The Concept of Paleography

The trend of studying ancient characters began to form in the Han Dynasty, and there were three main types of ancient characters seen by the Han Dynasty people. One of them was the inscriptions of pre-Qin bronze vessels. Xu Shen of the Eastern Han Dynasty said in the narrative of "Shuo Wen Jie Zi" that everywhere "often in the mountains and rivers to get tripods and yi, the inscriptions of which are the ancient texts of the previous generation". In the Western Han Dynasty, Zhang Chuan, who was good at writing ancient characters, read the inscriptions on ancient bronze tripods unearthed in Meiyang (now Fufeng, Shaanxi Province) during the reign of Emperor Xuan Di, as shown in the Book of the Han Dynasty (汉书?郊祀志 下). He had read the inscription, which was written in the Book of Han, under the Book of Sacrifices. One is the copy of the word book "Shi Zhou" which is said to have been made by Shi Zhou during the reign of King Xuan of Zhou, and what people in the Han Dynasty call "pre-writing" refers to the words of "Shi Zhou", whose font belongs to the Big Seal Character, and the other is the so-called Ancient Scriptures, which is the copy of the Confucian scriptures that were hidden during the burning of books by Emperor Qin Shihuang, such as the "Biography of the Spring and Autumn Annals of the Zuo Clan" offered by Zhang Cang at the beginning of the Han Dynasty, and the books of the "Book of the Shangshu", "The Rites of Passage" and "The Analects of Confucius" which were obtained by King Gonglu of Lu during Emperor Jingdi of Han Dynasty from the walls of Confucius' former residence. Analects" and other books. The scripts of these scriptures were neither official script nor small seal script or seal script, and were mostly called ancient scripts during the Han Dynasty. Scribes such as Xu Shen and others who respected the ancient script believed that this type of script was even earlier than the pre-Han script. However, according to later research, the so-called Guwen was in fact the script of the eastern countries during the Warring States period (referring to the countries east of the Qin Dynasty). In the Han Dynasty, the school of scribes who advocated the ancient script was called the Guwen scholars. The other school of scribes, who opposed the ancient scriptures and believed only in the texts handed down from generation to generation, was called the modern literati. In order to read and understand the ancient scriptures, the ancient literati had to study them from a philological point of view, so they were often philologists at the same time. They collected ancient texts and compared them with the characters in use at that time, and some of them further studied the structure of Chinese characters theoretically. Some of them further theorized on the construction of Chinese characters. The "Ancient and Modern Characters" recorded in the "Han Shu" and the "Sui Shu" and the "Book of Classics". and "Ancient and Modern Characters" by Wei Jingzhong (i.e. Wei Hong) of the Later Han Dynasty are the results of the former work. The establishment of the Six Books was the result of the latter work. The term "six books" was first used in the Zhou Li, which belonged to the ancient scripture system. However, according to recent studies, the interpretation of the six books as "the basis for the creation of characters" was probably a creation of the ancient literati of the Han Dynasty. At the end of the 1st century, Xu Shen wrote the Shuowen Jiezi (Explaining Characters in Chinese), an excellent summary of the ancient literati's study of writing.

