Confusingly but interestingly, the name Xihe appears in Chinese tradition in two rather different guises that scholars have long debated the relationship between. Alongside the mythological mother of the ten sun-crows described in works like the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the ancient Book of Documents, one of the oldest strata of Chinese historical and political writing, describes Xi and He as the surnames, or possibly the combined title, of officials appointed by the legendary sage-king Yao to observe the heavens, track the movements of the sun, moon and stars, and regulate the calendar so that agricultural and ritual life could be properly timed.
Some scholars have argued that this bureaucratic Xi-He tradition and the mythological solar mother Xihe share a common origin, perhaps an ancient solar-observation cult later split by Chinese tradition into a divine mother-figure on one hand and a rationalized, historicized pair of court astronomers on the other, part of a broader Chinese tendency, noted also in figures like Zhuanxu and the sage-emperors, to convert older mythic material into the seemingly historical record of a golden administrative age. Other specialists caution that the resemblance may be no more than a shared name applied to unrelated traditions, since the philological evidence connecting a goddess who bathes sun-crows in the eastern sea to a pair or office of terrestrial calendar-officials is suggestive rather than conclusive. Either way, the coexistence of a mythological Xihe and an official Xihe within the same textual tradition captures something distinctive about early Chinese thought, its comfort with letting cosmic myth and dynastic administrative legend sit side by side, without requiring a single tidy resolution of which came first.