From Oracle Bones to the Qin-Han Reforms

Boltz, William G. The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System. New Haven, CN: American Oriental Society, 1994.
Summary

Although the script of the oracle bones and the Zhou bronzes are fairly well documented there is a gap between them and the Qin standardized script. With this lack of evidence it is hard to show a direct line of evolution between the early scripts and the Qin-Han scripts. A further complication to the matter is that most of the pre-Han works were filtered through Han scribes who revised and altered the works to align with their script. Since the early 90s, however, more and more artifacts have been uncovered that have the original text forms from the pre-Han period. These artifacts found, written on wood, bamboo, or silk, have brought new light to the evolutionary process of the script. 

I order to show how the Kai Shu 楷书 (standard script) came into existence it is necessary to first look at Qin Shi Huang Di 秦始皇帝 and the reforms of Li Si 李斯. The author brings new light to the story of the Qin Emperor burning books. He argues that a main reason for the burning could have been to guarantee the success of his script standardization. At the time he came to power many different scripts were being used, but the burning of the books destroyed scholarship written in the Gu Wen 古文 (ancient script). Thereby making it useless to learn the script, as nothing was written in it. This reform led to a near millennium gap between the bone and bronze inscriptions and the Qin script. The author argues that the period of standardization lasted from Li Si (c. 200BCE) to Xu Shen 许慎 (c. 100CE). During this period there were still a number of variant scripts which slowly faded away. This variants might have had lexical differences to the standard script, but the author only focuses on the graphic variants in order to show the clear evolutionary pattern.  

Next the author looks at the Ma Wang Tui manuscripts which he shows can be accurately dated to the pre and early Han Dynasty because of their use of Han Emperor's given names (which would have been avoided after they were emperor). In these pre-reform manuscripts there are several cases of graphic variation. The main example of this variation is characterized by the characters 堇 and 勤. Both characters are pronounced the same, and both have the same meaning, they just look different. This shows that the 力 radical had not yet been standardized, and it remained in flux until after the reform period. This type of variation is to be expected because the longer the script was used the more characters needed to be created by adding pieces (radicals in this case) to preexisting characters. And although the process was used regularly, there was no standard way of adding radicals until after Xu Shen. Another variation is classified by the difference in uses between 而 and 能. The characters are used in the same way, but even now we are not sure if they were pronounced the same way, or if they had the same meaning.