The Aug. 4 Washington Post has an article (link) discussing research on a flood ca. 1900 BCE, and then mapping that evidence onto the narratives of the "Great Flood."
Could anyone comment on this? I am not an expert, but some of my assumptions were that (a) there are many different narratives of a Great Flood, and these are not unified; (b) those narratives do not date from the time period traditionally assigned to the Xia Dynasty; (c) most academic historians see no evidence for a Xia Dynasty, etc.
I realize that major discoveries in China have caused historians to accept dynasties / histories that they previously thought were mythological. But is that the case here? Somehow I remain suspicious about the claims that "the" flood was real, or that this is evidence of "the" flood.
It's almost always better to read the original publication, rather than a journalistic imagining of it. So here's the Science article.
The abstract is actually quite easy to read, which I quote:
China’s historiographical traditions tell of the successful control of a Great Flood leading to the establishment of the Xia dynasty and the beginning of civilization. However, the historicity of the flood and Xia remain controversial. Here, we reconstruct an earthquake-induced landslide dam outburst flood on the Yellow River about 1920 BCE that ranks as one of the largest freshwater floods of the Holocene and could account for the Great Flood. This would place the beginning of Xia at ~1900 BCE, several centuries later than traditionally thought. This date coincides with the major transition from the Neolithic to Bronze Age in the Yellow River valley and supports hypotheses that the primary state-level society of the Erlitou culture is an archaeological manifestation of the Xia dynasty.
So the claims made by the authors are quite narrow. They do not claim that the Xia dynasty was real, neither did they claim the legend of Emperor Yu was real. They only say that their dating of this flood is consistent with other hypotheses.
I don't know what you mean by "Great Flood", what are you referring to exactly?
I'm a little confused by some of these answers: how is this article anything to do with the Genesis Flood story whatsoever? Is anyone claiming it is? All I see is stuff about the Chinese myth of the Great Flood and the Xia dynasty. Am I missing something that some of the writers said somewhere else? I'm not really seeing why these answers are about Biblical myths rather than just Chinese ones.
Added question: are the authors suggesting a big disaster to be causal or correlated with a rise in bronze usage? Has anywhere else in the world seen a rise in bronze usage after a huge disaster?
Shortly after the era of the flood, sites associated with a culture called Erlitou began to emerge. To archaeologists, they signal the start of China's Bronze Age: The communities are 10 times as big as the ones that existed previously, and their technology is much more sophisticated.