Chronology Project ( 1996 )

The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project was a multi-disciplinary project commissioned by the People's Republic of China in 1996 to determine with accuracy the location and time frame of the Xia Dynasty, the Shang Dynasty and the Zhou Dynasty. Some 200 experts took part in the project, which correlated radiocarbon dating, archaeological dating methods, historical textual analysis, astronomy, and other methods to achieve greater temporal and geographic accuracy. Preliminary results of the project were released in November 2000. However several of the project's methods and conclusions have been disputed by other scholars. The traditional account of ancient China, represented by the Records of the Grand Historian written by Sima Qian in the Han Dynasty, begins with the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, leading through a sequence of dynasties, the Xia, Shang and Zhou. Sima Qian felt able to give a year-by-year chronology back to the start of the Gonghe Regency in 841 BC, early in the Zhou dynasty. For the period before that date, his sources (now mostly lost) were unreliable and inconsistent, and he gave only list of kings and accounts of isolated events. Later scholars were unable to push a precise chronology back past Sima Qian's date of 841 BC. Many elements of the traditional account, especially the early parts, were clearly mythical. In the 1920s, Gu Jiegang and other scholars of the Doubting Antiquity School noted that the earliest figures appeared latest in the literature, and suggested that the traditional history had accreted layers of myth. Noting parallels between the accounts of the Xia and Shang, they suggested that the history of the Xia was invented by the Zhou to support their doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven, by which they justified their conquest of the Shang. Some even doubted the historicity of the Shang dynasty.

Ox scapula with a divination inscription from the reign of the Shang King Wu Ding. In 1899, it was found that Chinese pharmacists were selling "dragon bones" marked with curious symbols, which the scholar Wang Yirong identified as an early form of Chinese writing. These were finally traced back in 1928 to a site (now called Yinxu) near Anyang, north of the Yellow River in modern Henan province. The inscriptions on the bones were found to be divination records from the reigns of the last nine Shang kings, from the reign of Wu Ding. Moreover, from the sacrificial schedule recorded on the bones it was possible to reconstruct a sequence of Shang kings that closely matched the list given by Sima Qian.

Archaeologists focussed on the Yellow River valley in Henan as the most likely site of the states described in the traditional histories. After 1950, remnants of an earlier walled city of the Erligang culture were discovered near Zhengzhou, and in 1959 the site of the Erlitou culture was found in Yanshi, south of the Yellow River near Luoyang. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the Erlitou culture flourished ca. 2100 BC to 1800 BC. They built large palaces, suggesting the existence of an organized state. More recently the picture has been complicated by the discovery of advanced civilizations in the Yangtze valley, such as Sanxingdui, Panlongcheng and Wucheng, of which the traditional histories make no mention.

Until the mid-20th century, many popular works, both Chinese and Western, used a traditional chronology calculated by Liu Xin early in the first century AD. However modern scholars were proposing shorter chronologies, for example typically placing the Zhou conquest of the Shang in the 10th century BC instead of the 11th. In 1994, Song Jian, a state councillor for science, was impressed on a visit to Egypt by chronologies stretching back to the 3rd millennium BC. He proposed a multi-disciplinary project to establish a similar chronology for China. The project was approved as part of the ninth five-year plan (1996–2000).

The Project used a combination of methods to attempt to correlate the traditional literature with archeological discoveries and the astronomical record. A key reference point was the accession of King Yi of Zhou, when according to the Bamboo Annals the day dawned twice. The Project adopted (without acknowledgement) the proposal of the Korean scholar Pang Sunjoo that this referred to an annular solar eclipse at dawn that occurred in 899 BC. Other scholars have challenged both this interpretation of the text and the astronomical calculations involved. Perhaps the most significant event requiring dating is the conquest of the Shang by the Zhou. Received texts give the day in the sexagenary cycle, the phase of the moon and the positions of the sun, moon and certain planets, but not the year. Previous chronologies have proposed at least 44 different dates for this event, ranging from 1130 to 1018 BC.

The strategy adopted by the Project was to use archeological investigation to narrow the range of dates that would need to be compared with the astronomical data. Although the site of the battle has not been identified, strata at the presumed site of the pre-conquest Zhou capital at Fengxi, Shaanxi have been identified with accounts of the origins of the Zhou. Radiocarbon dating of samples from the site as well as at late Yinxu and early Zhou capitals, using the wiggle matching technique, yielding a date for the conquest between 1050 and 1020 BC. The only date within that range matching the astronomical description is 20 January 1046 BC. This date was not new, having previously been proposed by David Pankenier based the same astronomical observations, but here it resulted from a thorough consideration of a broad range of evidence.

Other scholars have raised several criticisms of this process. The connection between the layers at the archaeological sites and the conquest is uncertain. The narrow range of radiocarbon dates are cited with a less stringent confidence interval (68%) than the standard requirement of 95%, which would have produced a much wider range. Some of the texts containing astronomical observations are extremely obscure, and could be interpreted in several different ways. One alternative reading leads to the date of 1044 BC used by The Cambridge History of Ancient China. Scholars have also argued that the ancient calendar is not sufficiently understood to support calculations of this kind. The Xia Shang Zhou Chronology Project concluded precise dates for accessions of rulers from Wu Ding, the Shang Dynasty king whose reign produced the oldest known oracle bone records. These dates are here compared with the traditional dates and those used in the Cambridge History of Ancient China :

Dynasty	King	Accession date (BC)
		XSZ Project	Cambridge History	Traditional
Shang	Wu Ding	1250	before 1198	1324
	Zu Geng	1191	after 1188	1265
	Zu Jia	–	ca. 1177	1258
	Lin Xin	–	ca. 1157	1225
	Kang Ding	–	ca. 1148	1219
	Wu Yi	1147	ca. 1131	1198
	Wen Ding	1112	ca. 1116	1194
	Di Yi	1101	1105	1191
	Di Xin	1075	1086	1154
Zhou	King Wu	1046	1045	1122
	King Cheng	1042	1042	1115
	King Kang	1020	1005	1078
	King Zhao	995	977	1052
	King Mu	976	956	1001
	King Gong	922	917	946
	King Yi	899	899	934
	King Xiao	891	872?	909
	King Yi	885	865	894
	King Li	877	857	878

Earlier dates are given more approximately :

• The relocation of the Shang capital to Yin during the reign of Pan Geng is dated ca. 1300 BC.
• The establishment of the Shang Dynasty was identified with the building of the Yanshi walled city and dated ca. 1600 BC, compared with the Cambridge History's ca. 1570 BC and the traditional date of 1766 BC.
• The project identified all four phases of Erlitou culture with the Xia Dynasty, dating its beginning at ca. 2070 BC, compared with the traditional date of 2205 BC.

Coverage of the project in the Western press focussed on alleged conflicts between nationalism and scholarship. One of the criticisms is that the project supports the concept of a 5,000-year, unbroken and homogeneous history of China, wherein the three ancient dynasties (Xia, Shang and Zhou) were large and powerful states—ignoring the fact that many other groups of people (perhaps equally advanced) existed throughout China and Central Asia during this period. No further report has been issued. An international conference on chronology arranged for October 2003 was postponed due to the SARS outbreak, but never rescheduled.

Source : ultra.wikia