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Sima Qi The Sacred Duty Of The Historian

Decent Essays

“Books are the steps towards human progress”. Following standard rhetoric like this, people nowadays would be easily lured into the belief that the formation and circulation of literacy was the result of nature development—a normative and inevitable route of the progress of human society, an official and more efficient way for the transmission of knowledge.Nonetheless, as we examine closely to the history all the way back to the period before the wide broadcast of writing, we are able to see that the writing at its first stage was merely aimed to strengthen the state’s rule as well to build the virtuous images of the state instead of functioning as a major channel of knowledge transmission. More than that, literacy in some circumstances even functioned the role as state formation and creation. Historians, as we normally perceive bear the responsibility as scholars who record and research about past events and compiled them together in order to benefit the future generations as an authoritative channel for them to understand and study the past of human kind. Nevertheless, these missions were hardly the main …show more content…

In the chapter “Sima Qian: The Sacred Duty of the Historian”, Sima Qian’s father Sima Tan, who was also a court historian serving the Western Han warned him that the main missions for a son was to carry on the deeds that his father and ancestors had been doing for centuries, which is to continue working as a court historian; he also stressed on the point that Sima Qian, as a virtuous son should fully obey the rule of his sovereign, as it is the right thing to do according to the concepts filial piety. Thus, the book of Shijji can be largely sensed as a filial behavior towards his parents, his sovereignty, and more importantly, the interests of the state of

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