The origin of Chinese characters has always been a subject of speculation and debate. One of the most widely spread theories is that Cangjie made calligraphy, and he is revered as the "Sage of Calligraphy". However, new discoveries of underground artifacts in recent years may overturn this historical concept. Perhaps Cangjie's creation of characters is just a myth, not actual history.
Although there are records of Cangjie in historical documents, whether these historical books are reliable enough has always been questioned. Cangjie is described as the historian of the Yellow Emperor, who was born in 2717 BC. If we believe in this version, the history of Cangjie's character creation is less than 5,000 years at most. However, from an archaeological point of view, oracle bone inscriptions are a mature writing system. However, in the archaeological discoveries before oracle bone inscriptions, although there were some sporadic symbols or words, no systematic writing system appeared. The oracle bone inscriptions are at least more than 1,000 years old from Cangjie's time. If Cangjie indeed created Chinese characters, there should be more evidence left in numerous sites. In addition, some archaeologists also pointed out that some characters unearthed in ruins 5,000 years ago are similar to oracle bone inscriptions, which shows that the formation of Chinese characters preceded the era when Cangjie lived. Therefore, according to archaeological discoveries, the history of Cangjie's character creation becomes doubtful.
What is even more puzzling is that although there are some records mentioning "Cangjie's creation of characters" in ancient documents, it is worth noting that these records usually appear in non-historical books such as literature or philosophy. "Historical Records", the first historical document, does not mention the character "Cangjie" or the record of "Cangjie's creation of characters". This raises an important question: why did the historian Sima Qian not mention Cangjie, and why did they remain silent about it?
From the perspective of existing literature, the earliest mention of Cangjie is "Xunzi Jieye", which is more than 2,500 years ago when Cangjie coined characters. So, how did Xunzi know "Cangjie"? This raises questions. There is also the view of Zhu Yanmin, a history professor at Nankai University. He believes that Cangjie may be confused with Shangqi (Yao's half-brother and ancestor of the Shang Dynasty) because the ancient pronunciation of the two is similar. However, even if we can prove the existence of Cangjie (or business contract), this is not enough to prove that Cangjie actually created Chinese characters.
From a historical perspective, character creation is a major project, and history books usually record details of such a major event. However, the existing ancient documents do not leave any specific records about Cangjie's creation of characters, which raises doubts about Cangjie.
Finally, through the analysis of documents and archaeology, a professor came up with a new point of view: Cangjie may be just a symbolic symbol, representing the organization and standardization work of the formation of Chinese characters in a certain period. The historical existence of Cangjie is still an unsolved mystery, and there is no conclusive evidence whether he created Chinese characters.
In the evolution of Chinese characters, there may be more unknown stories and mysteries. However, regardless of the origin of Chinese characters, it has become a treasure of Chinese civilization and has been passed down to this day.
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