The style of the characters in the Shuowen was "the present narrative of the seal script, combined with the ancient 籀", and the characters were mainly in the form of the small seal script. The character forms are mainly based on the Small Seal Script, and at the same time, some ancient and seal scripts with different writing styles are also included. When interpreting the characters, Xu Shen pointed out the original meanings of the characters as much as possible in combination with the character forms according to the theory of the Six Books. Therefore, even from the point of view of traditional philology, which does not regard the small seal script as an ancient script, Xu Shen's work is also characterized by the study of ancient scripts. It is a pity that the ancient writing materials Xu Shen and other ancient literati saw were of a later date. At that time, although ancient bronze inscriptions had already received some attention, the culture of collecting and studying such materials had not yet been formed, and it was difficult for scholars to utilize them. The Shuowen (《说文》) mentioned the "ancient texts" on the tripods and Yi, but all the ancient texts in the book seemed to be from the Guwenjing (古文經), which was actually only a text of the Warring States period. The pre-Han script is not very early either, and the Shi Zhou Zhuan (史籀篇) that Xu Shen and others saw was a copy that had been copied many times, and some of the glyphs had obviously been distorted and changed. These ancient characters, as well as those of the Small Seal Script, often failed to reflect their original meanings. Therefore, Xu Shen did not have a correct understanding of the development of ancient characters, and his explanations of the glyphs and their original meanings were often not credible. Under the conditions at that time, these shortcomings were hard to avoid. From the Wei and Jin dynasties until the beginning of the Song Dynasty, there was no great progress in the study of ancient characters. During this period, the most emphasized ancient scripts earlier than the small seal scripts were still the kind of ancient scripts mentioned by the ancient literati. During the Zhengshi period of Cao Wei, the "Shangshu" and "Spring and Autumn Annals", which were taught by the ancient literati, were engraved in stone in the Imperial College, and each character was written in three styles, namely, the ancient script, the small seal script, and the official script. This is the so-called Three-Style Stone Scripture. In the fifth year of Xianning of Emperor Wu of the Jin Dynasty (279, or in the first or second year of Taikang, i.e. 280 or 281), a large number of bamboo slips were found in a large tomb of the late Warring States state of Wei in Kapxian County (present-day Ki County, Henan Province), which had been robbed, and there were 75 scrolls with more than 100,000 characters in a script that resembled that of the ancient scriptures. This is the so-called Kizuka Ancient Texts. This batch of bamboo books was collected by the government, and was successively organized by Xunxu, the highest peak, Wei Heng, and Shuang Ci, etc., and written as a present-day text. The original bamboo books have long been gone, and the written texts, except for the biography of Mu Tian Zi, have also been lost. According to the historical records, there were some ancient compendiums found during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, but none of their contents had been handed down. During the period from the Wei and Jin Dynasties to the early Song Dynasty, there were still people who continued to collect ancient texts, and there were also people who used ancient texts to inscribe tablets or forged ancient books. Some of the ancient texts they used were based on the texts, while others were fabricated. Guo Zhongshu (郭忠恕) (?～977) of the late Five Dynasties and early Song dynasty wrote a book based on the ancient texts. ~977) compiled a compendium of ancient texts based on the various ancient texts available at that time, called "Han Jian". Later, Xia H竦(985～1051), compiled "The Four Sounds and Rhymes of Ancient Writings"(1044), which was basically based on the same sources as "Han Jian", but "Han Jian" was organized according to the initials of the parts, while Xia's book was organized according to the rhymes. Although these two books contain a lot of fabricated ancient texts, most of the glyphs are still valid, and they are important references for modern research on the Warring States script. After Guo and Xia, the study of ancient texts gradually declined.

During this period, ancient bronze vessels with inscriptions were also found, but unfortunately, there was still no culture of collecting and studying jinwen, and in the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, important pre-Qin stone carvings were found in Tianxing County (Fengxiang, Shaanxi Province), namely, the Shikuwen (Stone Drum Texts). People in Tang Dynasty paid much attention to Shikuwen and often mentioned it when they talked about fonts and calligraphy. Since the shape of the characters in Shi Gu Wen was close to the prehistoric script, people at that time believed that it was written by King Xuan of the Zhou Dynasty, Taishi Prehistory. In the Tang Dynasty, the seal script carved stone erected by Qin Shi Huang during his tour of the world was also highly valued. During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, there were already iconography; during the Tang Dynasty, there were also iconography of Qin's carved stones and stone drums.

