Because the ancients had no pen and ink, they used bamboo sticks to draw and write on bamboo tubes. This is called book deed, also called bamboo slips. Because bamboo is hard and greasy, writing is not smooth, and the words written are thick and thin, like tadpoles, so it is called tadpole book or tadpole essay. The lacquer books on bamboo slips can all be called tadpoles, not necessarily books written by him or tadpoles.
Ancient prose mainly refers to the characters in ancient books, such as the Book of Changes, The Analects of Confucius, Chunqiu, Shangshu, Zhou Li, Shilu Chunqiu and Xiaojing. This is an early writing style.
The ancient prose in the Three-body Book of Songs should be of the same origin as that in Shuowen Jiezi, but the fonts are occasionally different, which is caused by mistakes in copying ancient books. Jiang's family in the Northern Wei Dynasty said in the Lun Shu Biao that the three-body stone sutra "seal script and official script are similar to Shuowen, but there is little difference in ancient Chinese characters". It shows that the ancient writing method and calligraphy of The Book of Songs are different from those handed down from Han Dynasty. The ancient prose recorded in Shuo Wen Jie Zi is different from the unearthed Warring States scripts, such as Changsha Jian Shu, Hou Mameng Shu, Changsha Jian Ce and Sun Yat-sen Guo Jin Wen. The archaeologist Zhang said: "The so-called ancient prose in Xu Shen is probably the words used by Confucian scholars in Zou Lu (and perhaps Qi)."
In the ancient prose engraved in the Three-body Stone Classic, many strokes are "thick at the head and thin at the tail" and curved like tadpoles. However, in Wei's ancient prose, not all strokes are like tadpoles, such as horizontal and vertical, sharp at both ends and thick in the middle, like willow leaves. Compared with Qin Zhuan, the structural features of China's ancient prose are complex and simple. These writing methods and the abnormity of Xiao Zhuan in the Three-body Stone Classic just show that ancient prose is the legacy of the "Six Kingdoms Ancient Prose" in the Warring States Period. During the Cao Wei period, calligraphers who were also proficient in Confucianism paid more attention to ancient prose than Xiao Zhuan, so ancient prose was the first of the three. The purpose of learning ancient Chinese prose in Han Dynasty is to understand the classics of ancient Chinese prose, so calligraphers who are proficient in ancient Chinese prose are also philologists. During the Cao Wei period, although the new book style was fashionable, it failed to shake the position of ancient calligraphy in China. [