First of all, the ancients wrote vertically because they wrote on bamboo slips before papermaking was invented. Bamboo slips and wooden slips are long and narrow pieces of bamboo, which can be rolled into books by stringing them together. The word "book" is a pictograph of bamboo slips.
The roll mouth is naturally held by the right hand, and the left hand is convenient to unfold. Therefore, writing is from top to bottom and from right to left.
Extended data
The connotation of calligraphy mainly includes the following aspects:
1. Calligraphy refers to the art of expressing emotions with Four Treasures of the Study as a tool. The particularity of tools is an important aspect of the particularity of calligraphy art, and it is an important part of calligraphy techniques to fully embody the performance of tools with the help of Four Treasures of the Study. Without Four Treasures of the Study, there would be no calligraphy art.
2. Calligraphy art takes Chinese characters as the carrier. The particularity of Chinese characters is another important aspect of calligraphy particularity. China's calligraphy can not be separated from Chinese characters, and the form of Chinese character stippling and the collocation of radicals are the contents that writers pay more attention to. Different from other pinyin characters, Chinese characters are a combination of form, sound and meaning, which has strong formal significance.
The so-called "six books" of the ancients refer to six methods of pictographic, fingering, comprehending, pictophonetic, transliteration and borrowing of Chinese characters, which is of great guiding significance to the analysis of Chinese character structure.
3. The background of calligraphy art is China traditional culture. Calligraphy is rooted in China traditional culture, which is the background of its existence and development. The calligraphy theory we see today since the Han Dynasty has its own systematicness, integrity and orderliness.
Calligraphy theory, like other literary theories, includes not only the technique theory of calligraphy itself, but also the aesthetic theory of calligraphy, all of which shine with the wisdom of ancient China literati.
For example, the theory of how to express the categories of "spirit, qi, bone, flesh and blood" in calligraphy, the theory of techniques such as brushwork, calligraphy and composition, and the theory of creation and evaluation all have their own systems.
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