Why Xia, Shang and Zhou? Why Xia, Shang and Zhou?

Due to the low productivity in the pre-Qin period, people's understanding of objective things remained at a very shallow level, and many natural phenomena could not be explained. So people were superstitious at that time, and divination became an important basis for the country to implement major policies at that time. Therefore, when a baby is born, his parents always use the environment at that time, including the natural environment and social environment, as a reference for naming, and they also perform divination, and the words derived from it are likely to be directly used as names.

In the pre-Qin period, people's thoughts were relatively simple, so when naming their own names, they often used ordinal characters as the basis for naming. The most commonly used words are heavenly stems and earthly branches, such as A, B, C, D and so on, just like our eldest brother, second child and youngest son. When these words are combined with the above-mentioned words obtained from divination, they become the methods of naming people in the pre-Qin period, such as Taijia, Kong Yi, Wuding and Laoyao.

Another feature of names in the pre-Qin period was that they only had first names and no surnames. That's because people in the pre-Qin period were still in the period of tribal settlement, and the whole clan belonged to the same ancestor, so there was no need to add surnames before their names. This situation continued until the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. At that time, with the development of social economy, population and mobility began to increase, and surnames appeared as the basis for distinguishing different people, tribes and ancestors in different regions.

In the final analysis, the evolution of China's surname is closely related to the level of productivity.