Chapter 007 Huaxia

The Germanic barbarians brought new blood to the whole of Europe, German, in fact, it means German, you may not think, English is actually a dialect of German, there are quite a lot of words shared, in fact, I feel that the German English is more like English than the Scottish accent of some BCC documentaries. The reason is that the original language of the Scots belongs to the Celtic language family, and there is no English language close to Germany.

Both Germanic and Celtic languages belong to the Indo-European language family, which is home to more than half of the world's languages. Some of the languages we are familiar with belong to this language family, a European linguist in the study of the origin of the language found that the four oldest languages he knows: Greek, Persian, Latin and Sanskrit actually have similarities, so he put forward the term "proto-Indo-European", and later in the early 19th century German Franz Paupu systematically demonstrated this theory.

As far north as Scandinavia and Russia, as far south as Greece, as far west as Spain and Portugal on the Apennine Peninsula, and as far east as Iran and India in the South Asian subcontinent, their languages are homologous. What a bond and connection it is. It can be seen how close the relationship between the civilizations in the west of the heart of the earth is.

The high-caste class in India is directly the same Aryans as in Germany. How did the big brother who took the lead in this magical language come about? Linguists have traced their origins based on lexical similarities and found the source of a rough Indo-European language family in the steppes of Central Asia, in the steppes of the Black Sea and the northern Caspian Sea.

The expansion of Proto-Indo-European languages was linked to the taming of horses, which is why the origins of Proto-Indo-European languages are found in the steppes of Eastern Europe. Why did the Central Asian steppes, rather than the Mongolian steppes, become the mother of languages? Naturally, this is because in the global migration of human beings, the human ancestors who left Africa were the first to arrive in Central Asia, where they prospered first, not to mention the grasslands of the Americas.

So why wasn't it the cradle of humanity - the East African savannah that tamed the horse first? Let's take a look at what the horses are in East Africa. Hippos are not hippos, wildebeests or zebras, hippos needless to say, open their mouths to swallow life, no one dares to provoke it, and wildebeest is actually a kind of oryx, similar in appearance to a buffalo, although it is also a vegetarian, the temper is not peaceful at all.

Humans tamed the horned buffalo, but until now, herders everywhere have often turned bulls into eunuchs to control these horned restless creatures.

Zebras, on the other hand, are extremely collectivist animals, and their way of survival is to run together with the big guys, blinding predators with the sea of zebra crossings, and instinctively spreading their feet when they encounter danger, which is also difficult to tame.

The African Five: African Lion, African Elephant, African Buffalo, Leopard and Black Rhino. One is more resourceful than the other, and in the fertile lands of sub-Saharan Africa, predators and prey compete fiercely for survival, and none of them are fuel-efficient lamps. So the Africans can't handle them, the Africans can conquer the horse's **, but they can't conquer the horse's heart, and the glorious task of horse training falls to the nomads of the Central Asian steppe.

When a horse was tamed, you can't look at the horse directly, but there is one thing that is closely associated with the tamed horse, and that is the chariot. Chariots are often well preserved in tombs, giving archaeologists the opportunity to indirectly investigate the process of horse taming.

In fact, the doctrine linking the development of Indo-European languages to horses is called the "Grave Hypothesis". Archaeologists have identified the similarities of the ancient civilizations of the steppes of Central Asia by the similarity of the tomb buildings, and have called them the burial mound culture.

In 2000 BC, the first chariots appeared in the northern part of the Caspian northern steppe. 200 years later, the chariot reached the valley of the two rivers. The vocabulary we use here seems to be that friends from the north bring friendship and gospel, but it is likely that it was the bloody conquest of the two rivers by nomads.

The geography and climate were similar from the steppes of Eastern Europe and Central Asia to the steppes of Mongolia, so the horses grazed and ran, and only 100 years after reaching Mesopotamia, the wheels of the chariot were crushed to the Yellow River valley in the Far East. This was 1600 BC.

According to legend, the first chariot battle on the land of China was the Battle of Gan, where Xia Wangqi, the second monarch of the Xia Dynasty, suppressed the rebellion, and took place near Luoyang. However, this time was at least 2000 BC, and the chariot had not yet reached the Central Plains. Whether the Xia Dynasty really existed is a mystery in Chinese historiography.

Because archaeologists have only found the ruins of the Shang Dynasty Yin Ruins in Henan, they have not found ironclad evidence of the Xia Dynasty. Among them, there is a more reliable record of chariots than the legend of the Lü Spring and Autumn Period, written in the last years of the Warring States period, when Shang Tang destroyed the summer, there was a battle in a place called Naruto, and Shang Tang's army had 70 chariots. When the numbers come out, it's more reliable.

With the number of comprehensive chariots spreading around the world, we can safely say that Shang Tang's destruction of Xia and the spread of chariots to the Far East were about the same time, and the victory or defeat of a war was likely to be the survival of the fittest in weapons, so it was possible that Shang Tang had an advantage in chariots, so it subverted the Xia Dynasty.

