In the history of our motherland, there are rich and colorful inventions and creations recorded. The world-famous printing technique was invented by our industrious and intelligent ancestors. Before the invention of printing, especially before the advent of papermaking, there was a lack of light and cheap writing materials, and the dissemination of cultural knowledge was greatly restricted, so reading and learning were very difficult. About 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, our ancestors knew how to carve signs on pottery. These symbols consisted of vertical lines, horizontal lines, and oblique lines. There were about 20 or 30 types of symbols. This may be the origin of the original Chinese characters.Just imagine how difficult it is to write and read characters on pottery!

By the late Shang Dynasty, more than 3,000 years ago, Chinese characters had developed to a relatively mature stage.Most of the characters at that time were engraved on tortoise shells or animal bones, and later generations called them "Oracle Bone Inscriptions".Our Chinese characters today were developed from oracle bone inscriptions.Among recognizable Chinese characters, oracle bone inscriptions are the oldest writing system. More than 5,000 oracle bone inscriptions have been discovered, and about 1,700 characters can be recognized.The oracle bones themselves are heavy and mostly broken; the shape of the oracle bone inscriptions is very different from our writing today, and most people can hardly understand it; moreover, the content of the writing is all about divination records.Divination is divination, and divination is to ask questions. The king of Shang must decide everything through divination.The records of divination are called inscriptions.The inscriptions are simple in terms of words and extensive in content, and many contents are still unclear.One can imagine how difficult it is to write and read characters on oracle bones!

From about the late Shang Dynasty, our ancestors began to engrave characters on bronze wares.Some engraved their own names on the utensils after they were cast to show ownership of the utensils; some wrote a commemorative essay when casting the utensils, explaining the reasons and uses of the utensils.This kind of writing on bronze ware is generally called "ming" (commonly known as Jinwen).There are only one or two characters in the inscriptions, and hundreds of characters in the inscriptions.For example, the famous Shang Dynasty "Simuwu" Dafang Ding has the three characters "Simuwu" on the inner wall of the tripod belly; the famous Maogong Ding in the late Western Zhou Dynasty has an inscription of up to 497 characters, which is the longest on the existing bronze wares. inscription.We can learn a lot about history from the inscriptions we find.However, bronze wares were the most precious utensils at that time, and most of them were exclusive to the ruling class and could not be seen by ordinary people; Drawings, hard to make out.It is conceivable that engraving characters and reading inscriptions on bronze wares is difficult and difficult!

Probably also in the Shang Dynasty, our ancestors already knew how to write on bamboo slips with brushes and ink.Bamboo slips are slender pieces of bamboo or wood, each about one or two feet long and half an inch wide.Write more than thirty or forty characters on each piece, and write seven or eight characters less.Dozens or hundreds of sheets are used for a file, and thousands of sheets are used for a book.Hundreds of dried bamboo and wood slips need to be woven together in sequence with hemp rope, which is easy to break, so sometimes silk rope is used, which is called "silk weaving", and sometimes cooked belts are used, which is called "Wei weaving".Usually it is edited first and then written.The bamboo and wood slips made up of strings were called books in ancient times.The ancients wrote the booklet as ", and because of frequent flipping, the belt of the bamboo and wood slips broke three times. This is the allusion of "Wei (belt) compiling the three masterpieces". It can be seen that it was very difficult for the ancients to read the bamboo slips. Secondly, , the booklet is large and heavy, and it is very inconvenient to carry. It is said that during the Warring States Period, there was a scholar named Hui Shi. When he traveled, the books he took with him had to be loaded in five cars, so later generations praised him for reading a lot. In fact, the content of Wuche Bamboo is far inferior to a book today. There was a writer named Dongfang Shuo in the Han Dynasty. He wrote a letter to Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty to offer advice. The letter spent 3,000 It took two strong men to lift the many pieces of bamboo slips, and it took Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty two months to read them. In the early Eastern Han Dynasty, Emperor Guangwu took more than 2,000 vehicles to transport the books to Luoyang. These examples show that it is too inconvenient to carry the bamboo books. These shortcomings of the bamboo books not only bring difficulties to the learning of the ancients, but also are very unfavorable to the spread and development of culture.

