MONEY OF HUAGNDI AND SHUN: ON THE ISSUE OF ATTRIBUTION OF ANCIENT COINS IN SONG CHINA

The focus of the article is the problem of attribution of Chinese preimperial coins in the Song period (960–1127). Although a number of Sung scholars deemed their precise dating impossible, some others attributed them to the pre-dynastic period, i. e. the era of the legendary sovereigns of antiquity. Despite the fact that such an attribution turns out to be untenable from the point
of view of modern science, the study of the history and the reasons for this misattribution is of substantial scientific interest, since it allows one to consider both the peculiarities of Chinese ideas about antiquity and the early stages of the development of national archeology and paleography. The article examines the development of Chinese ideas about the origins of money, and also analyzes in detail the evidence and arguments of the main supporters of the idea of their pre-dynastic origin, i. e. Zheng Qiao (1104–1162) and Luo Mi (1131–1189/1203). As a result, it is concluded that the coins attributed in the Song era to the period of the legendary sovereigns of antiquity in fact belong to the Chunqiu (8–5 c. BC) and Zhanguo (5–3 c. BC) periods, and the author of this attribution is the collector and art critic Dong Yu (d. 1229?).