New geological findings suggest that an ancient flood in a popular legend about the birth of China's civilization might have actually occurred, but some 150 years later than historians thought.
© Wu QinglongThis photo shows Jishi Gorge upstream from the landslide dam. Gray silt deposits reveal an ancient, massive lake held by the dam.
In Chinese mythology, the tale of a great flood marks the beginning of the ancient civilization and the debut of China's first-ever, but possibly fictional, dynasty—the Xia Dynasty. Today, researchers published a paper in
Science laying out geological evidence for a huge flood on the Yellow River almost 4000 years ago that may have inspired the origin story.
"The scientific evidence of this flood would lend support to parts of the legendary history," said Li Liu, an archaeologist at Stanford University in California and coauthor on the new paper. Specifically, the findings could lend credibility to arguments that the Xia Dynasty actually existed.
Yu the GreatThe story of the
Xia Dynasty starts with a flood that supposedly lasted 20 years. In ancient times, a man called Yu recruited villagers in the Yellow River valley to divert the waters that had been raging untamed for almost a decade. Over another decade, Yu and the villagers dug channels and tributaries that led the water to the sea.
Grateful countrymen crowned
Yu the Great as their ruler. He started the dynastic tradition when he eventually passed his throne to his son. Modern scholars suggest that Yu's reign started in
2070 B.C.E.—if it existed at all.
Because Chinese texts made no mention of this story for the next millennium, some scholars reject the existence of the dynasty itself, said Wu Qinglong, a geologist at Peking University in Beijing and lead author of the paper.
