Ebook: The Origin And Early Development Of The Chinese Writing System

A new scan of William Boltz's book on the origin of Chinese writing, with pages shown in landscape mode.

From the introduction of the book: "In the present work, apart from the preliminary discussion in chapter 1, the possibility of a general theory of writing is only touched on in passing, and more by implication than by explicit statement. My purpose is instead to describe the nature and internal structure of the Chinese script from the time of its invention in the middle of the Shang age down to the period of its standardization in the Han, and to dispel some of the misconceptions that have long surrounded it.

I have divided the discussion of this span of roughly a millennium and a half into two parts: (I) the origin and early development of the script in the Shang, which I have called the Shang Formation, and (II) the regularization and standardization of the script in the Ch‘in-Han period, which I call the Ch‘in-Han Reformation. With the discovery and availability in the last twenty years of a considerable body of pre-Han and early Han manuscripts we can see more clearly than heretofore the exact nature of the pre-Han, non-standardized, script, and assess more accurately the effects of the Han standardization. This in turn enables us to identify previously unknown features of the “reformation”."