Studies In Jin Sigillography

The ancient seal is the largest writing material of the warring states period except the bamboo slips.The Jin seal is an important part of the ancient seal.The number of the Jin seal is very large,whether in the seals recorded by predecessors or in the new ancient seals.This paper mainly discusses the Jin seal from the aspects of characters,names and idiom seals.In addition to the introduction,this paper is divided into four chapters:The first chapter is the study of the Jin seal’s characters.First,it is the regional characteristics of the Jin seal’s characters.Although many scholars have discussed it,there are still some unfinished things.We have supplemented it on those bases,including describing the regional characteristics of some characters,and adding dozens of regional characters that have not been discussed before.The second section is the sorting out of the mix-up phenomenon of the Jin seal’s characters.The form mix-up of the Jin seal’s characters rarely has the whole word mix-up,generally is the theory of mixing of components.It will be divided into one-way mix-up and two-way mix-up two categories,respectively give examples to illustrate,and summed up the Jin seal’s characters mix-up of four main characteristics.At the same time,we also distinguish some subtle difference between the easy to mix,and on the basis of this,we make a judgment of scholars’ divergent interpretation opinions.The third section is an investigation of the different writing and heterogeneous characters in the Jin seal.Different writing can be divided into several categories from the level of stoke and the level of component.Heterogeneous words include two cases: the change of configuration and the same configuration but with different phonetic or ideographic symbols.The second chapter is the study of the names seen by the Jin seal.According to the number of words,the name of a person can be divided into two categories: double name and single name.The fist section of this chapter sorted out the double name in the Jin seal,combined with the existing research results,tried to explain their connotation,and referred to the same name in other documents.In the second section,the eleven name with the highest frequency are counted,and their possible meaning are speculated.The third section is about some phenomena reflected by the name of the Jin seal,including three main aspects: the way of naming,the regional characteristics,and the correspondence between the names of people in other handed down or unearthed documents.The third chapter is the study of the Jin idiom seal.As a result of the use and nature of different,idiom seal presents a special style.The first two sections is about the changes of the glyph of the idiom seal.The first section is about the changes of the whole glyph of the idiom seal.The second section takes four high frequency characters “yi(宜)”,“jing(敬)”,“Zhong(中)” and “zheng(正)” as examples to demonstrate their development and evolution sequence.In the process of analyzing the changes of the glyphs,we noticed that the official and private seal glyphs and idiom sea glyphs have the branch of traditional characters and popular form of characters,many words only appear in the variant of idiom seal.The third section from the printing surface shape,the printing button shape and the printing body decoration three aspects to the Jin idiom seal shape and system.The fourth section is the overall study of the layout and reading of the printing surface.Through the study of the latter two sections,we found some forms,layouts and order of reading that are common in the idiom seals but rare in the official and private seals.The fourth chapter is the notes of the Jin seal.The first section examines and interprets private seals of Jin,and at the same time involves the geographical attribution of some seal.The second section is the interpretation of the characters in the idiom seal,including the interpretation of the characters and the interpretation of idioms.The third section first summarizes the four main ways of distinguishing the false according to the form,the style,the form and the usage of words,and the context.Then,these methods are used to investigate four Jin seals and question their authenticity.In the last section,we rediscuss the classification of ancient seals in combination with the use of ancient seals,and make a supplementary explanation of the classification of Jin seals in connection with “shi(士)” from the aspects of shape and structure.