During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, books written on silk appeared.Silk products have names such as silk and silk, so this kind of book is called "fun book" and "silk book".In the book "Mozi" in the Warring States period, there is a record that "the bamboo and silk of the book are passed on to future generations", which shows that the silk and bamboo and wood slips were used at the same time at that time.In the writings of the Han Dynasty, the two characters bamboo and silk are often used to represent records, and bamboo and silk have become synonymous with books or history.Long silk books are always rolled up for storage, hence the name "roll".In ancient times, "juan" and "pian" were the units for calculating the number of books.Ban Gu's "Hanshu·Yiwenzhi" is a book catalog that records the collections of the National Library. The books recorded in it are counted by chapters and volumes, and the volumes are less than half of the counts by chapters.Pian refers to bamboo and wood slips, and Juan refers to silk scripts, which shows that the main writing materials in the Han Dynasty were still bamboo and wood slips, and silk scripts were not yet popular.Obviously, bamboo and wood slips are much cheaper than silk, and although they are not as light as silk, they still have to be used.However, silk scripts were still quite popular in the Eastern Han Dynasty. "Book of the Later Han Rulin Biography Preface" records that at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the warlord Dong Zhuo coerced Han Xiandi to move westward from Luoyang to Chang'an. Bags, it can be seen that there were a lot of silk books at that time.Silk books are soft and light, can be folded or rolled up at will, and are very convenient to read, carry, and store. Their appearance and popularity provided favorable conditions for the ancients to learn.However, silk is expensive and cannot be used by ordinary people, and it is not the best tool for popularizing culture. Therefore, our ancestors tried to study new writing materials.Thus, there was the invention of paper.

In the Western Han Dynasty, when people still used bamboo and silk to write, there was a kind of silky "wadding paper".The left half of the paper characters is "系", because the original paper is made of silk fibers.That kind of wadding paper was probably first invented by working women who rinsed cotton wadding, and it was a by-product made by picking out the remaining silk fibers from the waste.Due to limited sources of raw materials and limited production, wadding paper was not used as a writing material, but it provided a valuable method of making paper.Later, based on the experience of making wadding paper, the ancients made the earliest plant fiber paper—hemp paper.However, the early hemp paper was very rough, and it was not enough to replace silk and bamboo slips as writing materials.In the Eastern Han Dynasty, the eunuch Cai Lun summed up the papermaking experience of the working people, and jointly designed with relevant craftsmen, using waste materials such as bark, hemp, rags, and old fishing nets to extract plant fibers to make paper.In 105 A.D., a light, cheap and mass-produced plant fiber paper was successfully trial-produced. Since then, the papermaking technique has spread all over the world, and the application of paper has also spread.With paper, the ancients had good conditions for reading and writing.During the Wei and Jin Dynasties, paper gradually replaced the bulky bamboo slips and expensive silk, and books written on paper became popular.However, in the period when books were spread entirely by copying, it was still quite difficult for the ancients to read, and the popularization of culture was still greatly restricted.It takes several years or even more than 10 years to copy a long and great work, which not only consumes a lot of time and manpower, but also copies and copies, which is prone to errors and omissions.Whenever there is a mistake or omission in copying, the meaning of the original book is often changed.If there is only one or a few copies of a precious work, it is easy to be destroyed in case of natural or man-made disasters.Many famous classics in ancient my country failed to be preserved because of this.

As mentioned above, pottery, oracle bones, bronzes, bamboo and wood slips, and silk were once the writing materials in ancient my country. These materials were either very bulky or expensive, which brought great difficulties to the ancients in reading and writing.In the Han Dynasty, paper was invented. Although it was light and cheap, it had to be spread by copying so that people could read books and acquire cultural knowledge.However, with the development of social economy and culture, copying books could not meet people's requirements more and more, which prompted our ancestors to find ways to explore new techniques for copying books, so woodblock printing was invented.