Springs and Autumns of Six States

Springs and Autums of Six States (六邦春秋) was a history in annals form, recording wars, treaties, sacrifices, natural disasters, astronomical phenomena, and other events of ritualistic importance. It was compiled under the scholar and annalist Lord Hrjun (熏君; d. 285), who prefaced that the the work combined the separate annals of six states, Tsjinh, Pjang, Sjin, Ngak, Kem, and N′ar, spanning 385 BCE to the signing of the Treaty of Five Kings in 256 CE. It has become a canonical text in Themiclesian historical scholarship since the 4th century.

Form

The work begins with a preface credited to Lord Hrjun, who perhaps played a directive role in the compilation of the work rather than participated in the compilation, as he was on military campaign during this time. The preface states that after the signing of the Treaty of Five Kings, continued warfare in some areas have caused den′ (典) to be destroyed. As the records are considered precious, the "great historians" have made copies of den′ and entrusted them with great solemnity to the Patriarch of Tsjinh, who then ordered these den′ to be "opened" and compiled. The patriarch here is reasonably assumed to be Patriarch ′An, who reigned for 48 years during the final part of Lord Hrjun's life.

The main chronology of the book is in the regnal years of the Patriarch of Tsjinh, affixed with the regnal years of other rulers pertinent to the entry. Within each year, events are arranged chronologically and given either a month or date, but not both. Even though the main chronology of the work is that of Tsjinh, the actual records themselves are worded neutrally; rather than mentioning Tsjinh as "we" or "us", such as official chronicles often do, all states are mentioned by name. The following is an excerpt from the third year of Elder Brother ′Rjut, who was Patriarch of Tsjinh in the late 4th century BCE until 295.

庚子，晉史陳事于先祖庚眔啇辛，牛率二，羊五，在晉。

K.rang-tsje′, Tsjinh sent Drjen for affairs of Former Ancestor K.rang and Spouse Sjin, with two cattle each and five sheep, in Tsjinh.

辛丑，晉史善夫林事于啻母辛，惟公疾，公入羊二，在晉。

Sjin-n′rju′, Tsjinh sent Chef Rjem for affairs of Spouse Madam Sjin, because of an elder's illness, [and] elder(s) sent two sheep, in Tsjinh.

二月，辛征東，折首六，獲虎百又四十又五，乙巳告于父三示，用虎率三，在辛西宮。

In the second lunation, Sjin went on an easterly expedition, decapitating six and taking 145 Tiger*; on ′Rjut-sg′je′, they reported to the spirits of the Three Fathers, using three Tiger each at the West Complex of Sjin.

辛亥，辛史臣室事于祖甲眔兄丙，人率十、牛六，在辛南邊。

Sjin-ge′, Sjin sent Officer Stjit on affairs of Ancestor Krap and Brother P.rjang′, with ten humans and six cattle each, in the southern periphery of Sjin.

壬子，楚史卿事此晉，伯鄉牛眔酒，在晉。

Njem-tsje′, Sng′rja′ sent the Companion Tsji′ to Tsjinh, the Patriarch [of Tsjinh] received him with cattle and wine, in Tsjinh.

癸丑，鄂伯疾右，邦土、婦乙宗、祖癸宗率羊十用，在鄂。

Kwji′-n′rju′, the Patriarch of Ngak has affliction on his right [hand], and at the Land Shrine of the State, the Temple of Madam ′Rjut, and the Temple of Ancestor Kwji′ ten sheep each were used, in Ngak.

Note: Tiger is a prehistoric people of Themiclesia of unknown affinity.

The writing style of the work is terse, recording plain facts rather than providing explanations. The shortest records consist of only four words, and the longest does not exceed 100. Historians have long noted that more than 95% of the work consists of only six kinds of events: sacrifices, war, treaty, marriage, astronomical phenomena, and natural disasters. For this reason, the work is also called the "Six Springs and Autumns", referring to its six kinds of records and a double entendre on its actual title. As typical of a chronicle, the book has no explicit topic or conclusion.

