Before words appeared, many stories could not be recorded. How did fairy tales come down?

The appearance of characters has brought certain changes to the spread of myths and legends, confirmed the records of characters, fixed some myths and legends, made the space for their interpretation smaller, and kept the original spread for a longer time. However, writing also has many limitations. In most times when myths were circulated, few people mastered the writing ability, and they also controlled the right to interpret orthodox myths and legends.

Not many people are literate, and more myths and legends are not written as "folk beliefs", still maintaining the original circulation mode. At the same time, the writing itself has a process of evolution and development, and the content it describes is naturally deduced, not completely unchanged.

Myth, which is the same as history in essence, is the common memory of all members of this nation. But the difference between myth and history is that history is supported by cultural relics or documents, and its content is more accurate and unified; Myth, on the other hand, is limited to oral legends, and its content is vague and changeable. Due to the limited conditions of a nation's early development, what happened can only be recorded by oral communication, which has led to great changes in the stories handed down over the years.

And most of this is greatly exaggerated. It was not until this nation invented writing and found a way to record things accurately that this "historical" way was replaced. In fact, myths exist in ancient and modern times, both at home and abroad, and also in modern society, but we don't realize it ourselves. For example, a young couple had an accident and the woman was insulted. Because the woman is beautiful, there are various versions. Some people say that a woman had many boyfriends before her death, and these boyfriends killed her because they couldn't pursue her; Others said that the woman's life was abnormal, fooling around outside and cheating a lot of money. People killed her for revenge.

In the end, the case was solved. In fact, it was just an ordinary case, just giving people a myth that seeing is believing. In fact, there were many myths in ancient times, especially in the Han Dynasty after Qin Dynasty. For example, Meng Jiangnv cried and knocked down the Great Wall just to highlight the tyranny of Qin Shihuang. In fact, Meng Jiangnv lived in Qi during the Warring States Period, and there was no intersection with the Qin Shihuang era. Finally, talk about China's Zhouyi myth. Zhouyi originated in Shang Dynasty, and Zhou Wenwang and Ji Chang compiled it into 64 hexagrams and 384 hexagrams. During the Spring and Autumn Period, official school evolved into private school. Confucius praised Zhouyi as a Confucian classic, which is used by modern people to tell fortune.

But now many people think that Zhouyi is omnipotent and unfathomable, making it a tool for swindlers. I hope young people don't believe these myths too much, because Zhouyi has been away from us for 3000 years. So many literati in the past dynasties have not found this treasure. Did modern people find out? Moreover, with the rapid development of society, the country has undergone earth-shaking changes, which has nothing to do with Zhouyi. There are many universities in China, and there are no regular professors to teach Zhouyi. Professors taught science and technology, which changed the fate of China.

The so-called "myth" now belongs to the Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties, but its creation is not necessarily the Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties, nor does it necessarily have the characteristics of that era, but the imagination or fabrication of future generations. This is one aspect. On the other hand, there are quite a few "myths", which originated from the historical inheritance of "Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties" and were passed down from mouth to mouth. Some are inevitably deformed, while others remain the same because of various clever tricks. It's just that later generations may not have the ability to distinguish pearls when sorting out these things, which leads to confusion between true and false, and even fraud. In short, it is still impossible to tell the truth from the false. In fact, the history of world civilization has a * * * nature, that is, the generation of words is not "gradual", and there is an inexplicable suddenness. It seems that words existed overnight, and human beings entered civilization from ignorance.

In addition, there is still debate about whether there is a historiography circle in Xia Dynasty. Shang dynasty paid more attention to ghosts and gods, leaving few records, while the historical materials of Zhou dynasty were more detailed. Therefore, there are a lot of myths and legends in the history of Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties. When history moves from the period of myths and legends to the period of recorded credit history, the first thing we encounter is the age problem. Time is the measure of history. History has years, just as geography has longitude and latitude lines. There must be latitude and longitude lines, and then know where they are; There must be a date, and then we will know when it happened. For a historical event, if you don't know the time. You can't know its relationship with other historical events.