Master Archaeologist

Chapter 360 Gun and Yu are descendants of Liangzhu?

Standing on the top of the hill, overlooking the Liangzhu ancient city surrounded by the "C" shape in front of him, Kong Jianwen was amazed.

"The rise of Liangzhu ancient city is not unrelated to the prosperous water system!"

In fact, after 5000 years of vicissitudes, most of the branch water networks that originally spread throughout the plains disappeared due to a major flood.

However, after the day and night efforts of archaeologists.

The traces of ancient river ditches were cleared up by archaeologists, and they were densely distributed in the inner city of Liangzhu Ancient City.

Of course, the most obvious one is the ruins of the city wall of Liangzhu Ancient City.

Even after 5000 years, the remains of the Liangzhu City Wall and the city gate have jointly constructed a closed pattern that is close to a circle, which is the most undeniable fact of the ancient city of Liangzhu.

It is also the last remnant of the Liangzhu Culture revealed on the ground.

The mountains are the country, and the water is the wall.

In order to enclose the nearly 300 million square meters of the royal city, the Liangzhu people used the developed water system to transport a large number of stones from the foot of the mountain and the ditch, and mixed them with soil to build a road about 1500-1700 meters long from east to west and from north to south. About 1800-1900 meters, a slightly rounded rectangular city wall.

For defense, except for the south wall without moats among the four walls, the other three walls have internal and external moats, which is equivalent to building a city with rivers.

In addition, 8 water gates have been explored so far, 2 on each of the four walls, connecting with the inner and outer rivers.In addition, there is a Lucheng gate in the middle of the south city wall, and this is where you should usually go in and out of the city.

That is, this wide city wall is like a dividing line at that time. Inside the wall is the center of the entire ancient city, and outside the city is the outskirts of the ancient city.

A land gate separates the inner city from the outer suburbs.

"According to research, most of the rivers within Waiguo are not natural waterways. And the length of these artificial rivers has reached more than 3 meters." Chen Han said in shock.

Food cultivation requires water, and the communication between developed handicraft industries also requires the participation of waterways.

For this reason, in addition to their own river channels, the Liangzhu people continued to dig river channels on the basis of the original water system.

In fact, most of the dense waterway network in the inner city was dug out by the Liangzhu people themselves along a tributary of a large river.

These waterways add up to a total of more than 3 meters in the inner city, which is equivalent to 30 kilometers of waterways.

And the size of the entire inner city is only 3 square kilometers!

It can be seen how dense the water network in the inner city is, just like a spider web.

Except for the Mojiaoshan platform in the center of the inner city, which is not covered by any water network and is a boxy earthwork, the rest of the inner city is connected by the water network.

It can be seen that at that time, Chen Han lamented how incisive the idea of ​​Liangzhu being the Venice of the East was.

No, it should be said that Venice is Liangzhu of the West!

When Liangzhu flourished, the city-state of Venice hadn’t even appeared yet!
Water, not only can be used as a road, but also can be used for defense.

The Liangzhu earthen city wall and the river channel are matched with each other and together play a defensive role.What's more, the city itself is a water city, and only one of the nine gates is a land gate.

But while water brings abundance, opportunity and prosperity, it also sows the seeds of danger.The city that thrives on water is also plagued by floods.

At that time, the Tianmu Mountains were the absolute center of heavy rain.Whenever summer comes, the abundant rainwater tends to flood into raging mountain torrents, which directly impacts the ancient Liangzhu Kingdom located on the downstream plain.

In order to resist the intrusion of mountain torrents, the talented Liangzhu people creatively built a water conservancy system consisting of 11 dams.

At this time, the place where Chen Han and Kong Jianwen were located was actually on the mountains on the northwest side of Liangzhu Ancient City, at the end of the "C" valley.

Liangzhu's water conservancy system consists of three parts: the high valley dam, the long embankment in front of the mountain, and the low plain dam.

Among them, there are six high dams at the mouth of the valley. They are distributed in the mountains on the northwest side of Liangzhu ancient city. They are divided into two groups, east and west, and each group blocks a valley mouth.

The plain low dam is located between the plains and hills about 5.5 kilometers south of the Taniguchi high dam, and there are four in total.

The part of the long embankment in front of the mountain mainly refers to the Tangshan ruins, which is east-west, nearly curved in plane, and has a double dam structure in the middle.It is the largest single project in the water conservancy system.

The dams divided into high and low levels cooperate with the long embankment in front of the mountain to retain a large amount of incoming water in valleys and lowlands.

It can roughly block the continuous precipitation of 870 milliliters in a short period of time. Even now, this amount of rainfall belongs to the standard of once in a hundred years.

It can be said that the water conservancy projects and embankments built by Liangzhu people 5000 years ago, even in modern times, are still a very good water conservancy design!

According to estimates by water conservancy experts on the location of the spillway, the entire water conservancy system has formed a water storage surface with an area of ​​about 13 square kilometers in the north and northwest of Liangzhu Ancient City, with a storage capacity of about 275 million cubic meters.

This is the earliest large-scale water conservancy project system discovered in my country so far. Before the discovery of the Liangzhu water conservancy system, the history of water conservancy in China generally began with Dayu's water control for more than 4000 years.

Liangzhu's water conservancy system pushed forward the Chinese nation's struggle against water for 1000 years.

This is why some scholars have linked the "Liangzhu Civilization" with the legendary Dayu.

It is believed that Dayu may be a descendant of Liangzhu.

About 4200 years ago, the Hangzhou Basin where the ancient city of Liangzhu is located experienced a huge flood.

The entire Hangzhou Basin was flooded, forming a flood layer more than one meter thick. This area became unsuitable for human life, and the ancient city of Liangzhu disappeared since then.

The Hangzhou area became the country of Ze, and it was not inhabited until after 2000 during the Warring States period. This is why the Central Plains later saw that the Wu and Yue countries were still barren places with short hair and tattoos.

After the flood, the survivors of Liangzhu were divided into two branches, one moved westward to Shaanxi, and the other moved northward to Guangdong.

Because the jade cong, a representative ritual vessel of Liangzhu, was found in these two places between 3000 and [-] years ago.

Dayu and his father Gun came from the west of the Central Plains.

When Yu was young, he moved eastward with his father Gun and came to the Central Plains.His father, Gun, was entrusted to Chong by Emperor Yao.

Later, during the reign of Emperor Yao, floods in the Central Plains caused flood disasters, and the people were in great distress.Emperor Yao ordered Gun to control the floods.

Gun was ordered to deal with floods, and Gun used the method of blocking water, that is, setting up embankments on the banks.

Gun's water control method is exactly the same as the Liangzhu civilization's water conservancy project ideas of building dams and setting up embankments.

They all want to use the method of blocking to retain a large amount of water in the reservoir.

However, what Liangzhu people have to deal with is heavy rainfall. This method of embankment and dam, which is similar to building a reservoir, can still block it.

What Gun had to face was the raging flood of the Yellow River. Of course, this "water control method" passed down by word of mouth from the ancestors could not solve the problem of the Yellow River.

Don't say it yet.

This argument sounds quite logical.

After all, from an archaeological point of view, the Liangzhu civilization is definitely the earliest and the most advanced creator of water conservancy projects in China.

If there is a "little expert in water control" at the time point of 5000 BC, it must be the Liangzhu civilization.

It just so happened that Gun belonged to the Chong clan, which was famous for being good at water control.

It is indeed convincing to say that they are the descendants of the westward migration after Liangzhu's demise!

(End of this chapter)