Analysis

Textual sources

One of the theories that modern scholars have accepted on the Six States is that the compiler may have directly consulted the oracular archives of the states or even transcribed their contents in the process of creating this work. For a long time after the Mrangh dynasty, scholars passed little comment on the sources of Six States, accepting that content were simply transcribed from hypothetical titles like the "Springs and Autumns of Tsjinh", without editorial work. In part, this is because Six States was titled "Springs and Autumns", and the classical Menghean work of the same name (but much earlier) was known to be an actual, physical text, so Six States was assumed to be a combination of several works similar to the Menghean original. However, scholars in the 18th century noticed that such putative originals have never been found, quoted, or even mentioned by contemporaries anywhere and questioned their historicity.

In the mid-19th century, arguments focused on the nature of den′, the object that the preface mentioned was endangered by continual warfare and which "historians" sought to protect by means of copying and sending copies to safer hands or depositories. Studies on Themiclesian religion subsequently recovered that den′ was the offering in the ceremony of kongh-den′, a calendar that planned which deities were sacrificed to and what was sacrificed to them. In the pre-restoration practice of cyclical sacrifices that was becoming the consensus amongst 19th-century historians, priests sought oracular approval from these deities before the plan to sacrifice to them was sanctioned and implemented. The equation of the den′ mentioned in the preface with the sacramental document also resolves the thorny issue of a preponderant attention paid to sacrifices without explaining their rationale. Earlier historians who came across Six States were probably misled by the word den′, which in other contexts can mean any collection of documents.

The arguments surrounding the sources of the Six States also sparked early debate about the rise of history in Themiclesia. In the view of scholars who believed that the Six States was meant to capture the history of ancient Themiclesia for its own sake, the source documents were also considered intentional records kept for the reference of later humans. However, an alternate view is that history did not develop in Themiclesia until the 4th century, and previous writings, though of indisputable historical value, are not meant to educate readers in or after the writer's time about the past. With the clarification of the nature of den′, the latter view gained temporary pre-eminence in the early 20th century, as it was argued the compilers of the Six States would have logically chosen a better, more narrative source rather than "recapitulate the number of cattle or sheep sacrificed to a deified ancestor of no explicit relevance."

Yet in 1949, a hoard of ancient bamboo slips was discovered in the desert east of Kien-k'ang, which by calendar date seems to have been written in 189 but copied much later. The hoard contains a concise history of the states, detailing the family history of the successive rulers and their accomplishments up to the present day. Not only does the manuscript predate the Six States by more than a century, it is a biographic history that was assumed to be a development of annalistic forms like the Six States. The discovery led scholars to challenge the notion that "narrative history" was an outgrowth of annalistic history and did not exist until the 4th or even the early 5th century. More modern views provide that the practice of writing history in early Themiclesia was varied, and genres of history may have distinct origins and purposes.

Identity of chroniclers

As Lord Hrjun referred to himself as a compiler rather an author, medieval authors have written about the identities of the "primary chroniclers" who actually created the records compiled into the Six States. Some medieval scholars believed that there was a class of officials in ancient courts or temples called s.rje′ (史) that maintained chronicles as a profession and cited parallels from Menghean histories to demonstrate as much.

However, with the conclusion that the den′, the direct sources of the Six States, was not a chronicle as such, but a depository of oracular plates that served more spiritual than historical functions, it was also questioned in the 1800s who created or maintained the depositories of oracles. There are no chroniclers' names mentioned in the Six States anywhere. Modern scholars note that the word s.rje′, normally interpreted as historian, was a title used by officials who conducted sacrifices, in all six states. Since the den′ are established as records of sacrifical activity, it is considered plausible that most states had no dedicated chroniclers but a place where such records are stored. It is believed that since the content on record was not meant for reading, there did not need to be an office dedicated to its preservation. According to recent descriptions, the various s.rje′ simply deposited new den′ along with older ones, which eventually created great diachronic archives of den′.

