{"id":30046,"date":"2016-09-10T21:17:09","date_gmt":"2016-09-11T04:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/study-claims-chinese-civilization-come-from-ancient-egypt"},"modified":"2017-06-04T14:16:56","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T21:16:56","slug":"study-claims-chinese-civilization-come-from-ancient-egypt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/study-claims-chinese-civilization-come-from-ancient-egypt","title":{"rendered":"Study claims: Chinese Civilization Come From Ancient Egypt"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On a cool Sunday evening in March, a geochemist named Sun Weidong gave a public lecture to an audience of laymen, students, and professors at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, the capital city of the landlocked province of Anhui in eastern China. But the professor didn\u2019t just talk about geochemistry. He also cited several ancient Chinese classics, at one point quoting historian Sima Qian\u2019s description of the topography of the Xia empire \u2014 traditionally regarded as China\u2019s founding dynasty, dating from 2070 to 1600 B.C. \u201cNorthwards the stream is divided and becomes the nine rivers,\u201d wrote Sima Qian in his first century historiography, the Records of the Grand Historian<\/a>. <\/em>\u201cReunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, \u201cthe stream\u201d in question wasn\u2019t China\u2019s famed Yellow River, which flows from west to east. \u201cThere is only one major river in the world which flows northwards. Which one is it?\u201d the professor asked. \u201cThe Nile,\u201d someone replied. Sun then showed a map of the famed Egyptian river and its delta \u2014 with nine of its distributaries flowing into the Mediterranean. This author, a researcher at the same institute, watched as audience members broke into smiles and murmurs, intrigued that these ancient Chinese texts seemed to better agree with the geography of Egypt than that of China.<\/p>\n

In the past year, Sun, a highly decorated scientist, has ignited a passionate online debate with claims that the founders of Chinese civilization were not in any sense Chinese but actually migrants from Egypt. He conceived of this connection in the 1990s while performing radiometric dating of ancient Chinese bronzes; to his surprise, their chemical composition more closely resembled those of ancient Egyptian bronzes than native Chinese ores. Both Sun\u2019s ideas and the controversy surrounding them flow out of a much older tradition of nationalist archaeology in China, which for more than a century has sought to answer a basic scientific question that has always been heavily politicized: Where do the Chinese people come from?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a cool Sunday evening in March, a geochemist named Sun Weidong gave a public lecture to an audience of laymen, students, and professors at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, the capital city of the landlocked province of Anhui in eastern China. But the professor didn\u2019t just talk about geochemistry. He also [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30046"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66284,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30046\/revisions\/66284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}