Abstract

The book is on mythological history narration of Records of the Grand Historian. From the perspective of mythology，this dissertation takes Records of the Grand Historian as a fit object and manages to demonstrate that the writing of Records of the Grand Historianembodies the logic of mythological thinking，which is the gateway for us to interpret this great book. Based on this proposition，it’s claimed that mythological thinking is the fundamental clue to ancient history and myth is the prototype code generating Chinese traditional history and culture.

Being a giant book with 500，000 words，Records of the Grand Historian is difficult to be elucidated in detail. Therefore the following five angles are selected to elaborate on the paper’s point of view in five chapters respectively.

The second chapter focuses on the mythological record of Records of the Grand Historian，taking the first volume “Yellow Emperor” as a case to explicate in depth.This chapter overthrows the narrow view well accepted over 2，000 years，which indicates that nothing is reliable in the Annals of the Five Emperors. Drawing on the theory that there are more similarities than differences between myth and legend—in another word，legend is also coded with mythological thinking—this chapter expanded the popular view of the last century that “myth is preposterous，but there are historical factors in legend”.In a sense，The myth itself is true，and the history of early China carries the striking characteristics of “mythological history”.

The third chapter focuses on the 8 myths of inductive birth，which are the most typical myths in Records of the Grand Historian . Induced myths of ancestors of the Shang-Zhou Dynasties，spanning for thousands of years history before the Eastern Han Dynasty，remain not only of totem worship concept，but also come out from inheritance and transformation of prototypes of induced myths in the Book of Songs . Most important of all，the 8 myths of inductive birth reflect the cultural and ideological realistic appeals of the emerging empire in the same way.

The chapter four focuses the 22 dream myths in Records of the Grand Historian，whichas a whole actually is in a long-standing development history of dream myths. One factor which can not be ignored is that the alchemists emerged as a class，dream myths also emerged new characteristics compared with the previous dream myths. The 22 dream myths adopt classic mythological archetypes and use some of them for new myth retelling，but show more plain and elegant narrative characteristics.

The fifth chapter concerns the digital metaphor in the style of Records of the Grand Historian . The meaning of the two mysterious figures “5” and “12” derives from the pre-historical religious belief of the cosmological myth. “Number”，being a stage of the mythological thinking，is then recognized as one of the accesses of “primitive Chinese” to God. Therefore we should pay more attention to the “number” of the style of Records of the Grand Historianto deepen our understanding of Sima Qian’s intention when he compiled this book.

In the sixth chapter the theoritical development of new historicism，poetic history and mythological history is taken as the entry point to show that Records of the Grand Historianreflects the characteristics of narration，metaphor and imagination，which are regarded as the cornerstone of the mentioned new theories in the field of history.

The reconstruction and rewriting of Chinese ancient history should take Records of the Grand Historianas a model in order to update research theory when we are in possession of more historical material. This way we could reenter Chinese ancient history from the perspective of mythological history and make better interpretation of the history.

Key Words：Records of the Grand Historian Mythological History Reduced Maths Dream Maths Mysterious Figures Historical Imagination