Li Yangbing, a calligrapher of seal script in the Tang Dynasty, organized the Shuo Wen. He changed some of the seal forms of the Shuowen based on the Qin carvings, such as changing (欠) to (為), which was criticized by later generations. It was wrong for Li Yangbing to change the ancient books without authorization, but it is worthwhile to pay attention to the fact that he corrected the Shuowen based on the textual information of the ancient objects left in the world. His interpretation of the glyphs was also a matter of his own opinion. Although many of them were absurd, there were still some good points in them. For example, Xu Shen interpreted the character "木" as "from, under, like its root", and he thought that the whole character "resembled the shape of wood". In the Song Dynasty, due to the rise of jinshi (goldsmithing), there was a climax in the study of ancient characters. In the third year of Emperor Xianping's reign (1000), Jurong Zhongzheng and others examined the "Shi Xinfu Earthenware" presented in Qianzhou (present-day Qianxian County, Shaanxi Province), which was the beginning of the study of ancient bronze inscriptions by the Song people. From the Renzong Dynasty to the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, collect, record, study ancient bronze and its inscriptions of the wind is flourishing, the Southern Song Dynasty, Guanzhong, Central Plains and other major areas of discovery of ancient bronze has been occupied by the Jin, Yuan, the collection of newly discovered bronze basically came to a standstill, but because of the influence of the Northern Song Dynasty style of learning, Southern Song Dynasty, the early record, the study of the Jinwen wind is still quite prosperous to the decline of the late.

Song scholars who made important contributions to the study of Jinwen included Yang Yuanming (Nanzhong), Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), Lv Dalin (1046-1092), Zhao Mingcheng (1081-1129), and Xue Shanggong of the Southern Song Dynasty. Song people compiled a lot of ancient bronze and inscriptions of the book, handed down to the present day are Lv Daling "archaeological map" (1092), Song Huizong wrote "Bogu TuLu", the Southern Song Dynasty Zhao Jiucheng "renewed archaeological map", Xue Shanggong "successive generations of bells, tripods, and Yi ware paragraph identification of the law (1144), Wang Ziangzui "Xiaotang JieguLu" and Wang Houzhi (Fuzai) "bells and tripods paragraph identification". The first three recorded both forms and inscriptions, while the second three recorded inscriptions alone. Lv Dalin also compiled the "Archaeological Diagrams and Interpretations of Texts", which was the earliest compilation of Jinwen characters according to the rhymes (it may be claimed that this book was compiled by Zhao Jiucheng, which seems not to be the case). In the reign of Zhenghe, Wang Chu wrote "Zhongding Seal Character Rhyme", and in the reign of Shaoxing, Xue Shanggong wrote "Guang Zhongding Seal Character Rhyme", which had more materials than Lv's book, but both of them were lost (Wang's book was actually still preserved in Yang's "Guang Zhongding Seal Character Rhyme" of the Yuan Dynasty).

Yin and Zhou Jinwen were the first writings that scholars came across that predated the pre-Han and Guwen scripts. The collection, recording and study of Jinwen by the scholars of the Song Dynasty are of great significance in the history of paleography. They had already realized that the hieroglyphic characters were "purely pictorial" at the beginning of the book-making process, and that "the later generation of Miwen gradually changed the strokes in order to make the book easier to write" (Archaeology 4:26). The first part of the "Archaeological Diagrams and Interpretations" (考古图 4?26). The preface of the "Archaeological Map and Interpretation of the Texts" gives a concise summary of some of the features of the form of the gold texts (such as the number of strokes, the different positions of the borders, etc.) as well as the methods of identifying and interpreting the gold texts, which is also noteworthy. Most of the gold texts correctly interpreted by the Song masters are easy to recognize. However, they sometimes also have good insights, such as Yang Nanzhong interpretation of the Jin Jiang Ding inscription, doubt "" for the "flag" character, read as "pray", than the modern paleographers Wu Dacheng, Luo Zhenyu, etc. people to "" for the "pray" of the word exact.

In terms of stone inscriptions, both the stone drum inscriptions and the Qin inscriptions continued to be emphasized in the Song Dynasty. In the early Southern Song Dynasty, Zheng Qiao created the theory that the stone drum inscriptions were Qin seal scripts, and believed that the stone drums were engraved before Emperor Shi Huang after King Huiwen of Qin. Kung Fung, who came a little later in the period, believed that the stone was carved between the time of Duke Xiang and Duke Xian of Qin. This was a great progress in the study of the stone drum inscriptions. In the Northern Song Dynasty, there were also found the engraved stones of the King of Qin cursing the King of Chu in the Warring States period, which was called "Cursing Chu Wen" and was studied by Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), Su Shi (1037-1101) and Dong Juanxuan.

