According to traditional historical records, the Xia Dynasty was upgraded from Dayu to Xia up to 1/4 – from the mythical Emperor Shun. Traditional Chinese stories tell of the Xia Dynasty before the Shang Dynasty. With or without dynasties and states, China’s advanced agriculture and social organization can be traced back thousands of years before the Shang Dynasty. The Shang rulers held power for about 600 years, a period of cultural and economic stability during which Chinese culture and innovation flourished.
Zhou historians interpret the Yin-Shang royal family as a universal dynasty that controlled the central Yellow River plain until it was occupied by the Shang Dynasty. While traditional legends of the Xia Dynasty have long been despised as pure mythology, the oracle bone inscriptions found in Anyang, Hebei reveal a list of traditional Shang rulers in the Records of the Grand Historian and the Book of Zhu . The Bamboo Chronicle is not a myth, but a historical fact. Gu Jiegang and other Chinese scholars in the early 20th century (1892-1980) and Qian Xuantong (1887-1939) doubted the historical authenticity of Shang a and Xia, calling them mythological fabrications, such as Huangdi and Yao a-, Shun e, or Yu big
- Many modern scholars in the West and China questioned the existence of the Xia Dynasty, pointing out that many features of the Xia Dynasty were completely opposite to the Shang Dynasty, leading to the belief that the Xia Dynasty was created as a kind of Zhang Weishang.
Whether the Erlitou Culture is a Xia Dynasty site is controversial, mainly focusing on whether the archaeological evidence of urban settlements in the area before the Shang Dynasty should be used as the confirmation of the traditional single Xia Dynasty, or because of the trajectories of population growth and agricultural development from Neolithic to ancient history in the fertile regions of eastern China, regardless of the historicity of the Xia. Radiocarbon dating places the Erlitow site in c. 2100-1800 BCE, provides physical evidence for the existence of a modern and possibly equivalent state of the Xia Dynasty, as described in later classical Chinese historical writings. Discovered by Xu Xiusheng in 1959, the Erlitou culture spread throughout Henan and Shanxi and later Shaanxi and Hubei, and has been identified by several Chinese archaeologists as the site of the fabled Xia Dynasty (2100-2100). about 1700 BC). In 2011, Chinese archaeologists from Erlitou discovered the remains of a palace that appeared to date from around 1700 BC, further confirming the existence of the Xia Dynasty and Erlitou’s central role in its development.
In 1959, a large palace was unearthed in Yanshi City, which some Chinese archaeologists believe was the capital of the Xia Dynasty; although Western archaeologists are reluctant to make this claim, citing no written sources to confirm the names of the Xia Dynasty and its rulers . The matter remains controversial because there is no conclusive evidence linking several archaeological sites emphasizing the early culture of the Advanced Bronze Age with the Xia described in the written history of the Han people. In the 1960s and 1970s, archaeologists discovered urban ruins, bronze tools and tombs at the same sites mentioned in ancient Chinese historical documents about Xia; In 2011, Chinese archaeologists unearthed in Erlitou, Henan Province The discovery of the remains of a royal palace dating to around 1700 BC has further sparked debate over the existence of the dynasty. The Xia Dynasty is said to be the first true dynasty in China, recorded in the late 3rd century BC, the ancient bamboo chronicle “Ji Ling Zhi”; the historian Sima Qian (called Shi Ji, written about 145 BC) records.
According to the “Da Shi Ji” (Historical Records, which began around the 2nd century BC (a thousand years after the fall of the Xia Dynasty), there were 17 kings in the Xia Dynasty. According to historical records, the Xia Dynasty is believed to have lasted from about 2070 to 1600 BC. It is said to have been founded by Yu Grea, a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, who was born around 2069. The first government to appear in ancient China, and the first to adopt a dynastic policy, ancient China is known as the First Dynasty, and some historians Debating the origin and roots of the Xia Dynasty.
According to legend, the Xia Dynasty was founded by the legendary Yu Yu after the last of the Five Emperors, Shun, granted him the throne. According to Sima Qian’s “Historical Records”, the last of the Five Emperors, Shun, left the throne to Dayu, who established the Xia Dynasty, the first dynasty in China. Thus, the Xia Dynasty may have been the mistress of the powerful political system in the early Shang Dynasty or shortly before, and was chosen by historians as a model of that era for its remarkable cultural achievements. The argument that the Xia Dynasty is a mythological construction suggests that the Zhou (and subsequent dynasties) wanted to make it clear that the previous dynasties lost their right to rule due to immoral behavior, thus creating a primitive dynasty, the Xia Dynasty.
Since then, additional evidence for the existence of the Xia has been unearthed, but no written records of any of these structures identify them as Xia designs, and thus there is ongoing debate about whether China’s First Dynasty was a reality or simply a politically motivated fiction by later writers.