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
63 historical moments and processes what is of fundamental importance is not points of time but retrospective unity, the whole of the course of time given a compressed unity. Thus it is not an accident that Chinese historiography as well as Chinese historical surveys of any time begin with the mythical tradition, that is with the wise and blissful lives of divine ancestors and rulers of magic number and power who came to conquer an unknown world compiled of parts of magic number and of magic phenomena. Stories describing the beginning of history in a poetical but condensed form were quoted for thousands of years as real examples and parables; indeed they were often endowed with the apparent authenticity of historical reality as well. Their validity and the ancient character of the tradition relating to them was openly questioned only when the first archeological finds to be dated with absolute certainty were discovered in the 1920' s — by Swedish archeologists — near the capital of Shang-Yin state, present day Anyang (Honan province). Since then, investigations have, in different ways and to different degrees, rehabilitated the ancient traditions that have been — in the light of the above discoveries—gravely discredited or rather misunderstood. Only the early dates going so back as the 4th and 3rd millennia, have proved unacceptable, but the early records, the accounts of ancient heroic deeds as mythical examples and parables have not lost their credit. Besides the textual analysis of sources the internal connections of mythical tradition also help the scholar to understand the most ancient level of the written records of Chinese history and its tradition. We have to reconsider at least the inherent reference of some widely-known half-truths considered commonplaces as concerns myths and history, myths and literature in China. For on the one hand, although written tradition, traditional history and even the historian' s concept of past and contemporary world begin with myths, a sizeable systematized or systematizable mythology has not taken shape in China, and on the other hand, while Chinese literature is interwoven with magic elements, phantasy plays a strikingly unimportant part in mythical tradition. Besides the real antagonisms of historical reality, this paradox can be attributed, in the case of China, to a misleading starting point. Inevitably we have the viewpoint of a present-day reader who can examine mythical tradition without reference to its historical background, social medium and communal function, distingishing them for objective but modern reasons, naturally never unpunished. If, however, we concentrate on the primary significance of writing, recording, marking and preserving the beginning of history — on its civilising and civilisation-preserving significance —,we have to conclude that writing and written tradition born in the court, on the imperial peaks of culture, and promoted ex officio serves, first of all, to maintain representative values of importance to the state, supporting the perpetuance of society, with all the consequences that this implies; written records determine not only the kaleidoscopic elements of tradition passed down to distant future generations but also the direct survival of their parts or of the whole as the selective communal memory of a society selecting and chosing on the basis of literacy. Naturally, the most ancient tradition, memories of the history-forming and history-commencing struggle with nature and those of the foundation of the I