The influence of jinshi can be seen in the study of the six books of the Sung people. Zheng Qiao's "Tongzhi? The explanation of the glyphs of some ideographs in Zheng Qiao's "Tong Zhi" is obviously better than that of "Shuowen". For example, the Shuowen says that the character for "stop" "resembles a piece of wood with a site on it," while the Liushu Liao thinks that it "resembles the toes of a foot"; the Shuowen says that the character for "step" "comes from the foot," and the character for "walk" is "from the foot," and the character for "walk" is "from the foot. The character "步" in Shuowen (说文) is "from stop, back to back", while the "Lukshu Shu" (六书略) thinks that it "resembles two toes facing each other back and forth"; the character "立" in Shuowen (说文) is "from the top of the big standing one". The character "走" in Shuowen is "from Duanjian" (from the Duanjian text), and the character "夭" in Liushu Liao (from the Lixu Liao text) is "like a man running with his head up and his feet open", and the characters "步" (step) and "立" (stand) are "like a man standing on the ground". The words "步", "立" and "走" are generally regarded as ideograms, but they are included in the hieroglyphic category of the Six Books, and Zheng Qiao was quite knowledgeable about jinshi writing (Tongzhi has "jinshi liao"). He was obviously inspired by the ancient glyphs in the jinshi texts to come up with the above insights. During the Song and Yuan Dynasties, Dai Dong made the "Six Books of the Story", which directly utilized the Jinwen glyphs. Because of the scarcity of gold characters, he tended to fabricate the glyphs, and was therefore much criticized by later generations. However, Dai's characterization was quite unique, which was also recognized by later generations. For example, he thought that it was the initial character of "星", and that the character "鼓", from which the character "" was derived, originally resembled the shape of a drum, which was a very good insight. The Yuan and Ming dynasties were a period of decline in the study of ancient characters, and the only thing worth mentioning in terms of goldsmithing was the work of the Ming people in collecting and recording ancient seals. Only the Ming people collected and recorded ancient seals, which had already been done by the Song people. However, most of the ancient seal genealogies of the Song and Yuan dynasties had already died out, and the ones that had been handed down, such as the "Han and Jin Yin Yin Chart" collected in "Shuo Fu", were poorly documented and of little use. The ancient seal scores compiled by the Ming Dynasty, such as Gu's "Collection of Ancient Seal Scores" (1571), were relatively rich in content and provided useful information for the study of ancient writing.

During this period, the compendium of ancient characters continued to be compiled, but most of the collected glyphs were copied and reproduced from the books of the previous generations, which did not have much reference value. In the early Yuan Dynasty, Yang Huan's "Six Books" and Ming Dynasty's Wei Chuan's "The Essence of Six Books" also wanted to talk about the six books based on the ancient characters earlier than the small seal scripts, and these books "fabricated fonts and imagined the bias" were even more than the "Six Books", and their insights were not as good as the "Six Books", and were not valued by the later generations. After the Qing Dynasty, Jinshiology and elementary school were revived, and the study of ancient characters was re-developed. The level of ancient writing research in the Qing Dynasty was gradually improved. At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, Min Qiwei wrote Six Books, which was later published by Bi Hongshu. It was a compendium of ancient scripts that included ancient texts, seal texts, and Zhongding and stone carvings, and it was widely circulated, but the content was messy and the copying and recording were out of shape, so the level was very low. Qianlong, the Qing Emperor successively ordered Liang Shizheng, Wang Jie and others to imitate the "Bogu Atlas" style of the ancient bronzes in the collection of the Ministry of the Interior to be recorded, compiled into the "West Qing ancient identification" (1751), "Ning Shou Jian Gu", "West Qing renewed identification of the first" and "B" 4 books (the latter 3 books of the manuscript of the Republic of China when the party printed), the level of its level in the Sung people below. It was only from the time of Qian and Jia that the Qing people surpassed their predecessors in the study of ancient texts. After the Daoguang period, there were many important gold and stone collectors, of which Chen Jieqi (1813-1884, No. Worshipful Worshiper) was a representative. Their collection of ancient writing materials exceeded those of their predecessors in terms of variety, quantity and quality. Due to the increasing abundance of ancient writing materials, and also due to the development of elementary school, scripture and other related disciplines, the level of ancient writing research continued to improve and reached its peak in the late Qing Dynasty during the Tongzhi and Guangxu periods. Wu Dacheng (1835-1902) and Sun Jean were the most important scholars in the peak period.

