THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 3
Chronology of Chinese Dynasties, Astronomy, Writing
Copyright © 2002 by Andis Kaulins

Chronology of the Chinese Dynasties The Chronology of the Chinese Dynasties plays a role in an assessment of the building of the Great Wall and the purpose for which it was originally constructed. Currently, Chinese "written history" dates back only to ca. 1300 BC whereas the two earliest dynasties, the Xia Dynasty and the Shang Dynasty are dated to ca. 2100 BC and 1600 BC respectively by the archaeologists, although many Zhou scholars do not accept the existence of the Xia Dynasty at all. The Zhou dynasty followed the Shang dynasty Let me add here my observation that in Chinese "Xia" also means "down" and "Shang" also means "up", which in an astronomical context could mean that Xia was the "netherworld of stars" and Shang the upper world of visible stars. SHEN NUNG ca. 2800 BC = Orion = SHANG? We find support for this idea in the fact that the second mythical king of China was SHEN Nung which I take to be the original "Shang" i.e. shortened from "Shennung" and according to the Encyclopedia Britannica Shen Nung ruled ca. 2800 BC and had "the head of a bull and the body of a man". Since Taurus the Bull is just above and to the right of Orion, this mythical king can only be Orion - or a human king who assigned his realm to Orion. SHEN Nung - Shang - was thus Orion and belonged to the "visible" stars. According to this analysis, the Xia Dynasty of kings will be comparable to the Egyptian mythical kings of the netherworld. This explains the Zhou scholars. This view corresponds with the most modern archaeology of China. The history pages of the Chaos Group at the University of Maryland write: "The History Of China, as documented in ancient writings, dates back some 3,300 years. Modern archaeological studies provide evidence of still more ancient origins in a culture that flourished between 2500 and 2000 B.C. in what is now central China and the lower Huang He (or Yellow River) Valley of north China." The Huang He (Yellow River) mentioned above pretty much runs along the Great Wall of China. This civilization in China , which flourished in the 3rd millennium BC may have been the original architects of the Great Wall - which was not of stone but of tamped down mud and rock. I think these were the original "human" Shang and agree with the Chinese Zhou scholars who deny the existence of a Xia dynasty of human kings. ARCHAEOLOGY and CHRONOLOGY of the GREAT WALL As for the archaeological dating of the Great Wall, as is noted at the site of the Archaeological Institute of America, where they have FAQs by Dr. Dig: Question: "Has anybody ever dug at the Great Wall of China? Dr. Dig's Answer: "I may be wrong, but I do not believe that any part of the Great Wall of China has actually been excavated. This is not to say that archaeologists have not studied the Wall. They have! It has been measured and surveyed and photographed and researched." Recent satellite photos have permitted the discovery of ca. 500 kilometers of buried wall west of the Great Wall and not previously known. See satellite photos. This discovery was rejected by Chinese archaeologists because there was no written record of the wall being "extended" beyond Yumen by Chinese emperors. Of course, the Chinese archaeologists are right in that the wall was not extended beyond Yumen. The tamped earth and rock had most likely been constructed BEFORE the Great Wall of China was built, as a means to mark the road through the wastelands on the major East-West trail, the Silk Road. Accordingly, Chinese archaeologists can safely retain the Great Wall as "theirs" - as running from Yumen to Shanhaiguan. The additional tamped mud trail found beyond Yumen will have been built before the Jade Dragon and the current Great Wall of China came into existence. It too may have astronomical orientation, but this is not the subject of the Great Wall of China built by the Chinese. In terms of the history of the Great Wall, here is what was written by Copyright © 2001 Uyghur Information Agency Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 10:32:38 -0800 Chinese Archaeologists Refute the Extension of Great Wall into Lopnor "Washington, Feb.28 (UIA) -- Chinese archaeologists refuted a recent claim made by a researcher in an institute in "Xinjiang" that the Great Wall of China extended all the way to Lopnor.... "To know whether the Great Wall was actually extended to the West, we have to know the definition of Great Wall," Meng Fanren, the director of China's Frontier Archaeological Research Center in Beijing, said. According to China News Service report, Meng expressed serious doubts on the extension of Great Wall into the "Western Region" and refuted the claim made by a "Xinjiang" researcher. "The Great Wall as we know it was actually completed during the Ming Dynasty. It began from the east at Shan Hai Pass and ended in the west at Yu Men Pass. Therefore, it is questionable if the new discovery of Great Wall's extension is true," said, Meng, also a senior researcher at the institute of archaeology in China's Social Science Academy. According to Xinhua report, Mu Shunying, a research fellow with the "Xinjiang" Institute of Cultural Relics & Archaeology, discovered during a field survey conducted in 1998 an earthen wall streatching from western Yumen Pass in Gansu Province to the northern edge of Lopnor and claimed it as evidence of the extension of China's Great Wall. "There was no historical records that indicate the building of Great Wall beyond the Yu Men Pass. The area from Yu Men Pass all the way to Lopnor is desert so it is almost impossible to build a great wall. We are not sure if the wall found in Lopnor was naturally formed or artificially built," Meng said. Rejecting the wall was built during the Han Dynasty, Meng said, "Han Dynasty built a wall to prevent the attacks of Huns. During the times of Han Dynasty, the Huns mainly converged near Hami (Qumul) and Balikun (Barkol) area. But Lopnor is located in the south. So there was no practical need to build a great wall." "There were many great walls built throughout Chinese history: during the times of Warring States, Qin Dynasty and Han Dynasty. But the Great Wall we now refer is Ming Dynasty Great Wall. The Great Wall extends from the east at Shan Hai Pass to the west at