Bamboo annals

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The Bamboo Books or bamboo Chronicle ( Zhushu Jinian , Chinese  竹书纪年 ) are a Chinese history book in the form of a chronicle that during the Western Jin Dynasty of grave robbers in an ancient tomb (in the present province of Henan was found).

The bamboo annals tell of the earliest legendary times (the era of the great emperor Huáng Dì ) up to 299 BC. Chr. The original version of the Annals was during the funeral of Wei King Anli ( Chinese  安厘王 ;. † 299 BC.), According to other sources, the king Xiang ( Chinese  襄王 ) or the King Ai ( chinese  哀王 ) and was discovered in 281 . Because of this, the Chronicle survived the Great Book Burning under Emperor Shi of the Qin Dynasty . Along with Shiji, the bamboo annals are the most important historical work of ancient Chinese.

The bamboo annals fell apart already during the Han Dynasty (from 206 BC to 220 AD). In 279 , during the Western Jin Dynasty , a grave robber was arrested and many bamboo books were recovered from the robbed grave during the verdict. The government paid close attention to this matter and sent many officials to translate the bamboo books because the seal script ( Chinese  篆 ) of the Wei Kingdom was different from the relatively common seal script of the Qin Dynasty . During the translation, the War of the Eight Princes ( Chinese  八 王 之 Während ) took place, which severely hindered the progress of the translation and classification. Eventually, the reorganized books were called "bamboo annals" by the officials.

The bamboo annals gave the historians a great shock because their records were not only different from those in Shiji , but also had a completely mutual orientation. In it, they openly report on military coups and military conflicts from the Xia Dynasty to the Zhan Guo era of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty , thus presenting the original content of the Four Books (famous Confucian classics) before the Confucius corrections and revisions.

While the Shiji reports the events in biographical form, the bamboo annals use the chronological method to present substantive evidence and references.

The bamboo annals classified in Jin Dynasty fell apart again during the Song Dynasty . After the founding of the Republic of China , numerous historians combined quotations from other literary works of previous generations and constructed a "cured" version of the bamboo annals. This is called "old bamboo annals" ( Chinese  古 本 竹 书 纪年 ). In addition, there was another version under the Ming Dynasty , but its chronology does not match the quotes from previous generations. That is why this version is considered fictitious and referred to as "Today's bamboo annals" ( Chinese  今 本 竹 书 纪年 ).

literature

  • Zhu Yuanqing : old chronicle-historical work "Zhushu Jinian" (in Chinese), The civilization emerging again - The exposed literatures and the traditional academy (in Chinese). East China Pedagogical University Publishing House, China 2001
  • DS Nivison: "Chu shu chi nien", M. Loewe (editor): Early Chinese Texts: a bibliographical guide . Society for the Study of Early China, Berkeley 1993, p. 39-47.
  • J. Legge: The Chinese Classics III: The Shoo King Prolegomena. Southern Materials Center, Taipei 1865. (This contains an English translation of the Annals.)

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