Was There a Xià Dynasty? - Sino-Platonic Papers

Victor H. Mair, “Was There a Xià Dynasty?”Sino-Platonic Papers, 238 (May 2013)writing. For these reasons, documents of fixed type attributed to Pán Gv̄ ng (early Shāng)or to any earlier ruler of any dynasty, are intrinsically implausible. It can also be seenthat, in the Shāng oracle bones generally, there is no interest in previous rulers beyond theones sacrificed to as part of the Shāng dynastic lineage. There is thus no historicalsituation which might give color to a claim that Syà speeches, after a period of beingfrozen in oral form, were reduced to writing in Shāng. The same applies, mutatismutandis, to Jōu: whatever interest the Jōu had in previous dynasties was essentiallyadversative rather than documentary. The only period of time to which the composition ofthese purportedly early Shū can be plausibly ascribed is the one beginning with theeffective collapse of the Jōu in 0771, when the question of dynastic transition, and inparticular the question of what power would succeed Jōu, first forcibly presented itselffor solution. The question was answered by the universal state achieved by Chín in 0221.Within that span, from 0771 to 0221, a plausible attribution will require a motive or acompatible ambience in the current culture. The manifest use of purported early Shū inWarring States controversies in the 04c, the time when an earlier form of state was beingreplaced by an advanced bureaucratic state, and when increased state power made auniversal state militarily practicable, gives a high degree of external relevance and alsoprovides a convincing motive. We conclude that the first presumption for any supposedearly document, and especially one purporting to derive from the time before theappearance of writing in the reign of Shāng Wǔ Dīng (that is, all purported Syàdocuments), is that, at earliest, it was composed for controversialist purposes during the04th century.To the extent that Syà is known from these documents, we must conclude that Syà is afigment of the 04th century political imagination.——EBB26