Unearthed documents and handed down documents can complement each other and prove the spread of documents. The longer it lasts, the easier it is to be distorted. As far as the ancient documents we see today are concerned, there are too many mistakes, inverted sentences, missing chapters, different records and even random alterations. Unearthed documents have been buried for a long time, so they can keep their original appearance. Some documents have gone through thousands of years (such as Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Jinwen). ), and few have experienced it for hundreds of years, so its value is self-evident.

However, Stan needs to point out that after the unearthed materials appear, all the places that ancient skeptics doubted or thought should be criticized can be overturned, and the literature records can be completely believed. This kind of thing won't happen. After the unearthed data came out, people who opposed the ancient skepticism often said that the correctness of the documentary records was confirmed, which is actually a wrong idea. For example, even if there is unearthed data "Lao Zi", it can't be confirmed that Yin ordered Lao Zi to write "Lao Zi" in Historical Records, and then Lao Zi disappeared to the west of Hanguguan and so on. There are also records in Historical Records that Laozi has 5,000 words, but his Guodian bamboo slips do not have 5,000 words. Laozi, a bamboo slip of Guodian Chu, looks very similar to the popular version of Laozi, so many people think that the full version of Laozi with 5,000 words has appeared, and the simplified version is only an excerpt from the full version. In fact, there is a big difference between the two.

Therefore, the appearance of unearthed data does not in turn prove that there is no problem with what ancient skeptics suspected. Due to the appearance of unearthed data, the historical facts recorded in the literature have been confirmed, which is a bit exaggerated. For example, it is often said that the records of Oracle bone inscriptions in the Yin Dynasty confirmed that the genealogy of the Yin king described in Sima Qian's Historical Records is true. Generally speaking, this can be said, but the general explanation is not knowledge in the strict sense. We can't accept that other records in Historical Records are credible.

Unearthed materials and documents need to be criticized. It does not mean that the unearthed materials are pure facts without any processing ingredients; Similarly, it is not the history described in literature that is prone to problems, but the unearthed materials can reflect the real history: the unearthed materials do not have this privilege. This is easily misunderstood. In a word, unearthed documents are not necessarily more reliable than handed down documents. Although it was thousands of years ago, it only presents the ideological outlook of thousands of years ago, which does not mean that the historical things reflected thousands of years ago are true and reliable.