page_title: Chinese bronze inscriptions
section_title: Western Zhou
hierarchical_section_title: Chinese bronze inscriptions / Zhou dynasty inscriptions / Western Zhou
caption_attribution_description: English: Chart showing linearization of Chinese character forms during the first two thirds of the Zhou dynasty. Graphs were typed using publicly available fonts from the 漢字構形資料庫 of the Academia Sinica's Chinese Document Processing Laboratory (CDPL) under the Institute of Information Science, and dated via the Bronze Inscriptions Database of the Bronze Inscription Research Team (BIRT) under the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica.
context_page_description: Chinese bronze inscriptions, also commonly referred to as bronze script or bronzeware script, are writing in a variety of Chinese scripts on ritual bronzes such as zhōng bells and dǐng tripodal cauldrons from the Shang dynasty to the Zhou dynasty and even later. Early bronze inscriptions were almost always cast, while later inscriptions were often engraved after the bronze was cast. The bronze inscriptions are one of the earliest scripts in the Chinese family of scripts, preceded by the oracle bone script.
context_section_description: Western Zhou dynasty characters (as exemplified by bronze inscriptions of that time) basically continue from the Shang writing system; that is, early W. Zhou forms resemble Shang bronze forms (both such as clan names, and typical writing), without any clear or sudden distinction. They are, like their Shang predecessors in all media, often irregular in shape and size, and the structures and details often vary from one piece of writing to the next, and even within the same piece. Although most are not pictographs in function, the early Western Zhou bronze inscriptions have been described as more pictographic in flavor than those of subsequent periods. During the Western Zhou, many graphs begin to show signs of simplification and linearization (the changing of rounded elements into squared ones, solid elements into short line segments, and thick, variable-width lines into thin ones of uniform width), with the result being a decrease in pictographic quality, as depicted in the chart below.
  Some flexibility in orientation of graphs (rotation and reversibility) continues in the Western Zhou, but this becomes increasingly scarce throughout the Zhou dynasty. The graphs start to become slightly more uniform in structure, size and arrangement by the time of the third Zhou sovereign, King Kāng, and after the ninth, King Yì, this trend becomes more obvious.
  Some have used the problematic term "large seal" (大篆 dàzhuàn) to refer to the script of this period. This term dates back to the Han dynasty, when (small) seal script and clerical script were both in use. It thus became necessary to distinguish between the two, as well as any earlier script forms which were still accessible in the form of books and inscriptions, so the terms "large seal" (大篆 dàzhuàn) and "small seal" (小篆 xiǎozhuàn, aka 秦篆 Qín zhuàn) came into being. However, since the term "large seal" is variously used to describe zhòuwén (籀文) examples from the ca. 800 BC Shizhoupian compendium, or inscriptions on both late W. Zhou bronze inscriptions and the Stone Drums of Qin, or all forms (including oracle bone script) predating small seal, the term is best avoided entirely.
caption: Linearization of characters during the Western Zhou