The focus of the study of ancient characters in the Qing Dynasty was still on jinwen. During the Qianlong period, due to the rise of Park's study and the compilation of books such as "Western Qing Gu Jian", there was a gradual increase in the number of scholars who were interested in Jinwen, and in the first year of the Jiaqing period (1796), Qian Goblet engraved the "Examination of the Marks on the Ancient Vessels of the Hall of Sixteen Changle", which specialized in the collection of the vessels in the possession of the vessel, and the vessel forms and inscriptions were also recorded. In the ninth year (1804), Ruan Yuan engraved "Jiguzhai Zhong Ding Yi Ware Marks and Senses", which recorded the collected inscriptions of various families and explained them in order to continue the "Zhong Ding Yi Ware Marks and Senses of All Ages". Thereafter, there were many works similar to Qianshu or Ruanshu, the most influential of which were Wu Rongguang's (1773-1843) "Gyunqingkan Jinwen" (1840) and Wu Shifen's (1796-1856) "Vintage Records of Gold Texts" (1895), which were modeled after Ruanshu's. The first of these was a book by Wu Rongguang (1773-1843) entitled "The Golden Texts in the Jiguzhai Zhongding and Yi Vessels", in which he wrote about the inscriptions collected by various families and explained them.

The main scholars who studied Jinwen in the Qing Dynasty were represented by Qian Goblet and Ruan Yuan in the Qian-Jia period and Xu Tongbai (1775-1854) and Xu Han (1797-1867) in the Daohan period. Xu Tongbai wrote From the Ancient Hall (1886), and Xu Han revised Vintage Records of Golden Writings for Wu Shifen, and many of his insights on golden writings can be found in this book. During the Tongguang period, there was a climax in the study of jinwen, and the main scholars were Wu Dacheng, Sun Jean, Fang Chunyi(?), and Wu Shifen. ～The main scholars were Wu Dacheng, Sun Jean, Fang Jinyi (?), Liu Xinyuan (1848-1915) and others. Wu Dacheng's main works related to Jinwen include Shuowen Gu籀补籀,《字说》etc. The Gu籀补籀 is a book of ancient writings. Preliminary Supplement" is a compendium of ancient characters, the recorded characters are mainly in Jinwen, as well as stone carvings, seals, currencies and ancient ceramic characters, interpretation of the characters is quite out of his own vision. This book changed the practice of collecting characters according to rhyme since the "Four Rhymes of Ancient Writings", and it was based on the "Shuowen" for the separate parts of the characters, and the unexplainable and doubtful characters were included in the appendices. All the characters recorded were carefully copied by iconography, which was very different from the ancient character dictionary that had been copied and reproduced in the past and whose characters were distorted. Most of the later compilations of ancient characters were modeled after the Wu Shu. Sun Jean wrote Gleanings from the Ancient Preliminary Period (1888) and Remainder of the Ancient Preliminary Period (1929), which corrected the errors in the interpretation of Jinwen by previous authors. Fang Chunyi wrote the book Duiwuzhai Yi ware mark kaoji (1935), but it was not published until many years after his death. Liu Xinyuan's main work is "Qi goblet room Ji Jinwen shu" (1902). The interpretations of Jinwen by the above mentioned authors exceeded those of their predecessors in many ways.

