The use of silk has also spanned a long time. From the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period to the Han Dynasty, silk and bamboo slips coexisted and developed, which together constituted the unique bamboo and silk culture in ancient China.
Although bamboo slips are cheap and simple to make, this bulky book is inconvenient to carry and the number of words in each slip is limited. Once the long book compiled into a book is scattered, it is "wrong". In addition, ribbons, hemp ropes and belts used in bamboo slips weaving are easy to be worn off and difficult to read. Using silk as writing material makes up for the shortage of bamboo slips.
Silk is a kind of silk fabric, which is light, soft and smooth, and its width is easy to be inked. The width of the width can be tailored according to the number of words. But also can be folded or rolled at will, and is easy to store and carry.
China is the first country in the world to raise silkworms and make silk products. Exquisite silk relics attached to bronzes were found in Shang ruins, indicating that there was relatively advanced silk weaving technology at that time. By the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, silk weaving technology had a higher development, and silk products were more common.
The earliest extant silk script was found in the Chu Tomb of Changsha Ammunition Depot, Hunan Province in September 1942. It is the only complete silk book in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. According to the analysis of unearthed silk fragments, there may be four original silk manuscripts. One of them is complete with pictures and texts, and there are two groups of words in opposite directions in the middle part, one is 13 lines, and the other is 8 lines. There are pictures and notes all around. The whole silk book * * * has more than 900 words, with an inner circle and an outer circle, and numerous decorations.
In addition, the silk book of the magazine is painted with color images and similar inscriptions, and the statue of 12 is painted around it, symbolizing1February. This is an early relic in the illustrations of ancient books, and its influence on later generations is self-evident.
Archaeologists also found a large number of silk fabrics in the tombs of the Warring States Period in Jiangling, Hubei Province, including silk, yarn, Luo, brocade and so on. Its weaving quality, pattern design and variety are various, and the brocade pattern is well preserved, which is amazing.
This shows that the ancients had written on silk books at least in the Spring and Autumn Period. Whenever there are commemorative and important events, many books are in silk, and cheap and easy-to-get simplified books are used in the form of ordinary silk. Generally, an article is a paragraph, and each paragraph is stacked or rolled into a bundle, which is called "a volume". The so-called "quantity" in today's book comes from this. Later, it was developed to wrap a wooden shaft at the lower or left end of the silk as a support, which was crisp and easy to find. Silk book is actually the predecessor of scroll dress and also a kind of scroll dress. From the analysis of unearthed silk books, the contents of silk books can be roughly divided into three types: letters, paintings and books.
Many silk paintings have been unearthed in China. For example, a silk painting unearthed from the Chu tomb in Changsha during the Warring States Period, with celebrities such as Emperor Yan, Zhu Rong and Emperor Jun, is an important figure in ancient legends, or a relative or descendant of the Yellow Emperor. There are mysterious images around the characters, such as trees, birds and beasts, and grotesque figures. The names of the four seasons are drawn in four colors: cyan, vermilion, black and white. There are 12 images around the painting, representing 12 months, and each image is betting on the name, function and the month that should be avoided.
Another Chu tomb in Changsha also found a silk painting of a figure, which was originally stored in a lacquer coffin with other pottery figurines. Draw a woman with a thin waist on silk, which is khaki. The woman stood on the left, with a long skirt sweeping the floor, a bun behind her head and a crown on her head. In the picture, the woman crosses her hands and prays, with a bird and an animal on her head. It is said that birds represent the phoenix, and animals are real materials. Phoenix is a symbol of life, marriage and happiness, while Kui represents death, hunger and evil, and Feng Kui symbolizes the struggle between life and death.
There is also a silk painting of Yulong figure, which is made of fine silk and coated with gold powder and white powder. There is a man in the picture, holding the reins and riding a dragon. There is a crane standing on the dragon's tail, holding its head high, and there is a carp in the lower corner of the picture. This silk painting reflects the immortal thought prevailing in the Warring States Period, and it is the earliest pastel painting work found so far.
