The use of words is a great progress in human civilization. Chinese characters are characterized by hieroglyphics and are unique among human languages. Its advantages in writing and language are also being recognized and accepted by people who use phonetic characters. There is no consensus on when Chinese characters originated and who created them.
Old documents such as "Shiben", "Xunzi", "Lu Shi Chunqiu", and "Han Feizi" all say that Chinese characters were created by Cangjie and Jusong in the Huangdi era. Xu Shen's "Shuowen Jiezi" attempts to give a more comprehensive explanation, believing that Fuxi made the Bagua "to hang the image of the constitution" and inspired people to make different symbols according to different things. In the era of Shennong, people "governed by knotting ropes", but there were so many common things that they could not be satisfied. Cangjie appeared in the Huangdi era. "Seeing the traces of the hooves of birds and animals, he knew that the principles could be different from each other, so he first made a written deed." It is also said that when Cangjie first made a written deed, he "accorded to the pictograms." Wen was later called the word as the phonetic and phonetic complement each other. After a long period of evolution and development, it has been summarized into six methods of composing Chinese characters, which are called "six books", namely "referring to things, pictograms, pictographic sounds, knowing, transferring notes, and borrowing". "Yuan Ming Bao" says that Cangjie looked up at the circular motion of the stars, looked down at the tortoise patterns, bird feathers, mountains and rivers, and even the lines on the palms of his hands, which were the basis for his writing. Before the establishment of modern philology, the theory on the origin of Chinese characters in "Shuowen Jiezi" was undoubtedly the most authoritative. '
However, "Shangshu Confucius" and "Shiyi Ji" say that Fuxi made books and deeds to replace ropes, and writing also emerged in his era, which was obviously much earlier than the Huangdi era. . ·
Under the influence of the trend of doubting ancient times, "Six Transformations of Confucian Classics" puts forward another view, believing that Chinese characters were actually formulated by Confucius himself. Fortunately, this book has not been widely circulated, and the discovery of bone inscriptions quickly shattered this theory of deifying Confucius; the rhyme design of oracle bone inscriptions also shaken the legend about the origin of writing in "Shuowen Jiezi": the "Six Books" of the legend The theory has also raised various doubts.
With the discovery of the memory symbols on Yangshao culture pottery, many experts believe that they are symbols with the nature of Chinese characters. According to archaeological discoveries, a large number of pottery with commemorative symbols were unearthed from the Longshan Culture, Dawenkou Culture, Liangzhu Culture and Erlitou Culture. Some of them are indeed very close to characters, especially the Dawenkou Culture pottery symbols and other graphics that have been interpreted. They are Jin, Xu, Jiong, Jiongshan or axe, adze, Dan, etc. Therefore, people believe that Chinese characters originated from pottery engraved symbols. However, to be fair, there are not many existing pottery symbols that are close to Chinese characters, and even fewer of them can be interpreted. It seems premature to conclude that Chinese characters originated from pottery symbols. However, the discovery and interpretation of pottery symbols have allowed people to see the solution to the problem of Chinese characters. With the dawn of the origin issue, people are pinning their hopes on more unearthed information and more research results