Seal Script - Unified Small Seal Script

Unified Small Seal Script

The script of the Qin system (the writing as exemplified in bronze inscriptions in the state of Qin before unification) had evolved organically from the Zhou script starting in the Spring and Autumn period. Beginning around the Warring States period, it became vertically elongated with a regular appearance. This was the period of maturation of Small Seal script, also called simply seal script. It was systematized by Li Si 李斯 during the reign of the First Emperor of China Qin Shi Huang through elimination of most variant structures, and was imposed as the nationwide standard (thus banning other regional scripts), but small seal script was clearly not invented at that time. Through Chinese commentaries, it is known that Li Si compiled Cangjiepian 倉頡篇, a non-extant work of character recognition listing some 3,300 Chinese characters in small seal script. Their form is characterized by being less rectangular and more squarish.

In the popular history of Chinese characters, the Small Seal script is traditionally considered to be the ancestor of the clerical script 隸書, which in turn gave rise to all of the other scripts in use today. However, recent archaeological discoveries and scholarship have led some scholars to conclude that the direct ancestor of clerical script was proto-clerical script, which in turn evolved out of the little-known vulgar or popular writing of the late Warring States to Qin period (see Qiu Xigui, in references).

The first known character dictionary was the 3rd century BC Erya 爾雅, collated and bibliographed by Liu Xiang 劉向 and his son Liu Xin 劉歆, lost the pre-Han script during the course of textual transmission. Not long after however, the Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字 (AD 100–121), the lifework of Xu Shen 許愼 Han Dynasty, was written. Its 9,353 entries reproduce the standardized small-seal script variant for each entry, and for some entries other pre-Han variants from the late Zhou era. Entries are categorized under 540 section headers.