The Great Calamity and Reincarnation of Civilization - Tianwen: Sanxingdui

Author: Wu Hong, Ji Yuanlong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: The excavation of the Sanxingdui Ancient Culture Site in Guanghan, Sichuan is one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in modern China, once shocking the world. However, to this day, academic research and value judgments on Sanxingdui remain at a low level. A series of perplexing questions—where did the Sanxingdui civilization come from? How remote was it? What unprecedented level of civilization did it reach? What was its exotic flavor? And why did it suddenly disappear?—form the foundation of this book. In recent years, the author has conducted in-depth investigations and explorations at Sanxingdui, studying the ancient human corridor on the Gan-Qing Plateau, the Songma Ancient Road, and the Southern Silk Road, breaking free from traditional research perspectives and incorporating modern international archaeological, cultural comparison, and paleogeographical research findings. By examining Sanxingdui within the broader context of the emergence, development, and environmental changes of prehistoric world civilizations, the author discovers: The time of the Sanxingdui civilization's emergence and development coincided with that of ancient Egypt, ancient India, ancient Babylon, and other world civilizations, and they were located at similar latitudes on Earth. Their decline also occurred around the same time. They were part of the same wheel-human civilization sequence, and in terms of ancient civilization markers such as urban construction, bronze art, religion, and the state, they ranked among the world's leading civilizations. They were a strange outlier in the early period of Chinese civilization—a commercial civilization with a unique exotic flavor, emerging and developing over a thousand years earlier than the Yellow River civilization. Based on this, the author concludes: "Chinese history may need to be rewritten."