Was There a Xià Dynasty? - Sino-Platonic Papers

Victor H. Mair, “Was There a Xià Dynasty?”Sino-Platonic Papers, 238 (May 2013)stated in LY 17:4 (“If there were a ruler who would put me in power, could I [Confucius]not make a Jōu in the East?”); and (c) Sùng, with its generally admitted Shāng heritage,as developed and celebrated in the spurious Shāng Sùng poems which, as the Dzwǒ Jwànquotation patterns show, were not accepted as part of the canon by Lǔ, but had beenadmitted as genuine by most other states. The BA, written on behalf of Jìn, has the effectof equaling or trumping all those claims, in a document which proceeds to combine theclaims of all three states in a single lineage with Jìn, and later Ngwèi, as its validinheritor. This theoretical utility of the BA in the political theory wars of the 04c,paralleling the well-known literal military battles of the same period, seems to us anentirely sufficient motive for its composition at that time. That its makers tinkeredrepeatedly with the “significant intervals” latent in it, as David Nivison has convincinglyshown in his several studies of the text (e.g., “The Riddle of the Bamboo Annals,” 1995,most recently revised in 2009), gives us a window into its composition process and thethinking behind its design and redesign. It does not validate the BA as being in realitywhat it claims to be. That text’s value as independent testimony to the historical linearityof Syà and Shāng as preceding Jōu, or to anything of earlier date, thus seems to us to bezero. We consider that the BA is wholly intelligible as an artifact of the dynastic theorywars of the late 04c.Placed at its correct moment in history, we find the BA to be an intensely valuabledocument, which testifies in detail to the Ngwèi variant of the mind of the times. It seems to usmisconstrued if taken as evidence for the mind or deeds of remotely earlier times.YÌ 易14. Syà 夏 as a character does not occur, in any meaning, either in the Yì text or in the majorstandard commentaries. It is sometimes held that Syà “incidents” are alluded to in theimages of the Yì. For example, Gāu Hv́ng 高 亨 interprets Yì 5:4 “emerging from the pit”and 38:4 “opposing the orphan, meeting the original man” (the latter line has textualvariants which would eliminate the possible allusion) as referring to the Syà story told at22