中国书法史,英文版.doc

Chinese character and Chinese calligraphy [k?liɡr?fi] As we know, Calligraphy is the art of making beautiful or elegant[eliɡ?nt] handwriting, the Chinese calligraphy is not only very beautiful but also very practical . It use by the scholar’s [sk?l?] four jewels [d?u:?l], they are the writing brush ,ink stick（墨）, ink slab（砚） and paper. In ancient Chinese legend [led??nd], the Chinese character was created by 仓颉, but in fact , the formation of Chinese characters have a very long course.Here is 仓颉, he is the official historian of 黄帝，it seemed that he has 4 eyes .As human society forms, people remember things by tying a knot on the rope, then they learned to carve some pattern [p?t?n] on the stones or trunk. and these pattern became the early Hieroglyphics [,hai?r?glifiks] (象形文字). In China , the most famous Hieroglyphics is the oracle [?r?kl, ?:-]（甲骨文）,you may know this word form a very famous Software company. The oracle was found in the late 19th century in An Yang, He Nan. this found shocked the world. The oracle mainly used in the Shang dynasty to sacrifice [s?krifais] (祭祀). In the late west Zhou dynasty , with the bronze ware(青铜器) was used extensively [ikstensivli], the seal character(金文) was also used extensively in sacrifice ,but the seal character still belonged to the Hieroglyphics. In Chungqiu and Zhanguo dynasty ,the countries were disrupt [disr?pt](分裂) and the vassals(诸侯) [v?s?la] were always make wars. Then the ethnic [eθnik] fused (民族融合) , and the Chinese character has a big development ,especially when the QingShihuang unified China, he also unified the character .)It is the Lesser Seal(小篆), the Lesser Seal is the first unitive character in China, It is normative (规范的) and signifying [signifaii?](符号化)，so it played a great role on the Chinese character’s development. In west Han dynasty, the Lesser Seal is still the Official character ,but the Lesser Seal is so difficult to write, and it is against the spread of character, so the clerical [klerik?l] （隶