User:LBird BASc/sandbox/ATK/Seminar6/Truth/Truth about the existence of the Xia dynasty

Introduction

The Xia dynasty is the first dynasty in traditional Chinese history. Despite that, there are a large amount of historical work and traditional legends which mention the Xia dynasty, no contemporaneous records of the Xia dynasty are found by historians. Therefore, there is an ongoing dispute among historians on whether the Xia dynasty really existed or it is just imaginary. A recent scientific study sheds a light on the research on this controversial issue, but many historians rejected the conclusion of this study.

Did the Xia dynasty exist?

Science published an article named 'Outburst flood at 1920 BCE supports historicity of China’s Great Flood and the Xia dynasty' in 2016, which was written by scholars from several different disciplines. The establishment of the Xia dynasty is said to result from a Great Flood. This article reconstructs an earthquake-induced landslide dam outburst flood on the Yellow River about 1920 BCE that ranks as one of the largest freshwater floods of the Holocene and could account for the Great Flood. Through the discovery and reconstruction of the massive outburst flood, the authors imply that the Xia dynasty is very likely to have once existed.

However, this article has been criticized by a wide range of scholars ever since its publication and these critiques point out that this study, in fact, makes little contributions to discovering the truth about the existence of the Xia dynasty. Some historians hold the opinion that this study is not a historical study, but a geological and Environics study. First, the main discoveries about the great flood in this article are nothing new to the historians, and could not serve as a direct and convincing proof that the Xia dynasty existed. Second, although the authors accept the traditional historical ideas about the location of the Xia dynasty, they are in disagreement with historians about which time period the Xia dynasty belongs to. This shows that the writers misunderstand the concept of the Xia dynasty, and their argument is implausible. What's more, the chronological data cited by the authors are not the newest.

Recent studies on geology and archaeology demonstrate that there was once a state at Erlitou in Yanshi Henan, and many scholars identified the Erlitou culture as the site of the Xia dynasty.However, due to the lack of firm evidence, lots of historians still doubt about whether the archaeological Erlitou culture is the Xia dynasty. Since there are unignorable differences in methodology and conceptions between archaeology and history, the truth about the existence of the Xia dynasty is still waiting to be discovered and this may take a long time.

Conclusion

Truth in history is hard to found when there is a lack of historical evidence, such as the case of the existence of the Xia Dynasty. Although scholars from different disciplines are continuously working together to uncover the historical truth, there is still many difficulties.