Free A History of the World by Andrew Marr Page B

treasure-hunting Victorian archaeology has meant that while some of their greatest carvings and other artefacts are in European museums, the sites themselves are often dusty disappointments. This is tragic, since the achievements of the Sumerians, Akkadians and early Babylonians were huge, and in some ways much more impressive than those of the better-known Egyptians. Their city culture was bureaucratic and clearly in some ways oppressive, weighing heavily on farmers, requiring payment in return for the canals and wells that kept their fields so fertile. It allowed the emergence of kings with enough muscle to go to war against one another, and to carve out the first empires, along with the misery that early mass-killers such as Sargon of Akkad brought to the land. But these first cities were also places of beauty, intellectual advance, wonder and – quite clearly – a great deal of not very innocent fun.
    Da Yu to You
     
    You might imagine that the earliest named Chinese hero was a warrior-ruler like Gilgamesh, or some bearded sage; but you would be wrong. He is a public servant, an engineer and only latterly a king. Da Yu, or ‘the Great Yu’, a figure who stands just on the wrong side ofthe line between myth and history, was the man who tamed the Yellow River, that life-giving but capricious core of early Chinese culture. Da Yu’s father, so the story goes, was a man called Gun who had been given the job by the local ruler of dealing with devastating river floods. Most early cultures, particularly across Asia and Europe, have flood stories, suggesting that there was a time of flooding so bad that it remained in the consciousness of peoples for millennia.
    In China’s case, Gun tried to cope by building dykes, presumably using the same rammed-earth technique found in early Chinese towns. But more floods came and simply washed the earth walls away. The king who had commissioned Gun punished him by cutting him into many pieces. Gun’s son, the presumably rather anxious Da Yu, then took on the job in his scattered father’s place.
    Da Yu, it is said, worked ferociously hard – but he did not build dykes. First, he travelled up and down the river talking to the local tribes and persuading people that they would have to work together and accept central authority if the problem was to be coped with. The parallels with the rise of the Mesopotamian cities are obvious. Next, he had channels dug to send the water to other rivers, and irrigation systems built to spread it across the farmland. Instead of confronting his enemy head-on, Da Yu confused the river by dividing it. For thirteen years he worked fanatically, reducing his hands and feet to callused pads. It is said that during that time he passed by his home on three occasions. The first time he heard his wife in labour, but did not stop or go in. The second time, his son was old enough to call out his name. He did not stop, because the floods were in full spate. The third time, his son was over ten years old. Again, Da Yu ignored him, and kept working. Today he would be pursued by the Child Support Agency and condemned by newspaper columnists. Things were different then.
    The king was so impressed by his diligence and dedication that he passed the throne to him. Da Yu reigned for forty-five years, and then by passing the throne to his son founded the Xia dynasty.
    Later, copious amounts of nonsense were glued onto the story, ranging from Da Yu cutting through a mountain with a magic battle-axe, to his having engaged the services of a yellow dragon and a black turtle to help him. But the first key point is that, according to the earliest Chinese historians, the first Chinese dynasty began with attemptsto control flooding. And that is at the very least a good guess on their part. About four thousand years ago there seems to have been a collapse in Chinese settlements, at just the time when the same was happening in the Middle East and Egypt. Going back to those flood