Dates
Prolegomena

The Warring States situation, with its paucity of hard data and its high incidence of constructed and spurious texts, presents special methodological difficulties, even at the elementary level of establishing the dates of events. Circularity is a pervasive problem, since the chronological framework in which we wish to place the texts is in part derived from those very texts. We here list some of our first principles and specific working presumptions. We do not regard them as infallible, but after some experience we have reason to think that they will give a better starting point than their alternates or opposites.

Presumptions

1. No text source, and no inscriptional source, carries an absolute presumption of accuracy. The content of any advocational or celebratory text is liable to be affected by the text's agenda of advocacy or celebration. Exaggeration is especially likely in texts (including some inscriptions) which originally had ceremonial or ritual conditions of composition and use. Government documents, or the early Chinese equivalent of them, are notoriously prone to exaggerations and omissions.

2. The great majority of Chun/Chyou (CC) entries are genuine, and are also sound except as they were interfered with by the proprieties of court reportage.

3. Ruler sequences in Shr Ji (SJ) probably rely on earlier sacrificial traditions, and those traditions are presumptively sound except where they may have been normalized for reasons of ritual propriety or political expediency (as was the case with Shang; see Keightley Sources Tables 1 and 15), or altered within the SJ compositional process to agree with other and less sound data.

4. Reign lengths for Warring States rulers in SJ are presumptively sound except (as is famously true of certain Chi and Ngwei rulers) where SJ has mistaken a change of year number for a new reign, or has distorted better information in order to accommodate the imaginary and chronologically impossible career of Su Chin as portrayed in the Jan-Gwo Tsv material (see Maspero)..

5. Transmission genealogies are presumptively sound in proportion as they are reported in early sources. Latter Han and susequent genealogies may rest on earlier tradition, but they may also be attempted solutions of the same problems which we ourselves are facing.

6. Bamboo Annals (BA) dates are presumptively sound for the period close to its time of compilation (the end of the 04c), whatever may be the verdict about the value of BA date as records of earlier times.

7. Symbolic or schematic events in any text, or those marked by conspicuous astronomical phenomena, are intrinsically suspect.

8. Events in any text establishing precedents, precursors, or first instances of later innovations are intrinsically suspect. This defines one class of suspect CC entries.

9. Cosmically nice numbers, or data which add up to such numbers (eg 72, 100, 500, 700, and 1,000), are intrinsically suspect as schematic or symbolic, and must always be viewed with suspicion.

General Considerations

The ultimate test of a chronological system is that it should be self-consistent. Ideally, there should be a plausible explanation for supposed dates that turn out to be inconsistent with the system, and are thus wrong or spurious. It is important not to abandon rejected claims as false, and thus beneath the historian's notice. We should instead examine these claims for what they may tell us about the milieu in which they were first advanced. One useful question to ask, of any purported event record, is: What does the writer or sponsor of this have to gain if others accept it as true?

15 April 2000 / Contact The Project / Exit to Results Page