Chronology issues

The Springs and Autumns open in 385 BCE, the year the compiler calls the second year of ′Rjut, Patriarch of Tsjinh (晉伯乙二年). However, Tsjinh is not mentioned in any entry until 302 BCE, and the first enthronement of a Patriarch of Tsjinh not until 295 BCE, whereas the chronicler usually records enthronements and deaths with no omission. This conspicuous problem was noticed early in the study of the text, but no solution was accepted for much of the period the discrepancy was known. Scribal error was ruled unlikely. In 1773, it was proposed simply that Tsjinh had no chronicles that date to this period.

Though generally accepted, the proposition implies a chronological problem for the compiler, namely how he decided which Tsjinh ruler's reign did events from other chronicles fall into. In one view, the names and reign lengths of rulers are recorded on other documents, so a continuous stream of dates and events could simply be mapped to the name and regnal year of the appropriate Tsjinh ruler. While compelling, such a list of names and reign lengths has never been quoted or mentioned in contemporary writings. An essay written by a courtier in 340 on a different subject suggests that by that time there was no extant information about early rulers, other than their names. On the other hand, names and reigns could have been passed down as oral history by priests, who were responsible for the upkeep of these ancestral rulers' temples, many of which had apparently been ruined by the 300s. The oral history argument appears to be the most widely accepted, or at least the least widely rejected, position.

Another prominent issue with chronology exists in the use of the word "year" (年, ning) in the chronicles. The word "year" during the 4th c. BCE was not usually used as a measure of time, rather meaning "harvest". It is usually held that the sense of "year" derived from certain yearly crop yields and festivities associated with it. In Tsjinh, rulers often conducted "harvest-replications" (報年) with sacrifices to repay certain deities for a certain harvest. However, it emerges from the Six States itself that there are multiple harvests over an agricultural year, and it seemed unlikely that the word "harvest" had already acquired the meaning of "year" at this time. Rather, the typical term for specifying points in time was sg′je (祀), the cyclical sacrifices initiated by each ruler. Each sg′je differed in length but generally lengthened to include each passing ruler; as such, they cannot be equated to calendar years. While earlier scholars have proposed that each harvest-replication indicated a year, in 1856 this reasoning was demonstrated to be faulty, as multiple instances could be ordered for a single harvest.

Purpose

The preface of the Six States states that "continual warfare" has threatened the safety of the den′ in many places, wherefore "historians" have made copies of them and sent the copies to royal court at Tsjinh for safekeeping. Most pre-modern authors have accepted this brief statement without extensive comment.

However, in the early 1700s, it was contested that, historically, there was no "continual warfare" in the 260s to 280s, like the preface would suggest. By all accounts, it was instead a period of prolonged peace. This question was further explored in a 1783 treatise, wherein the author argued that the preface actually apologized for a glaring inconsistency rather badly, because the Tsjinh royal court made no attempt to create a compendium of annals during the previous period of genuinely continual warfare (223 to 254). The same author argued that in a period of real adversity, the royal court simply could not have commissioned a compilation with materials drawn from six geographically disparate sources, many of which were not under its control at all. It is "plainly unimaginable that state chroniclers would forward copies of their treasured records to a hostile power for safekeeping, however noble their intentions may have been." To further this point, the jurist and scholar Lord of L′jin wrote in 1785 that no state has to this point attempt a major compilation of so much as its own records, so the preface's claim of "historian's altruism" as a motive for the work of truly tremendous scale (it was the longest book written in Themiclesia to that point) was "quite distant to what is expected."

While these arguments receive acclaim today, they were controversial when they were raised. Defenders of "historian's altruism", who believed that the book was compiled out of a historian's love for truth, made strong arguments that the text of Six States does not have strong biases towards any state. They countered that not only in Themiclesia but also Menghe existed chroniclers killed because they were unwilling to "curtail their pen" to apologize for powerful figures. Opponents of "historian's altruism" refuted that Six States was not the work of a named historian, so even if such a high degree of integrity existed, it cannot be accepted automatically to explain the purpose of the work. An extreme view that existed is that the book is worthless, since neither the original writers nor the compiler attempt to make any comment about Themiclesian history. In the 1800s, scholars between the two camps, supported by linguistic evidence, earnestly reminded that Six States was not a single author's work, so it was only natural that some parts of it may truly be composed by a impartial writer, while the redactor may have selected some and dismissed others for their conveniences.

