Quantitative Studies Of Ancient Seal Characters

Ancient Seal characters are characters incised on Ancient Seals and mainly used in the Warring States Period. The amount of these characters is quite large. Therefore, they are very important in both historical documents and philological researches.The study of Ancient Seal characters started about 100 years ago. Since then, scholars mainly focused their attention on interpretations and studies of some unknown characters. And when they did such researches, they did by illustrating some particular cases. Although great achievements are made in all those studies, Ancient Seal Characters have never been treated as a whole system. Basic questions like 'how many characters there are in the system' are yet to be answered. It is on these questions that this dissertation studies - investigation in a more systematical and complete way.The material in this dissertation comes from the book of GuXiHuiBian. There are three chapters: Chapter I is a study on frequency of each character. According to the book, there are altogether 13119 models of Ancient Seal Characters on 5708 ancient seals. Among the characters, 912 were blurred models and the rest 12207 could be studied. Chapter II is a classification of character forms. And Chapter â…¢ is a study of three special writing styles.The main method applied is mathematical statistics. All the conclusions are based on mathematical analyses so as to be more objective and trustworthy.