Generally speaking, the ancient times refer to the historical times before the appearance of written records. Therefore, the definition of ancient times around the world is different. In ancient China, it generally refers to the period before Xia. In the two river valley and Egypt, it generally refers to the historical era before 5000 BC. Because there was no direct written record of that time in ancient times, the events or characters at that time could not be directly verified. These events and characters are often mythological.
The legends of emperors in ancient China include: Emperor Yan, Emperor Huang, SHAOHAO, Zhuanxu, DIHE, dizhi, Yao and shun.
At present, there is no concept of "XiaGu" in the field of historiography. As for the dividing line between the ancient and the middle ages, there are two kinds of Views: one is based on the current highest historical authority "general history of China" (Bai Shouyi chief editor, 22 volumes), the division between the ancient and the middle ages is based on the Qin Dynasty, that is, the pre Qin history is the ancient history. In the middle ages, it was before the Qing Dynasty 1840, until the Qin Dynasty. The second is to adopt the theory of European history. The ancient history of the world is the history of the occurrence, development and decline of primitive society and slavery society in the world. The decline of slavery in Europe was marked by 476 A.D. Therefore, the second view is that before 476 A.D., it is ancient history, and then it is medieval history. Because there are still great differences in the division of the ancient and the Middle Ages in China, mainly the division of slavery and feudalism, that is, the division of ancient Chinese history, has not yet been finalized. Therefore, for the time being, we will take the general history of China as the standard.
The exact time recorded in ancient Chinese books can only be traced back to the beginning of Sima Qian's chronology of twelve Marquises in historical records, the first year of Gonghe in the late Western Zhou Dynasty (841 BC). In 1989, general history of China, edited by Bai Shouyi, was published, which avoided the problem of dividing the ancient history by stages and replaced it with "ancient times" and "Middle Ages" in the sense of time. Bai Shouyi said in the inscription: "from the perspective of historical development order, this is roughly equivalent to the slavery era in general historical works. But in this era, slavery is not the only social form. It may be more appropriate to use the term "ancient times". In other words, it can be simply summarized as: ancient times: five emperors, ancient times: Xia and Shang, Western Zhou, spring and autumn, Warring States, and medieval times: Qin and Han Dynasties to Qing Dynasty
