Investigation Of The Carved Zhuanwen Characters Of The Medieval Period In China

The carved Zhuanwen characters of the Medieval period in China refer to all the Zhuanwen carved characters used in the literature material starting from the period of Wei, Jin and North-South dynasties and until the period of Tang and Sui dynasties. That is because all of the Zhuanwen characters remained in their original form and undergone no changes in the process of rewriting. We can say that those characters gave us the reliable information about what people of that time knew about Zhuanwen characters, how deep they investigated this phenomena and what was the process of calligraphy development like.For the reference material in this dissertation we used the "Shuowen Jiezi" character dictionary by Xu Shen, the most complete and structured Zhuanwen etymological dictionary, the "Yupian" and other books compiled in the Medieval Times and which are preserved nowadays, as well as "Guwenzigulin(the compilation of the comments about ancient characters)" and other compiled reference books on the graphic form of ancient characters. Using all the reference material, we conducted a full investigation and comparison of the characters.Basing on the contemporary theory of the formation of Chinese characters, we investigated the peculiarities of characters’graphic form making the analysis on three levels:investigating the whole character, their forming parts and the strokes. We also investigated the origin of Zhuanwen characters, their types and peculiarities.The Zhuanwen characters of the Medieval period not only inherited the peculiarities of the graphic form of the ancient characters, but they also reflected the later period of the Zhuanwen characters development, the peculiarities of clerical script and standard script, moreover, they went through the same process of development as ancient and modern scripts and comprised the core parts of this process. Therefore, having a broader perspective, we managed to make a deeper, more valuable and more comprehensive investigation of the Medieval Zhuanwen characters.