China has had a tradition of revision of history since ancient times, which is the main reason why we can still clearly restore the historical development context after thousands of years. However, an important premise for the later dynasty to compile the history books of the previous dynasty is that the previous dynasty has documented and passed it down.
For example, the "History of Ming" revised by the Qing Dynasty was added or subtracted from the Ming Dynasty's own "Ming Shilu" and other materials, and if it is separated from this kind of recorded literature, even if historians rack their brains, it is impossible to accurately record what happened decades or even hundreds of years ago.
Throughout history, the Xia Dynasty, known as the "First Dynasty", is undoubtedly a strange exception.
The literature of the Xia Dynasty has been mentioned many times in the history books since the Zhou Dynasty, and its names include "Xia Shu", "Xia Li", "Xia Shi", "Xia Ling", etc., and the "Zuo Chuan" alone quotes the contents of the "Xia Shu" as many as 15 times.
The "History of Xia Benji" written during the Western Han Dynasty not only records the lineage of the xia dynasty monarchs, but also has a more detailed record of the history of the most distant Dayu period.
The "Spring and Autumn of the Lü Dynasty" once mentioned that the Xia Tai Shi Ling finally saw that "Xia Jie was confused, and the riots became more and more severe, but it was carried out by his tufa ben shang", and Confucius also said that "I want to see the Xia Dao, it is the reason for the qi, and the lack of signs, I have to "Xia Shi" Yan", which shows that the later records of the history of the Xia Dynasty are derived from the literature records of the Xia Dynasty itself on the one hand, and from the memories of the descendants of the Xia Dynasty, the Western Zhou Fengguo State.
But strangely, the current archaeological findings do not support the claim that the Xia Dynasty has been documented.
The Yanshi Erlitou site in Henan is recognized by the academic community as a remnant of the middle and late Xia Dynasty, and has been excavated for more than 60 years so far, although large palaces, bronze ceremonial vessels and handicraft workshops have been excavated, but no writing has been found.
According to the study of "Sixty Years of Erlitou Archaeology", more than 30 kinds of independent "carved symbols" have been found on the artifacts of the Erlitou site, but the chronicle text of "ligature grouping" has not been found.
The biggest difference between words and symbols is that symbols can only represent individual artifacts, we can simply understand it as the stick figures of the ancients, while words can understand, that is, record events, and have a common meaning interpretation within a certain group.
In fact, the mainland "carved symbols" have a long history, as early as 8,000 years ago in Henan Jia Lake site has been found, these symbols basically appear as a single individual, to indicate the use or attribution of the carrier (family emblem), can be regarded as the predecessor of the birth of the word, but can not be seen as a text.
The Erlitou site is already a remnant of the development of the Xia civilization to a mature stage, if there is no writing, then why talk about the Xia Dynasty has a documentary history book?
Let us feel doubly confused is that writing is an inevitable product of the development of human civilization to a certain stage, and the characteristics of cultural cross-regional integration presented by the Erlitou culture have clearly indicated that the Central Plains at this time has entered the era of national civilization, and it is difficult to imagine how the Xia Dynasty without writing can transmit government decrees and calendars. The Neolithic era, which preceded the Xia Dynasty, had already begun to appear, so why did it suddenly disappear in the Xia Dynasty?
In fact, the historical records of the Xia Dynasty cited in the pre-Qin literature are standardized in terms of words and condensed semantics, which are by no means popular oral transmission, and must have written words as a carrier.
On the one hand, the literature of later generations clearly sorts out the history of the Xia Dynasty, on the other hand, the archaeological reality that no writing has been found in the remains of the Xia Dynasty, so we can't help but have a question: Since no Xia script has been found in Erlitou, how did the history of the Xia Dynasty pass down?
Before we can unravel this confusion, we have to mention the Shang Dynasty.
As we all know, the oracle bone of the Shang Dynasty is the earliest known script on the mainland, and it is precisely because the oracle bone is already a mature writing system of pictograms, fingerings, and meanings, so scholars have judged according to the law of the development of the script that the oracle bone is certainly not the earliest script, and there must be early writing before it, such as the Xia script.
Indeed, the Book of Shang once recorded: "Only the Yin ancestors have books and canons", and the word "book" in the oracle bones still retains the original pictorial form, depicting the situation of "two strings tied in a string, and the vertical pen is uneven", which is similar to the form of bamboo Jane, but does not match the excavated tortoise shell. In other words, the history of the Shang Dynasty was indeed passed on to future generations by another carrier.
