Is the flood that Dayu controlled the same as the one in the Bible?

I wonder if you have noticed that both Eastern and Western mythology record a flood. Many netizens asked, is it the same flood recorded in these two completely different cultures?

Here is the answer first: No, Dayu's flood was caused by a major earthquake that cut the Yellow River in half to form a barrier lake. The water in the Yellow River was accumulated for 6-9 months, forming a volume about 7 times that of the 1998 Yangtze River flood, and then collapsed in an instant, causing the entire north to be flooded.

This means

1. The causes of the flood are different . The flood in the Bible was caused by rainfall, while the flood of Dayu was caused by the Yellow River flood.

2. The geographical locations are different . The Yellow River originates in Qinghai and flows eastward, while the Bible takes place in the Middle East.

Below we would like to introduce a fascinating Science article about the great flood in the Xia Dynasty.

01. Did the Xia Dynasty and Dayu really exist?

When I saw this article, I was stunned and excited. I downloaded it to read. I share it with you. Please forgive me for not being a geography major.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the original science article

The legend about Dayu's flood control has been circulating in Chinese history, whether it is official history or unofficial history, and has been passed down from mouth to mouth by everyone from Confucius to peddlers.

Figure 2: Dayu's flood control

However, the existence of Dayu and the Xia Dynasty , and the authenticity of the flood that lasted for more than 20 years from Gun to Yu (9 years for Gun, 13 years for Yu, and including the early period, estimated to be more than 22 years) have always been controversial.

Today's article explains the cause of Dayu's flood . This article published in Science is an international team led by researcher Wu Qinglong from Nanjing Normal University. The title of the article is amazing. ——Outburst flood at 1920 BCE supports historicity of China's Great Flood and the Xia dynasty. Translated into Chinese, it means that the flood in 1920 BC supports the historicity of China's Great Flood and the Xia dynasty.

This is a rare top-level article that directly points to the existence of the Xia Dynasty. Note: The article is written by a Chinese, so you can just read the pinyin . The original text is briefly described as follows:

The remains of an ancient landslide dam were discovered on the border of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. They simulated and reconstructed the process and found that a super-impounded lake was formed due to the landslide dam. When the impounded lake collapsed, the flood that instantly poured into the Yellow River was enough to cause the diversion of the lower reaches of the Yellow River and prolonged flooding events.

The most coincidental thing is that the time of the collapse of this barrier lake coincides with the time of the large-scale cultural transfer event in the Central Plains in history, which means that our ancestors were forced to migrate on a large scale during the great flood.

02. About the barrier lake

This barrier lake is located in Xunhua County, Qinghai Province. Coincidentally, there is also an ancient Yuwang Temple in this place. The scope of this barrier lake discovered by archaeologists is roughly shown in the figure below.

Figure 3: The entire area of ​​the barrier lake

Jishi Gorge is also called Mengda Gorge. The whole gorge is 25 kilometers long. Mountains on both sides are towering and steep cliffs stand tall. The Yellow River rushes down from the west in the valley, and the sound of the water is as loud as thunder. Successive feudal dynasties built Jishi Pass at the mouth of the gorge to station troops. It was the first of the 24 passes under the jurisdiction of Hezhou Wei in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Now a hydropower station has been built here.

Figure 4: Jishi Gorge today

It was here that a super barrier lake was formed in ancient times. Roughly speaking, this barrier lake is 1.3 kilometers deep and 185 to 210 meters higher than the ancient Yellow River channel. Imagine the instant collapse of the Three Gorges Reservoir after the water is stored (assuming that the Three Gorges gravity dam does not exist and the Yangtze River waterway is stable).

Figure 5: Schematic diagram of the flood, the dotted line in the figure is the top of the barrier lake

The archaeological site of this lake (the white line)

Figure 6: Schematic diagram of the flood, the dotted line in the figure is the bottom of the barrier lake

What if we make a simulation diagram? As shown below

Figure 7: Schematic diagram of the Great Flood

This is the elevation map of the barrier lake caused by this dam. Due to the special basin terrain upstream, this landslide dam can block the Yellow River water for 6 to 9 months and form a giant barrier lake with a water storage of 12-17 billion cubic meters . What is the concept of this water volume? Everyone knows the Banqiao Reservoir dam burst in 1975, right? The Zhumadian Reservoir dam burst, which was rated as the biggest scientific and technological disaster in the 20th century, had a water volume of 700 million cubic meters. This barrier lake is more than 20 times that of Banqiao. (29 counties and cities in Henan Province, 11 million people were affected, and casualties were heavy. 17 million mu of farmland was flooded, of which 11 million mu of farmland suffered devastating disasters, 5.96 million houses collapsed, 302,300 farm animals and 720,000 pigs were washed away, and 102 kilometers of the Beijing-Guangzhou Railway, which runs through China from north to south, were destroyed, traffic was interrupted for 18 days, transportation was affected for 48 days, and direct economic losses were nearly 10 billion yuan)

Figure 8: Banqiao Reservoir dam breach

During the archaeological excavation, a large area of ​​landslide -like lake sediments (DLS) with a thickness of up to 30 meters were discovered, proving that a landslide lake of this size once existed in the upstream area.

