How did the critical scholarship doubting the authenticity of ancient texts originate and theorize? In the case of East Asia, one can quickly think of Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893-1980), the representative of the so-called Doubting Antiquity School. But there must have been a long history advocating the idea preceding Gu Jiegang. Based on the criticism on the discrepancies inherent in the ancient texts such as the Venerated Document (Shangshu) suggested by Wang Chung 王充 (27-96?), Liu Zhiji 劉知幾 (661-721), and Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007-1072), it was not until the 18th century when the scholarly quest for the cause behind the contradictions indeed began.BR The first step in theorizing the doubting of antiquity was the theory of superseding (kajō 加上) proposed by Tominaga Nakamoto 富永仲基(1715-1746). According to Tominaga, competitions between scholars to overcome previous explanations stimulated them to attribute their narratives to far-earlier sages deliberately. It was Cui Shu 崔述 (1740-1816) who applied a similar idea to history and found a fabricating pattern, in which he hypothesized that later the work, the farther in time the purported knowledge of the past is pushed back and the more complex the historical knowledge. All the same, it was not until the early 20th century when Shiratori Kurakichi 白鳥庫吉 (1865-1942) for the first time initiated the iconoclasm of sage kings such as Yao, Shun and Yu as the premise for establishing the doubting antiquity theory. Refining the relatively weak basis of Shiratori’s argument elaborately, Gu Jiegang completed the approach with the idea of the “accumulated creation of ancient history.”BR However, the sheer accumulation of archaeological discoveries in China during the second half of the 20th century exposed limitations in the idea of fabricated ancient texts promoted by the Doubting Antiquity School. Especially, Li Ling convincingly points out that they oversymplified the complicated long-term process of textual formation in early China. In this regard, studying the canonization process from the stream of textual tradition in the newly unearthed Warring States bamboo slips would provide a new vista to overcome the limitations inherent in the theory of doubting antiquity.