Chapter 6 Section 2 Bronze Inscriptions

According to archaeological findings, my country entered the Bronze Age as early as the Yin and Shang Dynasties.Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin.From the Shang Dynasty to the Zhou Dynasty, rulers and nobles widely used bronze to cast various utensils, mainly including food utensils, wine utensils, water utensils, and musical instruments, such as tripods, 鬲 (li stand), beans, jue, zun, pans, bells,钲 [zhenq sign] and so on.On these utensils, characters are often engraved to indicate who the holder is, the origin and purpose of the casting utensils, etc.Because in ancient times, "copper" was called "gold", and the bronze used for this kind of utensils was called "Jijin"; so the characters engraved on bronze ware are called "Jinwen", also called "Jijin characters".The ancients also used bell and tripod as the general term for bronze wares, so bronze inscriptions are also called "Zhong Ding Wen".

Like modern cast iron products, bronze castings generally use clay models, called "pottery models".Bronze inscriptions were engraved on pottery models in advance and then cast, and a few were engraved directly on bronze wares after casting.Due to the soft texture of pottery models, it is easier to carve than tortoise shells and animal bones, so early bronze inscriptions are more graphic than oracle bone inscriptions, and are closer to primitive characters.For example, the word "日" written in bronze inscriptions ⊙ means there is a black spot in the middle of the round sun (some people think that the black spot represents sunspots), but because it is inconvenient to write a circle on a hard texture, the oracle bone inscriptions can only be written as "日". ".Another example is the "nail" of a nail, the oracle bone inscriptions are written as ○, and the bronze inscriptions are written in the shape.

Many of the characters engraved and cast on bronze vessels are inscribed, that is, only the name of the owner of the vessel is marked, such as the name of the clan, the name of the maker, and the name of the person who was sacrificed, so they are very short.The characters on the early bronzes are relatively primitive, especially the clan name, which can be considered as the clan totem, that is, the clan emblem (Fig. 12).Many of these family emblems are just graphic symbols, not characters. Of course, many of them have undergone major or minor evolutions and become members of the big family of Chinese characters.

Like oracle bone inscriptions, the shape of bronze inscriptions has not yet been finalized, and the same character can often be written in different ways, such as: There are also combined texts in Jinwen, such as: There are also combined texts in Jinwen, such as: Bronze ware was greatly developed in the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the characters on the bronze ware also increased, from the name mark with only one or two characters to two or three characters to long inscriptions with hundreds of characters.For example, the bronze inscriptions on "Mao Gong Ding" written by King Xuan of Zhou had nearly 500 characters, describing relatively complicated events, and it was a precious material for studying the history and society at that time. (Figure 13)

The shape of early bronze inscriptions is often similar to oracle bone inscriptions in terms of complexity and simplicity, but the history of bronze inscriptions is very long, and the shape and structure are often simplified during development.For example, the word "Wei" in Weiwei, written in oracle bone inscriptions , written in the bronze inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty , the mouth represents a square city,orIt means the footsteps of the warriors defending the city, and it is a character that vividly expresses the original meaning of the word.In the late Western Zhou Dynasty, this word was often simplified as , the Spring and Autumn Period is simplified toup.Another example is that the word "wen" is often written in oracle bone inscriptions , , which means pattern, was also written in the early Western Zhou Dynasty bronze inscriptionsetc. By the late Western Zhou Dynasty, it was simplified toup.

At the same time, the shape of the bronze inscriptions gradually lost its pictorial nature and became linear and straight. For example, the character "fire" was written like a dancing flame in the early Western Zhou Dynasty, but it evolved into fire in the later period. Bronze wares of the Yin and Zhou dynasties had been continuously unearthed as early as the Han Dynasty and were studied by scholars, including bronze inscriptions, which had already become a kind of specialized knowledge.So far, about 3,000 different characters have been found in bronze inscriptions on bronze wares, and nearly 2,000 of them can be interpreted correctly.