Since the Song Dynasty, many people regarded the bird seal script of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods and other Jinwen with peculiar curved strokes as Xia and Shang scripts. Gong Zizhen (1792 ~ 1841) had suspected Wang Fuzai "Zhong Ding paragraph knowledge" recorded ﹑ cast with such inscriptions "Dong Wu Zhong" is Wuyue ware. Fang Joon Yi clearly pointed out: "If Xue recorded the four Shang bells, Wang's record of Dongwu bells, to be also Zhou ware, is that at that time there was such a one, such as Qin's muzuzhuan, Shu Shu Shu Shi" ("embellishments", Volume 1, "Yi Ware said"). This is a kind of progress. The Qing people also surpassed their predecessors in linking the inscriptions with the relevant historical data in ancient books. Currency writing really became a source of ancient writing research from the Qing Dynasty. The trend of collecting and studying ancient coins started very early. However, since the Song Dynasty, most of the researchers of ancient coins had described the knives and cloth coins of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, which basically belonged to the Warring States period, as those of the ancient emperors such as Tai Hao, Yao, and Shun and the Xia and Shang Dynasties, and explained the text of the coins in the best possible way. Until Qianlong's Qian Lu (1751), it still remained at this level. The turnaround in the study of ancient coins was also at the time of the Qian-Jia Dynasty. According to Cai Yun's "Fetish Talk" (1827), Qian Daxin said that "coins began in the Warring States period", and at the time of the Jia-Qing Dynasty, Chou Shang-ling made the "Records of Jijin" (1819), which categorized the ancient swords and cloths into the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period. Since then, the study of pre-Qin coins was gradually on track. Wu Dacheng's "Ancient Preliminary Works" included a number of coins, and Liu Xinyuan's "Qi Goblet" also explained some of the coins.

After the Qianjia period, the study of seal characters also made considerable progress. The Yuan and Ming people did not know that there were ancient seals earlier than the Qin Dynasty (the Ming people had actually included a lot of Warring States seals in their ancient seal catalogs, but they did not know their age). In 1787, Cheng Yaotian wrote a preface to Pan's Seal Records of the House of Seal Watching, in which he explained the word "private seal" in the seal of the Warring States period, and said, "The word 'seal' was used in the ancient language, but the word 'er' was not used in the ancient language. It also said, "'Seal' but with 'Er', the ancient text is also saved" (Tongyilu, Volume 8, "Narrative of the Seal Records of Watching Seal Building"). This is the precursor of the Qing people to recognize the pre-Qin ancient seals. In the fifteenth year of the Daoguang period (1835), Zhang Tingji (1768-1848) compiled Qingyige Ancient Seals Occasionally, claiming that the pre-Qin seals were ancient seals. During the same period of time, Chen Jieqi compiled "Ten Chung Shanfang Seal Citation", which listed "Ancient Seal" and "Zhou-Qin" seals as two types of Chinese seals. According to its content, the former is basically the seal of the six states, and the latter includes the seal of Qin during the Warring States period, the seal of Qin Dynasty and the seal of the early Han Dynasty. Chen Jieqi thought that the Zhou-Qin seals were from the end of the Zhou Dynasty and the Qin Dynasty, while the ancient seals were from the Three Dynasties. In the fourth year of Guangxu (1878), he said in a letter to Wu Dacheng: "...... vermilion bronze seal, the former people called the Qin seal, do not know is the third generation, today more see, also seems to be the text of the six countries" (five books of the state worship worship shakuji, book five e Yin April 22 zha), the ancient seal The knowledge of the age of the ancient seal is close to the actuality. Some of the seal inscriptions were included in the "Supplement to the Preliminary Chinese Seals". As for the seal scripts of Chinese seals, during the Jiaqing period, there were character compilations such as Gui Fu's "Miu Seal Scripts in Separate Rhymes" (1796), which was a more careful copy of the seal scripts and was better than the previous character compilations of other kinds of ancient scripts. After the Daoguang period, some new types of ancient writing materials were discovered, such as seal clay characters (i.e., seal characters on seal clay, mostly from the Han Dynasty), ancient pottery characters, and oracle bones of great significance, which were only discovered at the end of the Qing Dynasty. Ancient pottery writing was first found in Linzi, Shandong Province in the same period, and later in Yizhou, Zhili Province (now Yixian, Hebei Province) and other places, Chen Jieqi was the first to identify the "three generations of ancient pottery writing" (in fact, most of them belonged to the Warring States period) and the collection of the person. Wu Dacheng was the first one to seriously study the ancient pottery texts. He wrote some explanations according to the iconography of Chen Jieqi's pottery, and included many pottery texts in the "Supplement to the Ancient Preliminary Writings".

