Da Yu Tamed Floods
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By Dennis NormileAug. 4, 2016 , 2:00 PM Many cultures trace their origins to the hazy horizon where history meets legend. In China's case, that blurry line occurs sometime between 2200 B.C.E. and 2000 B.C.E., when a legendary hero named Yu tamed Yellow River flooding and earned a mandate to become the founding emperor of the Xia dynasty, the country's first. That’s the story according to texts written long after the fact, and many Chinese believe their civilization started with emperor Yu. But archaeologists have been unable to find convincing evidence for either the flood or the Xia dynasty itself. Now, an international team of scientists drawn from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, seismology, and geology have gathered disparate evidence from ancient texts, sedimentary deposits, earthquake-triggered landslides, and skeletons in collapsed cave dwellings to craft a scenario presented this week in Science that they claim supports the legend of a great flood and hints that the Xia dynasty might be real. If the findings hold up, they could lend credence to early historical texts and help resolve a long-running debate over the origins of China and its people. It is "a groundbreaking study," says Qingwei Sun, an archaeologist at Peking University in Beijing who was not involved in the work. Still, "more data is needed [for the findings] to be widely accepted," he says. Sign up for our daily newsletter Get more great content like this delivered right to you! The paper was nearly a decade in the making. In spring 2007, the study's lead author, geologist Qinglong Wu, was working as a postdoc at the China Earthquake Administration's Institute of Geology in Beijing, when his team found ancient lakebed sediments in the Jishi Gorge at the upper reaches of the Yellow River, about 1300 kilometers west of Beijing. They speculated that at some point a lake had formed in the gorge behind rubble from a landslide. If that dam gave away, they reasoned, it would have caused a major flood. Following a hunch that came during a sleepless night in July 2008, Wu traveled 25 kilometers downstream from the gorge, where a major earthquake had destroyed numerous cave dwellings in a Neolithic settlement called Lajia. Subsequently, a thick layer of mud engulfed the ruins and the victims, preserving them for discovery in the 1990s. Wu found that the Lajia mud matched material from Jishi Gorge, suggesting that the same earthquake that had destroyed the dwellings had also triggered the upstream landslide that set the stage for the flood. Because the sediment was quite different from what would have been washed into the ruins by rainstorms, "the earthquake and flood must have occurred in the same year," says Darryl Granger, a geologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is a co-author of the paper. At that point, Wu began thinking that this event could be the basis for China’s great flood legend. "I didn’t tell others because it would invite laughter," he says. Instead, he quietly gathered evidence from lake deposits in the gorge and flood sediments downstream, and reached out to specialists around the world to help him interpret the data. The team concluded that the landslide created a dam 200 meters high that choked off the mighty Yellow for 6 to 9 months. The rising water finally overtopped the rubble and then quickly washed it away, causing a torrent that could have been among the largest floods of the Holocene epoch, Granger says. It is difficult to determine when ancient floods happened, but radiocarbon dating of the Lajia human remains pegged the catastrophes to about 1900 B.C.E. Video of AAAS ChinasGreatFlood How a great flood may have spurred China’s first civilization. Science The massive flood “provides us with a tantalizing hint that the Xia dynasty might really have existed," says David Cohen, an archaeologist and co-author at National Taiwan University in Taipei. The devastating flood could have inundated settlements even a thousand or more kilometers downstream, he says, and created chaos from which a new political order emerged. This sequence of events neatly fits the legend of Yu controlling the flooding by dredging channels to confine the Yellow River and its tributaries. This feat, the ancient texts say, allowed him to claim a mandate as the first emperor of the Xia dynasty. The timing is curiously coincidental. Around 1900 B.C.E., Cohen says, Chinese society was transitioning from the Neolithic to the Bronze age. The date also correlates with what is called the Erlitou culture, which is known from palace buildings and bronze smelting workshops discovered near Zhengzhou, about 2500 kilometers downstream from Jishi Gorge. Many scholars have argued that Erlitou is a manifestation of the elusive Xia dynasty, but a link is not firmly established. Nevertheless, with hard evidence of a catastrophic flood occurring at a time of social and political change, "It's an amazing story of all these different lines of evidence coming together," Cohen says. “If the great flood really happened, then the Xia dynasty likely happened, too,” he concludes. "It's a thought-provoking piece of work," agrees Tristram Kidder, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri, who works on several sites on the lower Yellow River. "They've done a great job showing that there was a major, catastrophic flood.” But Haiwang Liu, an archaeologist at the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in Zhengzhou, China, who collaborates with Kidder, says that at their sites in the lower Yellow, "no hard physical evidence of great floods during that time has been found." And Lothar von Falkenhausen, an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, cautions against "proposing too direct a linkage between such environmental events with semimythical accounts recorded in texts of much later date." The new paper's findings are also at odds with other recent studies, which have proposed alternative explanations for both the Jishi Gorge deposits and the Lajia sediment, says Wenxiang Wu, a geographer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences's Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research in Beijing. He adds that recent radiocarbon dating refinements have suggested the Erlitou culture thrived between 1750 B.C.E. and 1530 B.C.E.