Interpreting History

Interpreting History

Ancient Chinese history is an extremely complicated story to uncover for today's historians. Trying to discover and be sure of one true history of the ancient Chinese peoples through evidence found in their literature has proven to be nearly impossible. One reason is for every event a historian may try to explore there exist several similar yet slightly different versions of the truth. In trying to come up with a uniform way of transforming myths and legends into an actual account of history, (a process known as euhemerization), historians have been so far unsuccessful in completing one universally excepted version of the history of Ancient China.

One reason that it is all so complicated is that every time the monarchy of China changed families, the new dynasty would rewrite myths and other folklore so they would better suit that dynasty's own beliefs. In other words they changed the stories to be the way they wanted them to be. In relation to euhemerization, it is imposible to accurately interpret the events, gods, demigods, and so forth as one history if the actions of these characters and the plots of their stories are changed every hundred years or so.

Secondly, there is not always one accurate translation for the myths that are used to spell out China's history, which is described in Derk Bodde's essay. In his essay Bodde gives a few example's of how common misconceptions about the proper translation of certain stories can ultimately change the interpretation of the story. For example, one story refers to a student asking Confucius if Huang Ti, the Yellow Emperor, was a man or a god because one of the myths about him claimed he lived three hundred years. "Confucius is made the exponent of euhemrism"(Bodde 49). Confucius claims that the interpretation that Huang Ti lived three hundred years is incorrect and the story should be interpreted to