The oracle-bone inscriptions of the Anyang Yin Ruins, which were mainly used for divination, began to attract the attention of antique dealers in about 1898. In the following year, Wang Yirong (1845-1900) identified them as ancient texts of three generations and collected them. The discovery of the Yinxu oracle bone inscriptions, which were rich in information and important in content and dated from the late Shang Dynasty, before most of the bronze inscriptions, is of great significance in the history of paleography. The year after Wang Yirong's identification of the oracle bones, he committed suicide and died because of the invasion of Beijing by the Eight-Power Allied Forces, and the oracle bones in his collection were returned to Liu Osprey (1857-1909). Liu Osprey selected some of the oracle bones and compiled them into "Tie Yun Zang Turtle", which was published in the 29th year of Guangxu (1903). This was the first book on oracle bones. Liu Osprey had already called the oracle bone inscriptions "Yin people's knife and brush writing" in his preface, and in the following year, according to "The Hidden Turtle", Sun Jean wrote "Examples of Qi-wen". This was the first monograph on oracle bone inscriptions. The manuscript of this book was printed by Luo Zhenyu, the founder of oracle bone science, in 1917. After the discovery of the oracle bones, the antique dealers deceived the collectors by claiming the excavation site as Tangyin. Luo Zhenyu was the earliest scholar to inquire about the real excavation site. In 1910, Luo Zhenyu wrote "An Examination of the Chaste Divination Texts of the Yin Shang Dynasty", which determined that the place where the oracle bones were unearthed was the old ruins of the capital city of Yin, and that the oracle bones were the relics of the Yin dynasty's divination, thus advancing the study of oracle bones to a great extent (he was wrong to think that the Yin Ruins were only the ruins of the Wuyi Dynasty at that time). The book was published in the following year.) In the year following the publication of this book, the Qing dynasty was overthrown.

The development of jinshi in the Qing Dynasty was also reflected in the works devoted to the study of the Shuowen. Duan Yucai's "Commentary on the Explanation of the Characters of the Shuo Wen" quoted the golden character "le" under the character ""("")，which was used as an explanation. Gui Fu, who was a jinshi scholar, repeatedly quoted jinshi texts in his Shuowen yizi zheng (Explanation of the meaning of Shuowen). Wang Gyun, in his "Shuo Wen Shi Biao" (Explanation and Examples of Shuo Wen), often compared the character forms of Jinwen with those of Shuo Wen.

With the deepening of the study of ancient characters, some mistakes of the Shuowen became more and more obvious. Wu Dacheng pointed out in the preface of the "Supplement to the Preliminary Script" that the forms of the ancient characters in the Shuowen did not match with the bronze inscriptions that were commonly seen, and he suspected that all of them were written during the "weekend of the seven kingdoms". Chen Jieqi had a similar view (Preface to Chen's Supplement to the Ancient Preliminary Works). Both Wu and Chen also expressed doubts about the age of the seal scripts collected in the Shuowen. From the "ancient preHan supplement", "word" and other books about the seal text, coin text and ceramic text of some words can be seen, Wu Dacheng has realized that these textual materials are basically "weekend", "six countries" when the things. He also clearly pointed out under the words "二" and "钧" in "古籀补" that the character shapes of these two characters in "说文" were consistent with the inscriptions on the bronze vessels of the Six Kingdoms, and that they should be the characters of the "Six Kingdoms". It is not a real "ancient text". It can be seen that Wu Dacheng's view on the ancient characters of the Shuowen was largely based on his study of the Warring States' scripts. Wu Dacheng, Sun Jean, and others often pointed out the errors in the seal forms of the Shuowen as well as in the shape and meaning of the characters spoken by Xu Shen, based on the ancient texts. The first article of the "Supplement to the Ancient Preliminary Writings" says: "The characters seen in ancient artifacts, some of which are slightly different from the font of Xu Shu ...... can be seen as the intention of the ancient sages in creating the characters, and can be corrected for the errors in the transmission and writing of the small seal scripts."

