Was There a Xià Dynasty? - Sino-Platonic Papers

Victor H. Mair, “Was There a Xià Dynasty?”Sino-Platonic Papers, 238 (May 2013)being associated with this phonophore, the sun radical dropped off. Consequently, the originalgraph now had to represent two words that were probably originally completely separate: theprimary meaning of “large” and the newly acquired meaning of “summer.”IXSo far as I have been able to determine, Xià does not occur as a dynastic title in the BIs, almostcertainly not in those of the Western Zhōu, and apparently not in those of the Eastern Zhōueither. The matter is of such great importance that I cite here the words of the late Gilbert Mattos(personal communication: August 22, 2002), an authority on Zhōu bronze inscriptions:The graph identified as Xia occurs in relatively late bronze inscriptions datingmostly from the late Chunqiu and Warring States periods. In bronze inscriptions,it occurs used in three ways: 1. the name of a tribe mentioned in a fifth- or fourthcenturyBC bronze text; 2. “summer” in a Warring States bronze text; and 3. aplace name in a Warring States bronze text. In other words, your suspicion aboutits being a late term is undoubtedly correct. And, in the bronze texts at least, thereare no cases where Xia is used in reference to an earlier dynasty. [emphasisadded]This is in contrast to Shāng which, as David Keightley has affirmed, does occur as the name ofthe conquered ethnos in the Western Zhōu BIs, e.g., that on the Li gui. And Zhōu occurs scores oftimes as the name of the capital (or as Zhōuyuán [“Plains of Zhou”]). Shāng and Zhōu asdynastic titles are thus fundamentally different from Xià in that the graphs to write them arepreserved in contemporaneous sources.XI would like to propose that there is a reasonable way to extract the meaning of “large” from theearliest BI forms of Xià. Namely, I believe that the graph may depict a very large head with anenormously wide beard. This is actually much more evident in the seal forms of the character andin other old forms, where we can see the strands of a large beard hanging along the sides(cheeks?) beneath the head and a long part of the beard extending directly downward from the8