—much later than the proposed new date for the Xia dynasty. The paper "needs more supporting evidence," for its claims regarding a great flood and the Xia dynasty, Wenxiang Wu concludes. Qinglong Wu, now at Nanjing Normal University, acknowledges the paper is certain to stir up several long-simmering controversies. But in trying to make sense of disparate historical and physical evidence "our data involves fewer contradictions" than alternative explanations, he says. One point all agree on is the need for further study. Finding evidence for a great flood along the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River "would undoubtedly strengthen the persuasiveness of the paper,” Sun says. Wu’s team "sets out a hypothesis we can follow up—it gives us something to look for," Kidder says. Posted in: Archaeology, Asia/Pacific, Human Evolution
The Great Flood Da Yu Andrew Marr’s History of the World – Age of Survival
Farming and town-living had both brought new dangers but the trap had closed. There was no going back. Across the world, many of our ancestors were now living in independent settled communities. But what would possibly bring them together into bigger groups? Again, we have to look to nature – not simply its opportunities but also its threats. All around the world people have told stories about a great flood, and it really does seem that something happened about 4,000 years ago which caused devastation to many of the first civilisations, including China. But what makes China different is that they still tell stories, part myth but part, probably, history, too. Yellow River The Great Flood In China, it really does all start with the Flood. According to the ancient chronicles, there were nine years of heavy rain, causing the Yellow River to change its course with devastating effects. The Yellow River is also known as “China’s Great Sorrow”. For thousands of years it regularly burst its banks, wiping out entire villages, destroying everything in its path. The 3000-mile-long river flooded an area greater than the entire United Kingdom. River Engineer Old Legends, Gun The old legends say that one of the clan leaders appointed a man named Gun to devise a way to tame the river. The stakes were rather high. If Gun succeeded, he’d be richly rewarded. If he failed, he’d pay with his life. He built huge earth dams. But time and again, they were brushed aside by the floodwaters. Gun was unable to save his people… Or himself. The father’s burden would now fall upon his son, Yu. After Gun’s execution the clan leader ordered Yu to come up with a new idea about how to control the floods, and Yu dedicated his life to the job. According to old Chinese legends, he said he wouldn’t return to his pregnant wife until the river was tamed. The ancient chronicles say that Yu decided to begin by surveying the entire length of the river. On this epic trek he came up with a radically different plan. No more confrontations with nature, no more dams. Instead of trying to confront the raging waters like his father, he would divide them. Yu planned to create a vast network of channels. During the flood season, they would divert the full force of the river and reduce its destructive flow, but that meant a colossal work of engineering… And a huge diplomatic challenge – because in order to succeed, he’d have to convince hundreds of rival clans to set aside centuries of hostility. Chinese Dynasties Hostile Clans We’re going back to the old strength of pre-historic humanity, tribalism, which was now becoming a weakness, because only by working together could the clans possibly solve the problem of the Yellow River. Yu’s epic engineering project began. Myth or not, there were major river-taming projects at this time. The story goes that over the next 13 years, Yu passed his home three times, but he remained true to his vow of self-sacrifice and never went inside. Finally, his vast network of channels was complete. And the rains came again. Yu’s great feat of engineering would be put to the test. But the channels calmed the floods. Yu’s story tells us an important historical truth about how natural challenges brought River-dwelling people together. Chinese hero Da Yu Da Yu had united the clans of the Yellow River for the first time because only by coming together, under a single authority, could they solve this problem. As a reward, the clan leader made Yu his heir. Some people argue he founded the first Chinese dynasty, and certainly Chinese history begins on the banks of the Yellow River. Yu is known to this day as Da Yu – the Great Yu – and it’s interesting that the first Chinese hero was a civil engineer and a civil servant. All around the world history is shaped by the desire to shape nature to suit us. That means working together, but it’s also competitive and violent. Each move forward brings fresh problems. Farming brings more people, but it brings more disease, and in more complex societies, leaders and priests will emerge. It’s all a shaggy-dog story of unexpected consequences. From the sweat and success of the first farmers, all the world’s hierarchies, from landlords and popes to emperors would grow, and they only thought they were planting next year’s porridge or trying to keep dry.