03. Will the impounded lake overflow the dam?

Through the simulation and reconstruction of the landslide dam, scientists believe that the barrier lake will eventually submerge the dam crest and quickly form a dam-break flood. They found evidence in the lower reaches of Jishixia: dam-break flood sediments (OFS) characterized by a large number of Precambrian greenschist and purple-brown Cretaceous sedimentary rock fragments. These rocks, which originally belonged to the Jishixia area, were carried by the turbulent flood to the Guanting Basin, 25 kilometers away, and deposited on the river beach 7 to 50 meters above the water surface.

Figure 9: Location of Great Flood Sediments

This is the entire flood rapidly dropping 110-135 meters within an area of ​​about 55 kilometers, releasing more than 12 billion cubic meters of water . This amount of impact is simply unimaginable.

Figure 10: The impact of a major flood

After the flood, the entire barrier lake shrank from blue to yellow.

Figure 11: Schematic diagram of changes in water area after the flood

Carbonized wood samples found in sediments upstream and downstream of the breach were then subjected to carbon 14 accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), proving that the age of the downstream breach sediments and the upstream barrier lake sediments are very similar, and are likely to have been caused by the same flood. The time point is also very similar, around 2000 BC.

Figure 12: Archaeological research on the time nodes of the Great Flood

Coincidentally, within the Guanting Basin directly impacted by the flood, there is a Lajia site belonging to the early Qijia culture, known as the "Pompeii of the East". In 2005, Nature also reported that the oldest existing noodles were found in the site (this picture is the original picture in the article, from the unearthed). Lu H, Yang X, Ye M, et al. Culinary archaeology: Millet noodles in late Neolithic China[J]. Nature , 2005, 437(7061): 967-968.

Figure 13: At the Lajia site in the Yellow River Basin of China, archaeologists discovered noodles dating back 4,000 years.

04. Lajia Ruins

The Lajia site was confirmed to have been destroyed by an earthquake. The author found that there were also flood sediments brought by the collapse of the Jishi Gorge dam on the ruins of the Lajia site, proving that the flood had flooded this place after the earthquake. This is the process of the place being flooded.

Figure 14: The Lajia ruins were submerged by a flood

This is the sediment found

Figure 15: Lajia Ruins

Coincidentally, there are flood sediments, not rainwater sediments, in the loess cracks of this earthquake, which means that this great flood occurred after the earthquake but before the rains of the second year .

The picture below shows the archaeological discoveries at the Lajia site.

Figure 16: Lajia Ruins

Therefore, with the help of our precise calculations of the earthquake (carbon 14 dating of the remains of several children found in the collapsed houses at the Lajia site), the time of this flood was determined to be 1922±28 BC.

05. How big is this flood?

How big was this flood? Look at the picture. The red pillar was the largest in the Holocene period (9700 BC to the present) and it killed countless later floods. It is estimated that it is unprecedented and will never be repeated in the history of the Earth.

The peak value is 400,000. You should know that the peak value of the Yangtze River flood in 1998 was only about 60,000. The largest flood in the Yangtze River was the flood in 1870, with a peak value of 100,000, which is a once-in-10,000-year standard. The largest flood relic in archaeological history is about 130,000 (about 40,000 years ago). This flood is equivalent to the amount of seven floods in 1998.

Figure 17: The unprecedented scale of the Great Flood

This flood poured down, submerging the entire Yellow River basin and sweeping across the entire Yellow River basin. No wonder ancient books recorded that "the Nine Provinces were blocked and the Four Rivers were blocked"; and there was never any mention of a storm, because this was not a flood that could be caused by a storm at all.

Figure 18: The flooded Yellow River

This disaster almost brought about the demise of the Chinese civilization. It should be noted that at that time, China was one of the peaks of the ancient Yellow River civilization and experienced a large-scale transformation from the late Neolithic Age to the early Bronze Age. The time point was close to the late "Taosi Civilization" (-2600-1900bc) within the Xia civilization in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, and was located in the early "Erlitou Culture" (-1900-1550bc, the latter was near the founding of the Shang Dynasty).

It is speculated that this super disaster caused the Chinese Alliance to move southward from Shanxi to Henan, and caused a century-long dark period of civilization.

Figure 19: Civilization in the Yellow River Basin at that time

The specific times of each culture and the time of the Great Flood

Figure 20: Civilization time in the Yellow River Basin at that time

Of course, this disaster also brought about the first dynasty in China: Xia. However, regarding the existence of Xia, it is currently believed that there was a dynasty before Shang, but whether this dynasty was called the Xia Dynasty is two different things, so sometimes we will uniformly call it "pre-Shang civilization". The archaeology of the Xia Dynasty is currently a big problem in archaeology, and both falsification and confirmation are problematic.

Finally, the difference between the Biblical Flood and the Xia Dynasty Flood:

1. The causes of the floods in the Bible and in the story of Yu the Great are different. The Bible records that the Great Flood was caused by heavy rain for 40 days and nights; the floods in the Xia Dynasty were caused by the Yellow River water that had been blocked for several months, so it only belonged to the Yellow River Basin in China.

2. The flooding time is different. The flood in the Bible receded very quickly; the flooding of the Yellow River lasted for more than 20 years (this is normal, Chiang Kai-shek's Yellow River flooded for nine years after it broke through).

ref.

Full name of the article Qinglong Wu et.al. Outburst flood at 1920 BCE supports historicity of China's Great Flood and the Xia dynasty .Science 2016: Vol. 353, Issue 6299