Between Legend and History: NOTES ON CHENG TANG

The key-role played as founder of a glorious dynasty, temporal remoteness, and the lack of reliable documents, have granted Cheng Tang 成湯 a highranking position in the realms of legend and moral literature, but have at the same time undermined the very bases of his historicity. In such conditions, any attempt aiming at digging out the historical core hidden by centuries of layering of more or less canonical traditions is fatally bound to be a troublesome undertaking. It implies on one side the careful unfolding of a tangled skein of multifaceted literary fragments embedded in a wide variety of texts