As for the oracle bone, it is only a ritual style, which is buried on the spot after the divination is completed, and is not used for posterity. Therefore, the history of merchants recorded in historical books such as the Book of Shang, Zuo Zhuan, and The Chronicle of History all come from the Jian Mu documents of the Shang Dynasty.
However, the Jian Mu of the Shang Dynasty has not been able to preserve, but it is the accidental discovery of the oracle bone, which allows us to verify the true truth of the history books through the unique perspective of the oracle bone.
Will the history of the Xia Dynasty be a similar situation?
In the Xia And Shang Dynasties, there were roughly four kinds of carriers of writing: pottery, bronze, bamboo, and beast (armor) bone. These four vectors represent four different types of script development.
For example, carved on ordinary pottery, belongs to the folk font, the content is primitive, craftsmen with a certain text foundation may engrave the family emblem or the name of the utensil, and more may just randomly graffiti some symbols that only they can understand, which is also the main reason why the pottery unearthed in Erlitou is mostly "carved symbols", but this does not mean that the Xia Dynasty is still in the original stage of "carving symbols".
The inscription on the bronze vessel is called Jinwen, which is the official script. It is worth mentioning that the Xia Dynasty did not have the technology to engrave characters on bronze casting molds, and archaeological findings have confirmed that it was not until the middle and late Shang Dynasty that few numbers began to appear on bronzes, and only in the Western Zhou Dynasty did more words appear in the inscriptions.
As for the oracle bone, it is a divination script unique to the Shang Dynasty, but the Xia Dynasty did not adopt this carrier, which is also an important reason why Erlitou archaeology has not unearthed a Xia Dynasty oracle bone for decades.
In this way, the only thing that can carry the historical documents of the Xia Dynasty is the possibility of Jian Mu, and compared with bronze and armor (beast) bones, Bamboo Jian is the most difficult to preserve.
Not only that, in the Xia and Shang dynasties, only a very small number of groups were able to master and read the script, including the upper nobles who governed the country, the sorcerers who mastered sacrifices, and the historians responsible for recording events.
Therefore, the Jinwen, the Oracle, and the Jianmu (Literature Style) have both common and unique characters. Among the more than 5,000 words of oracle bones that have been found, the more than 1,000 words that we can interpret and read are mainly judged based on the common words with the literature, and the rest that cannot be interpreted belong to the unique words of the oracle bone.
So the Xia Dynasty has historical records but no written archaeological findings, is it because the only carrier bamboo jane is not easy to preserve?
This must be one of the important reasons, but it is not limited to this, because archaeology actually has deep discoveries.
In the Dawenkou cultural site in Shandong, archaeologists accidentally found a "Jiong" character, there are two ways to write, one for the orthographic writing, one for the simplified writing, judging from the scene depicted, this character refers to the ancient period responsible for the star fire sacrifice and arrange agricultural production of the "Huozheng" position.
Curiously, however, identical symbols were also found on the urn coffin burial (used to bury babies and children) at the site of Anhui's Weichi Temple. Two late Neolithic sites that are not unified with each other 800 miles apart have found characters written in the same way, which reveals two key points of information:
1. The position of Huozheng was innate and hereditary in a specific family, which also facilitated the theocratic group to consistently interpret the will of "heaven"; 2. There was already a character in the theocratic group that could be recognized, even though there was no so-called unified regime at that time, but at least specific characters were already passed in the fixed group.
Similar examples are 5,000 years ago Liangzhu civilization, at the time of the rise of the Xia civilization represented by Erlitou, the Liangzhu civilization has long declined, but the "subject" character unearthed at the Liangzhu site has also been found in Erlitou, which is more than 3700 years old, although it is still stuck in the character stage in terms of usage, and has not yet been ligatured into sentences, but it shows that the spread of words in the embryonic stage has long begun, and this inheritance is also completed through the theocratic groups.
The Liangzhu civilization is precisely the most typical ancient country dominated by theocracy, the social operation is dominated by theocracy, and all the resources of the state are given priority to serve religious sacrifices. This also means that in the historical inheritance before the Shang Dynasty, in addition to the records of historical officials, the main carrier is actually the shaman (fortune teller) responsible for celestial phenomena and sacrifices.
This group relied on the hereditary family inheritance to pass on the events that occurred from generation to generation, to the late summer and early Shang dynasty when the royal power and the divine power were unified, and then to the Western Zhou Dynasty, the kingship became the only ruling core, and the theocracy and wizards were no longer the dominant state, and then withdrew from the historical stage, and the corresponding divination special texts disappeared.