Royal Canon of Tsinh
The Royal Canon of Tsinh is a list of Tsinh rulers to whom supplication was paid regularly. While the canon first appears in historical works dating to the late 4th century and contains 43 members, a version revised based on the contents of the Springs and Autumns of Six States has put the figure at 70; their lifetimes are estimated to range from the 8th or 9th centuries BCE down to the point the canon was set to writing.
Contents
| 1 | Kerap | Qrut | Prang | Neting | Met | Keq | Kerang | Sin | Nem | Ghwiq |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Prang I | |||||||||
| 3 | Qrut I | Nem Brilliant | (missing) | (missing) | (missing) | (missing) | (missing) | (missing) | ||
| 4 | Neting I | Kerap Ancestor | Keq Ancestor | (missing) | (missing) | (perhaps missing) | (perhaps missing) | (missing) | ||
| 5 | Qrut II | Kerang I | Ting Face | Nem II Great | (missing) | (perhaps missing) | (missing) | (perhaps missing) | ||
| 6 | Kerap II | Neting II | Prang III | Sin I | Nem III | Keq II | Met Heir | (missing) | (missing) | |
| 7 | Sin Later | Prang IV | Qrut III | (missing) | (missing) | (missing) | ||||
| 8 | Kerang Later | Neting III | (missing) | Ghwiq Heir | (missing) | (missing) | ||||
| 9 | Kerap III | Keq III | Prang V | Qrut Heir | Kerang Great | |||||
| 10 | Qrut IV | Prang VI Prince | Sin III | Prang VII Lesser | ||||||
| 11 | Qrut IV Defender | Neting IV | Met Middle | Sin Younger | Kerang III | Qrut V | ||||
| 12 | Sin IV Outsider | Qrut VI Outsider | Kerap V | Neting V | ||||||
| 13 | Kerang III | |||||||||
| 12 | Qrut V | Kerang IV | ||||||||
| 13 | Prang Outsider | Kerap VI | ||||||||
| 14 | Neting Glorious | Nem IV | Keq IV | |||||||
| 15 | Prang VIII Southerner | |||||||||
| 16 | Kerang V | |||||||||
| 17 | Sin | Kerap | ||||||||
| 18 | Neting | |||||||||
| 19 | Prang | |||||||||
| 20 | Sin V | |||||||||
| 21 | Qrut | |||||||||
| 22 | Qrut | |||||||||
| 23 | Qrut |
Source
It is generally agreed that the reason why the Canon survives as such and in this way is the cyclic worship of royal ancestors, to whom offerings were made in order of the most remote to the most recently deceased. This was an continual affair at the royal court of Tsinh from at least the 2nd century BCE.
The scientific analysis of the Canon began in the Historical Revival of the mid-17th century, when the study of history became increasingly academic in the modern sense. In this period, the primary object of study was, indeed, genealogy, and it has been argued that the Canon was the reason why the study of history became modern in Themiclesia, since genealogy was a matter of fact and not usually susceptible to opinion. Scholars began to study the then-present Canon and noticed that it had rational gaps; the names of other rulers were discovered in the most archaic source known to them—Springs and Autumns—and added to the Canon.
Analysis
The orthodox position on the Canon in Themiclesian historiography is to read it as a list of successive rulers, if not specifically as a sequence of father-son successions. This was maintained in the educational establishment as late as the 1945, by which time the analysis had been thoroughly discredited in academic circles.
The foremost argument against this analysis is that nothing in the Canon itself actually says so—it is a sequence of individuals to whom supplication is offered but does not define their biological relationship. Sources providing that the final members of the Canon are father-son successions are external to the Canon, and the more reliable early historians do state biological relationships when such are known and otherwise remain silent. Thus, in the 1700s, more learned individuals have accepted that beyond the last nine cycles (which contain only one member each with the exception of cycle 16, which has two members) biological relationships are not necessarily that between fathers and sons. However, in this period, the main alternative theory is that the Canon represents a successive list of kings who may be siblings or cousins.
As the 19th century progressed, more doubts surfaced regarding the interpretation of the Canon as a list of successive rulers, and these doubts are often connected with the length of the Canon and the external chronology of the Meng settlement of Themiclesia. Containing 90 names with Cycle 1 counted, and 80 without, "cramming" these names into the period in which Meng settlement can be archaeologically confirmed results in average reigns of less than 10 years, which is very short compared with both later history and foreign royal dynasties operating on primogeniture or agnatic seniority principles. The brevity of reigns only becomes more remarkable when known reigns of later members of the Canon (who can be confirmed as successive rulers) are taken into account. Even if the argument that persons had shorter average lifespans is admitted, the general brevity of these reigns is difficult to reconcile with the norm.
Cycle 1
The first cycle, which has ten members in sequence of the Heavenly Stems, is usually considered mythical as their behaviour is fundamentally different from that in other cycles and quite transparent. Nevertheless, their inclusion in the Canon cannot have been recent and is likely to be ancient as well.