I really enjoyed
Mike's post about the metal plates and it started me wondering, is there a correlation between the medium used and the kind of document preserved? There are records from the Chinese preserved on wood, bamboo, silk, stone, paper, metal, and ceramic. I hypothesized that more domestic things would be preserved on ceramic, silk, and bamboo while the official institutional documents would be kept on paper, metal, and stone.
Records from the Chinese court credit Tsai Lun with the invention of paper around AD 105. read more about that
here. The earliest known Chinese writing dates to the 28th century BC so it is clear that for several centuries the primary writing surface was not paper. (
this is a really interesting source about early Chinese writing and it covers the original yin and yang) In the time in between the invention of writing and paper people wrote on shell, bone, sticks, ceramic, and bronze. (there is an interesting theory that the vertical nature of written Chinese is a preservation of writing vertically on bamboo slats) What is interesting to me is that after the invention of paper it appears that the other media continued to be used.
I surveyed of some anthropological papers cataloging artifacts with writing or inscriptions. I was surprised by what I found because they did not match my hypothesis. There appeared to be a four fold division. It turned out that the more official things belonging to the government were written on wood and stone. These were things like seals, drums used for long distance communication (we really should have looked at that in our oral unit) and catalogs of law. The paper artifacts came mostly from academic institutions (a lexicon) and businesses. Buddhist and Taoist artifacts were primarily metal like ritual pots and sacrificial equipment. Finally, shell, ceramic, and bone artifacts were "reserved for the mundane requirements of daily life"
Long. I only anticipated a division between institutionalized and non-institutionalized records I had not considered that the different institutions would have different preferences. Note: there is a huge possibility of error in this 1) I may have sampled or catagorized things badly 2) not everything is equally preserved so there may well have been much more paper. However, even with the very likely errors I find it interesting.
Something that I learned that was unexpected was that the invention of paper changed the Chinese characters. When the characters were engraved or chiseled they were curvy; after the transition to brush and paper, they became pointy. This is probably because those shapes were easier to form with a brush rather than a stylus. So even though the other media continued to be used after paper became common, writing on them became much more difficult, likely reinforcing a preference for paper. Read more about this
here.
Mike Thank you so much for using your blog master super powers to help out. I don't know what happened to the scheduling feature, but I was on top of a mountain and could not have fixed it without you. You're the best!
ReplyDeleteHaha. You are welcome Alicia. So I really really enjoyed this post. I would give it an A+ if they gave pluses in college. I think that is a way interesting hypothesis and even more interesting findings. I guess it would make sense if every different institution used a different medium. We do that today too. Artsy people use macs. Sciency people are usually on a pc. BYU uses blackboard for grading, other schools use other systems. I think it turns out to be a tradition thing too. There are a lot of people that don't move away from something because it's comfortable even if it is completely impractical.
ReplyDeleteWow this is interesting and something I had never really thought about- the mediums people choose to write on depend on the importance of the topic to be written. It makes sense that the more important things like government items were engraved on mediums that lasted longer. We don't have much of that today because of the computer. Actually on second thought we are all about back up today, we back up the most important date with very secure and painstakingly thorough methods... Wow yet another way we are like ancient civilizations!
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to me that the medium that they used really influenced the look of the characters and is responsible for how they look today, more pointy instead of curvy. It reminds me of how English has two ways of writing, cursive and the more commonly used standard way of writing. I wonder if one form developed off of the other based on different mediums used or if it was just more legible to write standard instead of in cursive?
ReplyDeletei think that cursive was a product of ink pens actually. I imagine that print developed from, well, print.
ReplyDeleteThis made me think about something: how I choose the material on which I am going to write reflects the way I feel about what I'm writing, or the importance I perceive of it. Just today: when I was taking notes in one of my econ classes, I was doing so in my notebook, in ink. Even the neatness of my writing and the organization of my notes reflected the fact that I plan to come back to these notes over and over again. When I passed a note to my friend in Arabic, it was on the back of a post-it note I don't need anymore, scratched on the edge, because all I needed to do was tell her the time of my yoga class, and I anticipate never seeing that slip of paper again, or her keeping it, because all she needed was the information.
ReplyDeleteI think there are a lot of factors that go into the choice of medium that is used, and we have hit on several. I would like to draw a correlation between the institution and the the material that they used. I find it interesting that the common people had to use the most common mediums available - bones from dinner last night, the pot shards that my sister broke trying to make dinner, and the shell I pulled out of the rice patty last week. Then the academia needed a material that was less common and could be more precise in writing on it, but still not to labor-intensive, so they got the paper. Then the government, the dynasties, who can command as much work as they want, got the elite materials of wood and stone. Also writing for them was a less frequent occurrence, and when it did happen it was important enough to be preserved, or at least they thought so. Just some ideas that we interesting to me as I imagined myself in that society.
ReplyDelete