More than 3,000 years ago, China mainly used brushes to write: it was not a "knife pen"

The oracle bone inscriptions discovered in the Yin Ruins in Anyang a hundred years ago uncovered the biggest mystery of Chinese civilization and made the legendary Shang Dynasty a believed history. However, the results of research on Yin Ruins show that more than 3,000 years ago, China mainly used brushes rather than "knife pens" to write.

Oracle bone inscriptions are the only sword writing in the world that is "alive" to this day. They are written on turtle shells and animal bones, recording the divination process of the Yin people. So far, about 150,000 carved oracle bones have been unearthed in the Yin Ruins, containing more than 5000 single words and more than 100,000 oracle inscriptions. They are precious materials for studying the politics, economy, culture, astronomy, meteorology and other aspects of the Shang Dynasty.

"Although what we can see today is oracle bone inscriptions, there is sufficient data to show that daily writing in the Shang Dynasty was not 'knife and pen literals', but the same as the words written on bamboo slips or wood chips after the Qin and Han Dynasties." Tang Jigen, director of the Anyang Workstation of the Institute of Archaeology, China Academy of Social Sciences, said.

"The word 'book' in oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions is in the shape of strings of bamboo or wooden slips. The original meaning of 'book' can be understood as recording and preserving archives." Tang Jigen said,"Bamboo strips are strung together with ropes to make bamboo slips, and the existence of bamboo slips undoubtedly indicates that the daily writing of Shang Dynasty is calligraphy." Click to go to next page Click to go to next page

"The characters 'history' and 'bi' in oracle bone inscriptions are all shaped like writing with your hand rather than grasping a knife with your hand." he said.

The archaeological team once found a Shang Dynasty jade zhang with brush writing in a noble tomb in the late Yin Ruins; and the individual characters on some oracle bones themselves were written rather than engraved.

"Words written with brushes have been found on a small number of oracle bone inscriptions and jade and stone tools in the Yin Ruins. They directly proved that the daily writing of the Shang people was completed with brushes." Tang Jigen said.

He introduced that the inscriptions on the bronzes were cast through pottery models. The words on the inscription pattern are first written with a brush and then carved according to the strokes. In this way, the forged inscriptions are exactly the same as the original written brush characters, with full meaning.

"In the inscriptions on bronzes, you can see a large number of words with round strokes or strokes, and some words even have Teton." he said.

Tang Jigen showed some rubbings extracted from the inscriptions on bronzes in Yin Ruins. The words on the rubbings indeed retained the traces of calligraphy. For example, the word "Hao" in "Fu Hao", the word "Lu" in "Zuding Lu", and the word "Yi" all retain the round brush style that can only be left behind by writing brushes, while the word "Fu Xin" clearly shows the "stroke" that can only be written by writing brushes.

In addition to oracle bone inscriptions and gold inscriptions, a large number of pottery inscriptions were also found in the Yin Ruins, some of which were written on pottery with brushes.

Tang Jigen said that unlike the pottery inscriptions usually carved on the mouth, shoulders and abdomen of pottery, the pottery inscriptions written are all on the inner wall of pottery, and the contents mainly include numbers, directions, ethnic names, people's names, branches, divination, records, etc.

Judging from the unearthed written data from archaeological excavations, official writing existed in China at least during the Xia Dynasty. For example, on a flat pottery pot found at the Taosi site in Xiangfen, Shanxi Province, the character "Wen" written in a brush and red script was found. During the Yin and Shang Dynasties, there were many categories of text carriers. In addition to writing on simple books with brushes, characters were also engraved on turtle shells and animal bones, pottery, jade, and pottery cast on bronzes. It is the earliest mature writing found in China so far.

"There is too much evidence to show that the daily writing of the Shang people is brush writing. Unfortunately, due to the writing materials, the brush characters cannot be preserved for a long time. Only the oracle bone inscriptions engraved on the hard oracle bones have been preserved, witnessing the existence of the Shang Dynasty."