Megg's History of Graphic Design Study Pints Chapters 3-5
Chapter 3: THE ASIAN CONTRIBUTION
Legend suggests that by the year 2000 B.C., a culture was evolving in China in virtual isolation from the pockets of civilization in the West. Three innovations developed by the ancient Chinese that changed the course of human events are: gunpowder, paper, the compass
About 1800 B.C., Ts-ang Chieh was inspired to invent
Chinese writing by claw marks of birds and footprints of animals. Elementary pictographs of things in nature were highly stylized and composed of a minimum number of lines.
There is no direct relationship between the spoken and written Chinese languages. Written Chinese was never broken down into syllabic or alphabetic signs for elementary sounds. The Chinese calligraphic writing system consists of logograms, graphic signs that represent an entire word. The earliest known Chinese writing, called chiaku-wen was in use from 1800 to 1200 B.C. and was closely bound to the art of divination, an effort to foretell future events through communication with the gods or long-dead ancestors. It was also called bone-and-shell script because it was incised on tortoise shells and the flat shoulder bones of large animals, called oracle bones.
Chinese Calligraphy was unified under Shi Huang Ti
In earlier times, the Chinese wrote on bamboo slats or wooden strips using a bamboo pen and dense, durable ink. After the invention of woven silk cloth, it, too, was used as a writing substrate; however, it was very costly.
Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese high government official, is credited with the invention of paper in A.D. 105, and was deified as the god of the papermakers. His process for making paper from natural fibers continued almost unchanged until papermaking was mechanized in nineteenth-century
England.
One theory about the origins of relief printing in China focuses on chops, seals made by carving calligraphic characters into a flat surface of jade, silver, gold, or ivory.
Another theory focuses on
Legend suggests that by the year 2000 B.C., a culture was evolving in China in virtual isolation from the pockets of civilization in the West. Three innovations developed by the ancient Chinese that changed the course of human events are: gunpowder, paper, the compass
About 1800 B.C., Ts-ang Chieh was inspired to invent
Chinese writing by claw marks of birds and footprints of animals. Elementary pictographs of things in nature were highly stylized and composed of a minimum number of lines.
There is no direct relationship between the spoken and written Chinese languages. Written Chinese was never broken down into syllabic or alphabetic signs for elementary sounds. The Chinese calligraphic writing system consists of logograms, graphic signs that represent an entire word. The earliest known Chinese writing, called chiaku-wen was in use from 1800 to 1200 B.C. and was closely bound to the art of divination, an effort to foretell future events through communication with the gods or long-dead ancestors. It was also called bone-and-shell script because it was incised on tortoise shells and the flat shoulder bones of large animals, called oracle bones.
Chinese Calligraphy was unified under Shi Huang Ti
In earlier times, the Chinese wrote on bamboo slats or wooden strips using a bamboo pen and dense, durable ink. After the invention of woven silk cloth, it, too, was used as a writing substrate; however, it was very costly.
Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese high government official, is credited with the invention of paper in A.D. 105, and was deified as the god of the papermakers. His process for making paper from natural fibers continued almost unchanged until papermaking was mechanized in nineteenth-century
England.
One theory about the origins of relief printing in China focuses on chops, seals made by carving calligraphic characters into a flat surface of jade, silver, gold, or ivory.
Another theory focuses on