Yu Men Pass," Shui Tao, an archaeologist from Nanjing University, said. "The discovery of a wall in Lopnor is a great discovery in archaeology. But since the Great Wall is referred to the Ming Dynasty Great Wall so to claim the Great Wall was actually extended into the west of Yu Men Pass is controversial. We can't come to the conclusion that the Great Wall was extended another 500 kilometers." XIA and SHANG ARCHAEOLOGY Ancient Chinese history has been reconstructed as if chronology were certain for the Xia and Shang dynasties, but this dating is far from resolved. Let us take a look at excavations in Shaanxi, one of the major areas of the Great Wall. As noted at chinatopnews.com January 22, 2000 (Beijing): "Ruins Dating Back 3,800 Years Unearthed in Shaanxi (Chinesenewsnet)-- Ruins dating back 3,800 years were recently unearthed by archeologists in Shaanxi Province in northwest China, reported Xinhua News Agency. The ruins at Donglongshan, three kilometers east of the city of Shangzhou in southeastern Shaanxi, are believed to belong to the early Xia dynasty (21th-16th Century BC). This was the first such discovery in the province. Experts say that the excavations will provide valuable references for studying and accurately apportioning the lengths of the Xia, Shang (16th to 11th Century BC), and Zhou (11th Century-226 BC) dynasties, China's first three dynasties. A team from the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology last year uncovered 10 housing ruins, 37 tombs, a number of stone knives with perforations, and stone axes, bone articles, and pottery at the site. This followed the discoveries of several ruins dating back to the Shang Dynasty and later Xia Dynasty at the start of the excavation. The excavation began in 1997 covering an area of 400 square meters. Experts have found that a majority of the decorations on the articles and pottery are unlike those unearthed at the Erlitou Site, which is believed to have been the capital of the Xia Dynasty, in central China's Henan Province. But items unearthed earlier at Donglongshan are quite similar to those found at the Erlitou Site. Based on this, Yang Yachang, an assistant researcher in charge of the excavation, believes that the newly found ruins were created by a tribe in the early Xia Dynasty. China's chronological records date from the year 841 BC during the Western Zhou Dynasty (about 11th Century to 771 BC). Dating the earlier Xia and Shang dynasties remains obscure because of the lack of written records. The Chinese government organized a research project in 1996 in an effort to discover this "missing history," which has inspired many legends and anecdotes." In any case, the central area for the building of the Great Wall, according to the above, is traced back to artifacts similar to the EARLY Xia Dynasty. ANCIENT CHINESE PICTOGRAPHIC SCRIPTS The pictographic artifacts of the Shang dynasty are so ancient - at a time when a fish sybmol still looked like a fish rather than like modern Chinese writing - that these symbols must be very old. As written at the site of the Chinese Language Program of the Dept. of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University "On the basis of the available evidence, the earliest Chinese scripts, dating from the Shang Dynasty, are known as Jiaguwen (the oracle bone scripts) and Tongqi Mingwen (the Bronze scripts). There surely also existed some symbols which preceded these, such as the symbols inscribed on the pottery found at Xian Banpo and belonging to the Yangshao Culture Period... as well as the pictographic symbols on the pottery found by the Lingyang River of Ju County in Shandong Province and belonging to the Dawenkou Culture Period.... These writing graphics, however, are too sparse to form a system. Therefore we only call them symbols. Jiaguwen is the script inscribed or written on tortoise shells and ox bones...[and] called "zhao" (omens). [LexiLine note - zhao is similar to Latvian viz. Indo-European ZI-me "omen. mark"]. ... All these texts are called Jiaguwen or Jagu buci (the divinatory texts of Jiagu) [LexiLine note - buci is similar to Latvian viz. Indo-European BUr-ti "characters".] .... ... Jiaguwen is a rather mature script system. However, the shape of the graphs is still unfixed during this period as shown below. (1) The graph of a single word is unfixed. For example, chu (out) [LexiLine note - chu is similar to Latvian viz. Indo-European CAUr "through"] is represented by a few different graphs.... (2) The side radical of a graph can be replaced by some other graphs which exhibit similar meanings. In the case of lao (stable) [LexiLine note - LAO is similar to Latvian viz. Indo-European LAI-dars "stable"], the inner graph can be the graph for cow, lamb, or horse.... (3) The strokes of the side radical are also allowed to vary in number. For example, the character wei sometimes contains four legs and sometimes two legs.... (4) A character can be written erect, reversed, or upside down, such as the character bu (to divine) [LexiLine note - BU is similar to Latvian viz. Indo-European BUr "to divine"].... In opposition to Sutiz [vulgar style script] is Zhengtizi (standard style script) which is represented by the inscriptions on bronze vessels. Ancient people called bronze "Jin" (gold) [LexiLine note - this is similar to Latvian viz. Indo-European DZIN-tars "amber", also applied to metals]. So the texts of the bronze vessels are also called Jinwen (gold script)." SHANG AND THE TOCHARIANS Is there any relation between the Tocharians and the Shang? especially relating to the Xia Dynasty? Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov in The Early History of Indo-European Languages, Scientific American, March 1990, P.110, write: "Tocharian was another language family that diverged from the IndoEuropean protolanguage quite early. Tocharian is one of the more recently discovered Indo-European languages, first recognized in the early decades of the 20th century in texts from Chinese Turkestan. The texts were comparatively easy to decipher because they were written in a variant of the Brahmi script and were mainly translations from known Buddhist writings." These Tocharians are known as "Yeuhchi" and the first writing in China is known as the characters of "Jiagu" so that LexiLine postulates that Yeuhchi and Jiagu are the same. Go to Gemini Yumen and the Great Wall of China