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Meanwhile there's people alive today who claim main line descent from Confucius who lived in the 5th century BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang
by ginko 4y ago
Meanwhile there's people alive today who claim main line descent from Confucius who lived in the 5th century BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang
- thaumasiotes 4y agoChina also has a continuous literary tradition between that time and now, so the claims are plausible. I'm actually more impressed that the old Chinese imperial families are still around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu In what I would think of as the "standard model" of history, one of the highest priorities for a new king is eliminating everyone who might theoretically be related to the old king.
- vkazanov 4y agoYeah.. even the last Chinese emperor wasn't executed, despite the endless civil war and his cooperation with Japanese.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoOn the other hand, membership in that family is unlikely to be something you want widely advertised. I believe most of them changed their name.
- SZJX 4y agoIt does seem to be a Chinese tradition (and I believe in quite a few other places) to pacify the old king and grant them a comfortable enough retirement, as they’ve already lost power. It’s probably less confrontational and somewhat satisfies all sides in the long run. Examples would be some kings during the Three Kingdom period, who all got some sort of honorary title in the conqueror’s kingdom.
- jl6 4y agoWhat does “main line” mean in this context?
- prox 4y agoI would assume father > son descent, so oldest son is usually the main inheritor.
- abirch 4y agoDepth First Search for heirs.
- JasonFruit 4y agoThat sounds like an elevator pitch.
- bhaak 4y agoWe lost a lot of historical records between late antiquity and the early middle ages. Most devastating for Italy was probably the Gothic War. Then the records that were in Constantinople were also lost, not only by the fall of Constantinople itself but also by the sacking of it by Christian crusaders. Lots of records that could have shown such a descent are lost. Now Confucius was an important historical figure. It's not surprising that he is one of the few cases where an uninterrupted descent could be true. If Jesus or Caesar had a family line run into modern times or if the Papacy was hereditary, we might have such a line for Western civilization as well.
- JamesSwift 4y agoChina also has kept a fairly robust set of records compared to the rest of the world.
- stackbutterflow 4y agoWould be hard for Jesus, given he didn't exist.
- tsimionescu 4y agoThat is an extremely fringe belief, in disagreement with most scholars of antiquity.
- ncmncm 4y agoBut the gradient is positive.
- bhaak 4y agoWhat's that supposed to mean?
- ncmncm 4y agoIn 1900, no historians thought Jesus was like Moses, Abraham, and Adam, made up from whole cloth. In 2000, some did. Today, more. The scenario as I understand it is that Paul's writing came first. But to get a congregation to pay attention they found they had to invent a corporeal Jesus to have said their things, then apostles to have heard them, then a bio for where and when, and finally gospels to tell it in. For those who object that such a thing wasn't done, consider Moses and, really, all of Genesis and Exodus. Iliad. Thor'n'Loki. It was not just done, but positively demanded.
- peter303 4y agoJapanese emperors back to 600 BCE.
- peter303 4y agoGenealogists have worked out most American Presidents 800 years or so. A couple interesting facts include (1) about everyone one of them is at least 10th cousin to every other one and (2) a large fraction descend from King John of England. Probability suggests that after a millennium that that someone becomes a super-ancestor, i.e. everyone is descended from them, or no one is descended from them. Very little middle ground. (A lot of northwest European Americans probably have the same statistics as Presidents.)