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
66 with several names appear also as divine ancestors in some elements of traditional accounts and are ranked among the prehistoric "emperors" of mythical number and rank, succession and period of rule in later historical chronologies; in other stories the same persons are heroes and sages with magical power or knowledge, e.g. the personification of agriculture and barter, the introducer of medical science,andhe who formulated the signs of divination; in the end, they become the ministers of the so called "Yellow emperor" and fade away into the mythical past. It is not their personal fate but the process of organising the state, the organisation of administration following the age of cultic leaders and cultural heroes that assures the order of their stories. For that reason even if the fragmental mosaic of myths would be carefully fitted together or is set into order according to persons and, let's say, catalogued, they would remain shadowy figures. (For that matter, nobody attempted to catalogue them, perhaps because of the dispiriting difficulty firstly with interpreting the material and then rearranging and selecting it. ) On the basis of the writer' s latest investigations [ 3] , she was led to the realisation that the Chinese myths may contain historical evidence even in their prehistoric anachronism; that this evidence may often be even more authentic than the early historical records which can be dated but are bound to a date, spotlighting a single event; and this conclusion seems to offer a key to the many-sided, complex problem of the network of tradition and traditional texts. Instead of forcing an "epic" interpretation and coherence on the myths from outside and from a distance of several thousand years, we should grasp the historical moment of their crystallization; instead of concentrating on the exact date of the events they relate, we should rather observe the processes evolving from them, in our case, during the period of state formation in China which is not easy to circumscribe but provides an unparalleled historical lesson. In China the first, decisive and peculiarly long ("Asiatic") turning point of historical development, the foundation of civilisation and its final phase constitutes the period to which the myths are relevant, in which the broken pieces of reality unite. It would seem the main task of historical research to give the due credit to written mythical tradition which has shed light on a crucial chapter in history, created and ctystallised in the myths, so that even the timeless myths themselves — made to speak in their natural place and context — can be interpreted as authentic sources of social-historical processes. Notes = -- ::.-._=-..- = == = = 1. A preliminary form of this paper was submitted in Hungarian to the conference devoted to the work and memory of the eminent classical-philologist K. Marót (Budapest 1973, Eötvös Loránd University), cf. 'Idő és történelem, A Marót Károly emlékkonferencia előadásai' [Time and History. The Papers of the Károly Marót Memorial Conference, ed. by L. Kákosy, E. Gaál] , Budapest 1974. 2. On the nature of Chinese historical works see E. BALÁZS, 'L'histoire comme guide de la pratique bureaucratique (Les monographies, les encyclopédies, les recueils de statuts): Historians of China and Japan, ed. by VV. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank, London 1961. 3. Cf. 'The Asian Soil of Chinese Civilization': Ancient Socieiv and the Asiatic Mode of I reduction. ed. by F. Tökei, Budapest (in print).
