A New Collection Of Chinese Characters On Ancient Seals

Ancient seals refer to the seals of the pre-Qin period, which mainly appeared during the Warring States Period as a symbol of official and personal identification. The extant ancient seals arein large quantities, which are the most important materialto study the history of Warring States besides the bamboo slips. The identification and classification of the characters on the seals is the base of the systematic research of ancient seals, which plays a great role in the study of Chinese philologyand also the study of the official systems, geography, surnames, economic situation, social customs and artsof ancient china.GUXIHUIBIAN (The collection of ancient seals) and GUXI WENBIAN (The collection of the textson ancient seals) (the Gs for short)edited by Luo Fu-yi in the 1980s, were thought to be themost complete collection and systematic analysis of ancient seals, a fortiori the most representative achievementsin this area.However, a lot of new materials have been found during the past thirty yearsand great achievement has been made in thecollation and explanationto ancient characters recently. Thus, a revision and supplement is an urgent necessary for the Gs.Basedon the Gs and the latest research, this dissertation tries to systematically classify and interpret the characters on ancient sealsby employing the database of the characters.This dissertation consists of four parts.Chapter one briefly introducesthe collection and explanationsof the scripts on ancient seals, especially the research based onthe Gs. Then itsummarizes theresearch results in the last ten years in this area and puts forward the main points, aims, range and methodof this dissertation.Chapter two makes a revision and supplement to the explanation of 1599 characters in GUXI HUIBIAN, which aims to reflect the recent development on the research of the scripts on ancient seals.Chapter three makes a supplement of the new-found seals to GUXI HUIBIAN. 3732 seals in this supplement are not included in GUXI HUIBIAN,2742 of which are not included in Hui Kao. Most of these seals consist of 2 characters andare published for the firsttime in this paper. The amount of the seals has come to a total 9440, which serves as the range of my classification of the characters.Chapter four is a statisticaldescription to the classificationofallthe characters on ancient seals. According to the examination of all those 9440 seals,22308 Chinese ancient charactershave been got finally,2755 of which appear only once.31 characters recur more than 100 times, while 338 recur more than 10 times and less than 671 times,705 recur more than 3 times and less than 9 times,1710 recur twice. An index of all these characters is compiled at last.