Was There a Xià Dynasty? - Sino-Platonic Papers

Victor H. Mair, “Was There a Xià Dynasty?”Sino-Platonic Papers, 238 (May 2013)It is entirely possible there was a Xia (I am sure I would have been skeptical about theexistence of the Shang if Yinxu had never been discovered), but many, many things are entirelypossible, and there is no evidence for the existence of the Xia (unless you count things writtendown a millennium or more after the fact). Your list of what would be necessary to prove itsexistence (section XXX) is a very useful thing to put out there.I have not come across much about the dynasty from the past ten years which coversground you have not already covered in the paper. I looked over the relevant passages of LiLIU’s books again, and they provide a good overview of the standard Chinese understanding ofthe Xia, but, again, seem to have nothing (relevant to the question at hand) that you haven’talready covered. There have (of course) been a number of articles published in Chinese over thepast decade which discuss the Xia, but the ones I have read mostly seem just to be using the termas shorthand for something else. I found an interesting article called “Xià-Shāng-Xī Zhōuwénhuà duì qí xīfāng hé běifāng dìqū wénhuà shèntòu de fāngxiàngxìng yǔ céngjíxìng”夏 商 西 周 文 化 對 其 西 方 和 北 方 地 區 文 化 滲 透 的 方 向 性 與 層 級 性 by Jiǎng Gāng 蔣 剛 (Kaogu2008.12), but it is really only interested in the interactions between various material cultures —“Xia” here simply means Erlitou culture, and nothing other than the terminology would change ifyou systematically replaced the word “Xia” with “Erlitou” (other than in the obligatoryintroduction that discusses how the Xia were China’s first dynasty, and a very brief passage thattries to connect archaeological sites with names from the Bamboo Annals and the Zuo zhuan).Other articles just use Xia as basically a time word. The article “Nánfāngshuǐ yízhǐ Xià hé XīZhōu shíqí yícún de chūbù rènshi” 南 方 水 遺 址 夏 和 西 周 時 期 遺 存 的 初 步 認 識 by Duàn Tiān段 天 and Zhū Yǒnggāng 朱 永 剛 (Kaogu 2011.4), for example, uses the word “Xia” to describewhat it calls a “proto-Shang” ( 先 商 ) site belonging to the Xiajiadian 夏 家 店 culture (in Hebei).So “Xia” here has no meaning except, I suppose, the time period identified as “Xia” by the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project. Other than these kinds of references, I haven’t been able totrack down anything new about the Xia.It is difficult to identify a Shang graph used to write the word xià—I think it is still anopen question whether the graph Jonathan Smith (see XXXIV) and others suggest writes xiàdoes in fact do so (this is the graph that scholars have variously identified as 夏 , 俊 , 夒 , 夔 , etc.),36