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The term large seal script traditionally refers to written Chinese dating from before the Qin dynasty—now used either narrowly to the writing of the Western and early Eastern Zhou dynasty (403 BCE), or more broadly to also include the oracle bone script (). The term deliberately contrasts the small seal script, the official script standardized throughout China during the Qin dynasty, often called merely 'seal script'. Due to the term's lack of precision, scholars often prefer more specific references regarding the provenance of whichever written samples are being discussed. During the
Han dynasty The Han dynasty was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China (202 BC9 AD, 25–220 AD) established by Liu Bang and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–206 BC ...
(202 BCE220 CE), when clerical script became the popular form of writing, the small seal script was relegated to limited, formal usage, such as on signet seals and for the titles of stelae (inscribed stone memorial tablets which were popular at the time), and as such the earlier Qin dynasty script began to be referred to as 'seal script'. At that time, there remained knowledge of even older, often more complex glyphs dating to the middle-to-late Zhou dynasty, directly ancestral to the Qin forms—which resembled the Qin forms in their rounded style, as opposed to the rectilinear clerical script style prominent during the Han.中國古代簡帛字形、辭例數據庫
/ref> As a result, the 'large' and 'small' terms emerged to refer to the respective scripts. The Han-era '' Shuowen Jiezi'' dictionary () credits sometimes traditionally identified with a group of characters from the '' Shizhoupian'' (), preserved by their inclusion within the ''Shuowen Jiezi''. Xu Shen, the latter text's author, included the variants differing from the structures of small seal script, and labelled the examples as (), referring to the name of the original book, not the name of the dynasty or of a script


See also

*
Seal script Seal script or sigillary script () is a Chinese script styles, style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of bronze script during the Zhou dynasty (1 ...
* Small seal script


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* * {{list of writing systems East Asian calligraphy Chinese script style