A theoretical watershed for the studies of the Six States presented itself in the improving understanding of its source materials. Scholars of religion and anthropology late in the 19th century asserted that the den′ were "testimonies" that a certain quantity of humans or animals had been offered and accepted by a deity. They were "receipts like that in commercial transactions today, proof that the deity had demanded goods and received it," according to Benedict Hampton. In context of Six States, an exhaustive compilation of all these testimonies, "it seems to have meant the Tsjinh court now controlled the symbolic proof of transactions between man and divine, and those not only with Tsjinh gods, but of all the gods of Themiclesia."

Writing in 1901, A. Bjit proposes that the Six States be considered in conjunction with a passage in the Antiquities of Themiclesia, where Patriarch Dêng promised that he will "continue the sacrifices and preserve the temples of the ancestors of Teng" when he conquered Teng in 218. Bjit states that the act of taking control of a ruler's sacrifices and temples symbolized dominance over that ruler's house and state. As it was not physically possible to transport temples to Tsjinh, he argues that caches of oracles, which were visual testimonies of the state's gods, were seized or at least copied in their stead. Thus, Bjit concludes the preface claim that historians sent copies of the chronicles to Tsjin for preservation was patently fictitious—the Tsjinh ruler probably robbed the oracles from their depositories to legitimize his power over all the cities and states that existed in Themiclesia, by taking for himself the very tangible proof that their gods existed; "as for the 'continual warfare', it was probably a euphemism for suspicious arsons that happened in at least three states' temple complexes, since the Tsjinh ruler can then protect the surviving oracles or copies of oracles and be portrayed as a protector rather than a destroyer."

Subsequent writers have received Bjit's arguments generally favourably, since it addresses multiple issues in the preface. Analyses of the content of Six States have generally concluded that redactions were technical and minimal in scale, with no general effort to change the tone of the records; these analyses are thought to confirm partially the assertion of "historian's altruism", but only in the body of the work. In 1940, Yoshida argued that the "accuracy" of the chronicles was actually desired by the Tsjinh court: preserving the chronicles accurately advanced the Tsjinh ruler's reputation as a protector of sacrifices, especially in an era when the originals still existed physically or in memory. Deviations from the originals would instead cast doubt on the ruler's piety and credibility as a protector of sacrifices and worship, and deviations were mostly unnecessary as the chronicles covered topics of little interest. According to Yoshida, "that all the chronicles exist at the fingertips of the Tsjin ruler was important; what the chronicles actually said was not. The physical medium meant more than the message."

The question why all the states were addressed by name was explored in the 1950s. The prevailing view on this topic is that the Tsjinh rulers in the late 200s wished to establish a "new kingship", through which they ruled new domains as natural kings rather than subjugators. They consulted and borrowed elements of the unification of Menghe in the early 2nd century BCE as a model for their policies. The Six States seems to be connected to this effort: by taking all the "material proof" of the gods of the states, the new Tsjinh rulers seems to have claimed to be the sole conduit to the divine by controlling interactions with it, or at least the evidence of interactions. At the same time, by combining all the chronicles, an illusion of a single chronicle of a single pantheon was created. "A powerful statement is made by merging all the ancestral cults into a single cult, a single cult that is focused on the person of Patriarch of Tsjinh or the Hegemon of Themiclesia as he was known in unofficial documents of the day," according to Hjak.

Provenance

While the original work is believed to completed circa 280 CE, the observed phenomenon is that its content was seldom quoted. The title of the book was seen in bibliographies that the government compiled to ensure the completeness of its library. From this historians deduce the book was probably not widely copied in the public. On the one hand, this means there are fewer opportunities for scribal errors to be introduced; on the other, it also means errors are less easily detected, and forged content more easily passed for genuine, yet linguistic characteristics suggest that the book substantially dates to the 3rd century, with some quotes significantly older.

Influence

Six States was not as widely transmitted or studied as another forms of history like elegaics and family biographies.

See also

• Themiclesia
• Antiquities of Themiclesia