Silk is expensive as a writing material, so its use should be limited to dignitaries. Because silk is not widely used for writing, there are not many words in the excavation of ancient silk books. As far as the calligraphy art of Chu tomb silk is concerned, its ranks are generally neat, the spacing is basically the same, and it is natural and unrestrained in striving for standardization and neatness. Its font is flat and stable, balanced and symmetrical, straight and serious, between Zhuanli and Zhuanli. His brushwork is smooth, full of twists and turns, and his music is fascinating, showing its beauty in the change of thickness and rhyme in the frustration of stippling, which fully shows the author's deliberate pursuit of artistic writing.
By the early Western Han Dynasty, exquisite silk fabrics had been sold well all over the country, for people to make clothes, curtains and tents. During the Eastern Han Dynasty, silk was widely used for writing. "The Annals of Sui Shu" records: "Dong Zhuo's rebellion, Xian Di's westward migration, books and silks were all taken as accounts by the soldiers." Soldiers use big silk as tents and small ones as handbags. It can be seen that there are many silk books in the Eastern Han Dynasty.
Among the silk fabrics of various colors unearthed from Mawangdui Han Tomb in Changsha, there are silk, silk, yarn, brocade, embroidery, silk, etc. The most precious one is a colorful silk painting with a coffin. The paintings are painted with mineral pigments such as cinnabar, azurite and azurite, and the colors are gorgeous. The picture is roughly divided into three parts: the upper part, the middle part and the lower part, which represent the scenery in the sky, the ground and the underground respectively. Its content and craft are more complicated and colorful than silk paintings in the Warring States period, but there are no words.
There are more than 10 kinds of silk scripts found in Mawangdui Han Tomb in Changsha, with more than 200,000 words. They are written in black ink, and the fonts are Xiao Zhuan and Li Shu. They are works from the 2nd century BC or earlier. These silk books include two manuscripts of Lao Zi, Lao Zi Jia Ben is the manuscript of Han Gaozu and Lao Zi Yi Ben is the manuscript of Han Huidi. The order of each part is just the opposite of the handed down book. This version of Tao Jing comes first, and the moral classics come last, so Laozi is also called Tao Te Ching. The newly discovered silk book "De Jing" comes first, and "Tao Jing" comes last. There is also a book, The Warring States Policy, which is about1.2000 words, and most of the contents are not involved in this edition. There is also Zhouyi, which has more than 4,000 words than this version, and the sixty-four hexagrams are also different from this version. There is a whole lost book in the silk book called Twenty-eight Books of the Warring States Period. It recorded the words and deeds of Su Qin and Su Dai during the Warring States Period, with about 1. 1.00 million words. Most of them are not found in the current edition of Historical Records of Warring States Policy, which provides a lot of new historical materials for proofreading and textual research on Su Qin.
Five-star Zhan, about 8 thousand words, copied from all silk. The first half is written by five-star Zhan, and the second half is a five-star watch. According to the observed scenes, the positions of Jupiter, Saturn and Venus during the 70 years from 246 BC to 177 BC, and the rendezvous period of these three planets were recorded in the form of a list. Reflects the level of astronomy in Han Dynasty.
In addition, a silk painting was also found in the Shanxi tomb of Jinque in Linyi, Shandong Province in the early Han Dynasty. The whole background is in the sky, under the sun and the moon, in the curtain, the tomb owner's songs and dances, relatives and servants, production, games and other life scenes. The clothes of the characters in the paintings are similar to those in Changsha silk paintings, reflecting the legacy of Chu, indicating that southern Shandong was influenced by Chu culture from the end of the Warring States to the beginning of the Western Han Dynasty.
The ancients wrote on silk books, each of which was a book, lighter than the old bamboo slips. This has great enlightenment for the later invention of papermaking. After the invention of paper, characters were written on paper and gradually developed into books made of paper. It can be seen that silk script plays a connecting role in the development of ancient books in China.