Black Jade Age New Evidence of 5000-Year History of China

Free Download Black Jade Age: New Evidence of 5000-Year History of China
English | 2025 | ISBN: 9819613086 | 256 Pages | PDF (True) | 37 MB
This book analyzes and summarizes the narrative motifs of Chinese mythology, before tracing their material and cultural elements using the new classification of Big Tradition and Small Tradition theories of culture from the field of literary anthropology, as well as related interdisciplinary theories from literary anthropology and archaeology. China's history reaches back more than 5,000 years, while the earliest known Chinese character system, oracle bone script, was created over 3,000 years ago. Following up on a reference to black jade in The Classic of Mountains and Rivers, the author conducts an extensive survey of black jade ritual articles in the Yellow River and its tributaries, supported by the new archaeological discoveries of black jade battle axes, the primal jade ritual article used in the Central Plains 5,300 years ago. The author then establishes a chain of evidence, using quadruple-evidence methods to validate the Black Jade Age as the first age of the jade culture in the Central Plains. His goal in doing so is to flesh out the myth-enshrouded age of Emperor Yan, Emperor Huang, and Warrior Chiyou, transform it into a substantiated landscape of the origin of the Central Plains Civilization, and offer evidence-based reasoning for this two-thousand-year gap.