Sun Jean, in the thirty-first year of the Guangxu era (1905), wrote a book called "The Original of the Name", which summarized the results of his research on oracle bones and gold texts from the perspective of philology. He pointed out that characters "originated from images", and that Chinese characters were initially "based on the ancient stone carvings of Babylon and Egypt that were handed down from the present day, and were drawn as if they were being painted", and that they were gradually simplified due to the inconvenience of writing, and that they were "finally neatly organized into the form of seal scripts", and that it was only after this that the characters were written in the form of "seal scripts" that the Chinese characters were written. Later, due to the inconvenience of writing, it was gradually simplified, and "finally, it was neatly organized into the form of the seal script", and became the kind of script contained in the Shuo Wen. The book also pays much attention to the examination of characters from the same radical together. To a certain extent, "The Origin of Names" has gone beyond the circle of jinshiology and traditional philology, and it is an important work in the history of paleography. In the era of the Republic of China, under the influence of western academic thought, modern Chinese history, archaeology and linguistics were gradually formed, and paleography was gradually strengthened in its scientific nature.

The representative scholars in the study of ancient characters in the early Republic of China were Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei. Luo Zhenyu's research on ancient characters began at the end of the Qing Dynasty, but his academic activities were mainly carried out in the Republican era. Luo had a rich collection of ancient writing materials such as oracle bones, bronzes, gold topographies, seals and seals of clay. He was not only diligent in recording and disseminating all kinds of materials, but also in researching and writing, and his contributions were manifold. Among his works, the most important one is "The Examination and Interpretation of Yinxu Shuqi" (1915), which was written on the basis of "The Examination of Yinshang Zhenbu Writings". This book made great breakthroughs in the interpretation of oracle bone characters and the reading of divination, laying the initial foundation for oracle bone studies. Wang Guowei began to engage in the study of ancient characters under the influence of Luo Zhenyu. He made achievements in the study of oracle bones, jinwen, and guwen, seal script, etc. In the field of oracle bones, Wang Guowei made a great breakthrough in the interpretation of oracle bones and the reading of divination. In the oracle-bone inscriptions, Wang Guowei did not know a lot of characters, but they were often important for the reading of divinatory texts. His main contribution was the study of history, geography and etiquette by corroborating oracle bone inscriptions with canonical texts. In the field of jinwen, he authored Five Kinds of Guantang Ancient Jinwen Kaoxue and many other single articles. In the area of ancient script and seal script, he wrote "Wei Shi Jing Kao", "Shi Zhou Chuan Shuo Zheng", "Qin used the ancient script during the Warring States period", "Tongxiang Xu's Seal Genealogy Preface", etc. He believed that the ancient script was written during the Warring States period and that the ancient script was written during the Warring States period and that the ancient script was written during the Warring States period. He believed that the ancient script was the script of the six eastern states during the Warring States period, and his statement was more precise than Wu Dacheng's, which has now become the final word. As for whether the seal script is the script of Qin during the Warring States period, there is still a difference of opinion in the field of paleography.

Luo and Wang were both influenced by western academic thought and were dissatisfied with the old Jinshiology. Luo Zhenyu advocated to change Jinshiology into Ancient Artifacts (Yunweng Manuscript? Discussing Ancient Artifacts with Friends"). Wang Guowei once called the study of ancient bronzes and inscriptions "the study of ancient artifacts and ancient characters" ("Preface to the List of Recordings of the Golden Texts of the National Dynasties"), and often used the terms "the study of ancient texts", "the study of ancient characters", or "the study of ancient writing" alone. He also often used the name of "the study of ancient texts", "the study of ancient characters" or "the study of ancient characters" alone, which showed that he was inclined to divide Jinshi into the study of ancient artifacts and the study of ancient characters. This actually reflected the objective trend in the academic world at that time. However, from the point of view of Luo's and Wang's research work, they have not been able to get rid of the boundaries of the Jinshiology and the traditional philology.