Scientific Evidence of Flood May Give Credence to Legend of China’s First Dynasty
Scientists have found evidence of a catastrophic flood that overwhelmed the upper Yellow River valley in China some 4,000 years ago, an event that they say may confirm the historical basis of China’s semi-legendary first dynasty. Ancient Chinese texts record a mix of historical events and legends. Some records, such as those relating to China’s second and third dynasties, were confirmed in surprising detail when archaeologists turned up inscriptions on oracle bones and ancient bronzes. But records of the first dynasty, that of the Xia, contain stories of a Great Flood with a Noah-like savior, the Emperor Yu, who gained the mandate of heaven after dredging canals to dispel the floodwaters and make the land safe. Historians have long wondered whether this flood account was a creation-style myth, the folk memory of a real event, or some mixture of the two. Some have dismissed the story of Emperor Yu as a fiction intended to justify centralized rule and, in the absence of any evidence of a massive flood at the time, many have regarded the stories of the Xia dynasty as more myth than history. A team of archaeologists and geologists led by Qinglong Wu of Peking University in Beijing has now discovered evidence of a massive flood that they say could be the Great Flood mentioned in the Chinese annals. The setting for the flood was a landslide, caused by an earthquake, that planted a massive natural dam across the Yellow River where it travels through the Jishi Gorge after emerging from the Tibetan plateau. To judge from the remaining sidewalls, the researchers wrote in Friday’s issue of Science, the dam would have risen some 800 feet above the river’s present level. For six to nine months, Dr. Wu’s team estimates, the river ceased to flow as water accumulated in the new lake behind the dam. Then, as the water overtopped the dam’s crest, the dam rapidly gave way, releasing up to 3.8 cubic miles of water, one of the largest known floods in the last 10,000 years. The outburst flood wave could have traveled as far as 1,250 miles downstream, breaking the river’s natural banks, causing extensive flooding and even making the Yellow River switch course. Floods are often hard to date. But the same earthquake that dammed the river provided a date by destroying a village called Lajia some 16 miles downstream. Fissures caused by the earthquake are completely filled with sediment from the outburst flood, with no annual deposit of the windblown earth that is common in the region, which means the flood occurred the same year as the earthquake, Dr. Wu’s team says. Radiocarbon dating of the bones of three children killed by the earthquake establish that the event took place around 1920 B.C. A view of skeletons in a cave in a village called Lajia, which is said to have been destroyed in an earthquake in China thousands of years ago. Cai Linhai A view of skeletons in a cave in a village called Lajia, which is said to have been destroyed in an earthquake in China thousands of years ago. The date offers a striking temporal link to the Xia dynasty which, if it existed, is thought to have begun at this time. A modern Chinese chronology project sets the beginning of the dynasty at 2070 B.C. Even closer, two scholars working from Chinese astronomical records — a statement that there was a close conjunction of five planets early in the reign of the Emperor Yu — have calculated that the dynasty began in 1914 B.C. Chinese annals record that Emperor Yu contrived a recovery from the Great Flood by dredging drainage canals rather than trying to repair breaches in the Yellow River’s dikes, as his predecessor had done. He also laid the foundations for the Chinese civilization that followed by specifying which regions should send tribute. The place where he began his operations is recorded as Jishi, which has the same Chinese characters as that of the gorge where the landslide dam occurred. Dr. Wu’s team said its reconstruction of the outburst flood from the Jishi Gorge showed that the ancient textual accounts of the Great Flood “may well be rooted in a historic natural event.” The finding also supports the idea, the researchers say, that archaeological remains found at Erlitou, a site about 1,550 miles downstream from the gorge, may have been the Xia capital, given that the Erlitou culture dates to 1900 B.C., the same time as the Jishi Gorge flood. But historians may require more evidence before signing on to the team’s thesis. It is not so clear how a folk memory of the flood could have been accurately maintained for at least 900 years, as Dr. Wu’s team suggested, given that elements in the texts may begin as early as 1,000 years ago. There were probably many floods, which may have been conflated in popular memory, said Sarah Allan, a historian of ancient China at Dartmouth College. In her view, the Great Flood described in the ancient texts is a myth to explain how the world was made, not a historical event. “The story begins with water everywhere and the problem is how to make the world habitable,” she said. Even if the myth was centered on a real event, it is a reach to associate this with the Jishi Gorge flood or the flood with the Erlitou culture, she said. Paul Goldin, who studies China’s Warring States period at the University of Pennsylvania, also sees the stories of Yu and the Great Flood as unlikely to represent historical events. And they date mostly to the fourth century B.C., long after the Jishi Gorge flood. “These are relatively late legends that were propagated for philosophical and political reasons, and it’s inherently questionable to suppose that they represent some dim memory of the past,” he said. Dr. Goldin remarked on a “kind of fixation” in Chinese archaeology “to prove all the ancient texts and legends have some fundamental truth, which is an overreaction to an earlier period when they were rejected as myth. It shouldn’t be every archaeologist’s first instinct to see if their findings are matched in the historical sources,” he said. Skeletons of 14 victims killed by an earthquake at the Lajia site were excavated in 2000. Cai Linhai Skeletons of 14 victims killed by an earthquake at the Lajia site were excavated in 2000. The Jishi Gorge flood occurred at a pivotal time in Chinese history, the boundary between the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age that followed. Dr. Wu’s team said at a news conference on Wednesday that the story of Yu taming the flood represents the emergence of a new political order. The archaeological record shows some sort of a decline, as would be expected after a great catastrophe, followed in the Bronze Age, first seen in the Erlitou culture, by new levels of development, a large increase in the size of cities, the development of writing and workshops manufacturing bronze. “If they can show some kind of connection in the archaeological record between the Jishi Gorge flood and the emergence of a culture like Erlitou, that would be a major improvement of our understanding of history,” Dr. Goldin said.
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Examples
1 We know as well about Yu the Great Taming the Floods (da yu zhi shui)
2 The story of Yu the Great Taming the Floods doesn’t mean that water control projects didn’t begin until Yu the Great’s time.
3 Da Yu 's endeavor of taming floods was successful