Chinese calligraphy is an independent art of writing Chinese characters with a brush. Chinese square characters (Hanzi) are one of the three oldest scripts in the world. The other two are the Sumarian and Babylonian cuneiform writing, and the other is the pictorial writing of ancient Egypt. Both of these writing systems were later discontinued, but Chinese characters have continued to develop to this day. If we count the pottery inscriptions from the Dawenkou Culture in Shandong and the Yangshao Culture in Banpo, Xi'an unearthed in 1959, it has a history of about six thousand years. It can be said that since the emergence of Chinese characters, there has been a requirement to write Chinese characters beautifully, which includes calligraphy factors. Therefore, when talking about the origin of calligraphy, it must be related to the origin of Chinese characters.
There was no writing in ancient times. Historians call this period the "prehistoric period", which is roughly equivalent to the stage of clan communes in the history of social development. At that time, people could only rely on language to communicate ideas and rely on legends and legends to accumulate knowledge and record events. However, it is easy to go wrong simply relying on legends. Later, methods of using certain physical objects to evoke memories and exchange ideas emerged, such as tying knots to record events and carving wood to record events. "Book of Changes·Xici" said: "In ancient times, people were governed by knotting ropes, and later generations of saints changed it with written contracts." This method of recording events has long been extinct among the Han people in my country, but it is still used by the Lisu and Hani people in Yunnan and Taiwan. Among the Gaoshan tribe, there were those not long ago. As for carved wood records, physical objects of carved wood passed down from generation to generation have so far been found among the Wa people in Yunnan.
Knotting and carving wood (that is, what is called "deed" or "deed engraving" in ancient books) can only help memory, but are not direct records of language, so they have nothing to do with writing. Words develop from pictures. Ancient people knew how to use paintings to express things closely related to them in life. There are such pictures painted by people in the Paleolithic Age in Zhoukoudian, my country, and in ancient caves in the mountains of France and Spain. The initial drawings were more complicated. If you wanted to record a cow or a deer, you would draw the cow and the deer in their original appearance. They were very detailed and vivid. Later, people gradually summarized and simplified the images of cows and deer. When drawing cows, they only used lines to represent their heads and horns, and when drawing deer, they only outlined a characteristic outline. The meaning of the picture gradually decreased, and the components of symbols gradually increased. This resulted in the earliest written symbols of language. Concrete things can be represented by pictures; simple abstract concepts can also be represented by pictorial symbols. For complex abstract things, people combine two or more symbols to express a certain meaning. For example, there is a pictographic symbol on the pottery unearthed in Dawenkou, Shandong Province, which many paleontologists interpret as "Dan", which means that the sun has just risen from the horizon. There are also people who interpret this as "heat". The lower half is like "fire", that is, the fire under the sun is "heat". There is also a symbol on the pottery, which looks like a fire on a mountain under the sun, which is also the word "heat". The painted pottery fragments unearthed from the Banpo and Yangshao cultural sites, which are slightly later than the Dawenkou remains, also have some inscribed symbols. Although their meanings cannot be determined, paleographers believe that they are already symbols with the prototype of characters.