É. Apor (ed.): Jubilee Volume of the Oriental Collection, 1951–1976. Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
I. ECSEDY: Historical Time and Mythical History in Ancient China
62 with the change of dynasties and usually stopped at the state border — both before the era of the emperors and later when China was often split into small states; their duration is limited in space and time, and they reveal thus the primary and primarily determinative connections of writing and state, written records and state formation in China. The first written records, short inscriptions preserved on the so-called oracle-bones and on metal objects, recorded the state rituals of the Shang-Yin state (16th—11th century B.C.) as well as other activities of importance to the state, e.g. donations, exactly marking the month, day and, occasionally and fortunately, the hour of the day with respect to the importance of the event and to the cultic time-regulations of hunting or agricultural rituals. Still, the intention was to record the event itself and not its date; thus it is sometimes possible to discover the date of an event just from an accessory incident, for example, a recorded astronomical phenomenon or other extraordinary moment breaking through the stereotypical forms. As it is, reality is not generally described or presented by means of identifying or identifiable details; even if details are given, they are hard to interpret and to understand because of their chance character. Actual, objective time is not the subject of Chinese records; even in the case of minute detailing it is usually impossible to put a year to a date as there is no outside point of comparison, point of time, or chronological practice known and acknowledged as real; and there was no apparent breach or jump in the long, gradual and unidirectional historical development of the immediately known world either. Both the main weakness of Chinese historywriting, i.e. vagueness or the absence of points of time, and its greatest strength, its poetically compact accounts especially of events receding in space and time — naturally in inverse ratio to their distance from the time of writing — can be explained by the geographically relatively isolated position of ancient China and of the first Chinese states and by the fact that Chinese history takes shape with an unbroken continuity. In the writing of history in China historical time had become timeless, due to the absence of any means of comparison; it was bound, regulated and arranged in a continuous succession of events when direct, unavoidable and continuous contact with the outside world forced on the Chinese the awareness of foreign, "deviant" time. This happened about two thousand years after the appearance of the first records, at the end of the T'ang-empire (618—907 A.D. ); and it took the form of history arranged in the order of chronicles,beginning and ending with points of time, in the Sung-era (960 —1279). However, both before and after, the most important moments of history, the monographical picture of the most significant historical events were described as uninterrupted sequences, indeed often as simultaneous happenings. This was frequently done deliberately, especially after a natural caesura, e.g. a change of dynasty. [2] This is how one of the most peculiar features of Chinese historical sources actually came into being: the actual dating of a record apparently grounded in time or at least formally dated or simultaneous with the event described, is usually incidental or arbitrary even in the case of a huge mass of records set in chronological order; also in the description of important
