The earliest Chinese script is the oracle bone script of the late Yin Shang period, because the oracle bone is a hieroglyph, the image of an object, plus it is carved with a turtle shell and a cow bone, as a buci, the priest uses the fire to see the crack to guess the occurrence of something, or the name of a certain ghost god, the main use is "sacrifice and divination", the ancestor of the sacrifice is the name of some ghost gods. Therefore, the oracle bones excavated by modern archaeologists can only decipher one-third, and two-thirds cannot be deciphered. The reason is that the ancient people lived in the environment, surrounded by primitive forests and wilderness, people's thinking stayed in the fear of wild beasts or the fear of ghosts and gods, which was incompatible with the thinking of modern people.
The Zhou Yi created by Ji Chang, the King of Zhou Wen in the late Yin Shang Dynasty, has 384 gua and 64 yao, which are also used for "sacrifice and divination", except that the oracle bones are baked with fire to see the cracks, and the Zhou Yi is measured by gua. Used to worship ancestors and divinate the future. For example: 1. Wang Hai lost cattle and sheep to The country, and the ancestor of Yin Ancestor Wang Hai lost the cattle and sheep to the Country of Yi and was besieged, but there was no danger. 卦六三爻辞. 2. Emperor Yi returned to his sister, and Emperor Yin married his two daughters to King Wen of Zhou, auspicious, and zi.
Yin Shang and Western Zhou and Eastern Zhou all had bronze ware, and bronze ware as a ceremonial vessel was also used to sacrifice ancestors. The inscription on the bronze, the Zhong Ding Wen (金文), is engraved on the bronze. The most obvious example is the Middle Western Zhou Dynasty "Sui Gong Yu", which has the name of Dayu engraved on it, indicating that the ancestors of Western Zhou were Dayu, and they were descendants of the Yanhuang surname Ji and the surname Jiang. These seal inscriptions perished in the Western Zhou Dynasty, and at the beginning of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, some king Ping of Zhou moved east to Luoyang, and the priests and wushi spread these seal inscriptions, and the princely states only recognized these seal inscriptions.
The whole Spring and Autumn Period is a culture of sacrifice, although Confucius's Confucianism is differentiated from the Zhou Li's "Wu Bu Divination Ritual" and so on, but Confucius "said but did not do, words must be good", indicating that Confucius did not write in the late Spring and Autumn Period. In the early Warring States period, the Three Branches of the Jin Dynasty of Wei appeared in the Bamboo Book Chronicle, which was written in bamboo, and began to have written words. But these seal characters are written on bamboo with a brush, and the words are like gold, and not much can be preserved. Qin Shi Huang unified China and also unified the writing, that is, Li Si's Qin Xiaohuan. These Qin Xiaozhuan are no different from the seal characters of various countries, indicating that these words will not be circulated for too long.
After Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty exalted Confucianism, the great Confucian Dong Zhongshu opened the "Prince's Court" in various counties, laying the foundation for the promotion of Confucianism and the popularization of writing. However, at that time, lishu was used, which developed the seal script (hieroglyph) from the circle to the square, and the writing form was also easy to identify. With the promotion of Lishu, a large number of Confucian scriptures have followed, and a large number of counterfeit Confucian classics have emerged, which is not similar here. The Two Han Dynasties, the Three Kingdoms, the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and the Southern and Northern Dynasties all used lishu. In the Northern Wei Dynasty, Xianbei Tuoba changed the Lishu to Weishu (Chinese characters), and in the Tang Dynasty, the Xianbei people changed the Weishu to Kaishu (Chinese characters), which is the traditional Chinese characters we use now.
The Eastern Han Dynasty paper was invented, and by the time of the Two Jin Dynasties, it began to formally write on paper (Luoyang paper gui occurred in the Eastern Jin Dynasty), and abandoned bamboo. In the Tang Dynasty, there were engravings and printing, and during the heyday of the Taoism and Buddhism, the Tao Te Ching and the Diamond Sutra were published in large quantities. In the Northern Song Dynasty, there was movable type printing, and at that time, two percent of people mastered Chinese characters. The Ming and Qing dynasties have always used the Calligraphy left over from the Tang Dynasty and the Song script (Chinese characters) of the Northern Song Dynasty, using the Wen dialect and the Bagu script, and since the characters printed on the books are written vertically, there is no punctuation.
In the Republic of China period, Chinese characters began to develop into simplified characters, and the language was popularized, abandoning the wen yan and the eight strands of the text, and it was also written horizontally, and the punctuation of the Western language was introduced. After liberation, the character was comprehensively reformed, in 1956 Chinese characters (traditional characters) were changed to simplified characters, all the writing language was consistent with the spoken language, the article became a popular language, the pinyin letters of the text were born, the punctuation marks should conform to the paragraphs of the article, and a new and standard new article was displayed in front of the Chinese, that is, the "Mao Zedong Anthology"!