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| The oldest script in Chinese and Japanese calligraphy is called seal script or tensho,identified as a specific style in China around the third century B.C. In the tensho style, characters do not have clearly identifiable "strokes," and the lines are fairly even in thickness. This is because these early characters were originally written, not with a brush, but with a kind of bamboo fountain pen. On the right is an 18th-century scroll written in tensho. |
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The tensho style is known as "seal" script because it came to be used chiefly for seals after brush writing became popular. The image at the left shows the impression of a seal from eighth-century Japan. |
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