adaptable phenomenon. She went a long, multi-stage development path and yet retained its originality and uniqueness. She is of great interest to study. To understand what kind of writing was in China, it is necessary to study the history and culture of the country, get acquainted with the illustrations of Ancient China. The written language in them is often displayed, in addition, the features, life and traditions of the country are clearly conveyed.