During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, chariots were highly valued, so the powerful country was called the country of a thousand times. This totem of war is a testament to the subversive effect of the appearance of chariots on a certain distance. At that time, there were no horses that could hold the feet in place, and standing on the carriage and using a spear with both hands had a strength advantage over the enemy cavalry with a knife in one hand, and a mobility advantage over the enemy infantry.

The question of whether the Xia Dynasty existed was very interesting. Obviously, even if the Xia Dynasty did not exist, then the hundreds of years before the Shang Dynasty could also be called the eve of the dynasty. Before the advent of chariots, it was clear that humans had already begun to train horses, and certainly some time before chariots appeared. Domesticated horses must have appeared in the Central Plains before chariots.

The first monarch of the Xia Dynasty was nominally Dayu, who ruled the water, but why him? Because all the previous monarchs were in fact the leaders of the tribal alliance, taking turns to serve as the leader, until Dayu appeared, after his death, according to tradition, the seat of the alliance leader was given to Boyi, but Dayu's son Qi was stronger, killed Boyi, and seized the throne.

Dayu didn't know what earth-shaking changes his son would bring to him if he became bigger and stronger, Xia Qi, who was a big fighter, was a bit like Li Shimin, although on the surface the founding monarch of the Tang Dynasty was Li Yuan, but Li Shimin was the founder of the Tang Dynasty.

History is the memoir written by the victors, and it is the little girl who can be dressed up. After the careful dressing of Li Shimin of the Xia Dynasty, Dayu almost became the person with the highest status in the entire history of China, the founding king of the Xia Dynasty, and also governed the problem of the flooding of the Yellow River.

Judging from the expression of the Yellow River in later generations, it is impossible for Dayu to master the method of controlling the flooding of the Yellow River, whether it takes 13 years or 30 years, the Yellow River will always be a disaster that floods regularly and diverts from time to time. There is a saying among the people that "every three years will be broken, and every hundred years will be changed".

So, why is there a large number of people living on the banks of the Yellow River? This is because the flooding itself brings fertile silt, which brings nutrients to the crops. In nature, plants are natural crop rotations, different plants and the soil ecosystems on which they are based absorb nutrients and emit wastes differently, the land remains alive forever, while arable land is different, and a single crop that lasts for many years will make the productivity of the soil decrease year by year.

Another obvious example of the Nile's early agricultural civilization was the Nile, a mother river in Africa that passed through deserts and wastelands and brought huge amounts of nutrients from crops upstream every year.

When the extraordinary flood came, I ran quickly, my father couldn't find my mother, my mother couldn't find my baby, and I couldn't take care of the house or something. This is the most instinctive and correct approach of the primitive ancestors before the Dayu era, but why did they start to want to control the water in the era of Dayu?

Because, wealth is accumulating, the architecture of the settlements is becoming more and more advanced, and people are reluctant to leave their homes. This is the greatest similarity between agricultural civilization and nomadic civilization. The technology of the ancient agricultural civilization is not necessarily more advanced than the nomadic civilization, and the horse training technology is a good example, including the invention of the horse pedal behind, which is an example of the advanced technology of the nomadic civilization, but the people are different technology trees.

Nomadic civilizations deal with horses all day long, so they will naturally unlock horse-related skills first, and it's hard to imagine that a group of farming buddies suddenly came up with such a thing as equipping horses with a blow on their heads.

Similarly, nomads wander around the world all day long, and must be the first race to discover natural copper and enter the red copper civilization. Oz, a frozen natural mummy in the Alps, has a copper axe of red copper next to him, proving that copper mining began in Europe in 3300 BC. Copper axes found in Serbia are even from 5500 BC.

But the biggest problem of nomads is that wealth cannot be accumulated, they may have found copper, but they can't take it with them, and it is even more difficult to enter the Bronze Age, because bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, which is a more complex metallurgical technology. Not only can the minerals not be taken away, but even children can't have more children, and if they accidentally give birth to an extra baby, they are likely to be cruelly disposed of.

There's a reason why powerful nomads can't produce writing at all, because they can't take with them what is written on them, can you imagine a bunch of horseback people walking forever on the road with heavy bamboo slips in large bags?

Therefore, large-scale cities must be built by another branch of civilization, the agricultural civilization. The Yellow River civilization belongs to the agricultural civilization, and the era of Dayu must be the era of urban expansion. Because they have begun to think about building river embankments to defy the rules of nature, and only large-scale settlements are possible.

Coincidentally, the time of the mass settlement coincided with the spread of horse taming technology from Central Asia to the Far East. Therefore, it is likely that the birth of the Xia Dynasty has something to do with horse taming. In the Central Plains, there was an exchange between nomadic and agrarian peoples, and farmers began to use horses to transport their grain to the bazaars and trade with handicraftsmen.

The essence of the city is trade, the basis of trade is transportation, large transportation can give birth to large cities, the so-called big cities here are not modern concepts, the scale is much smaller, but it is enough for the people of Dayu to start thinking about how to save the real estate of the residents when the continuous flooding, and they have just begun to have the ability to build river embankments, or dig and dredge the diversion channels of floods.

Why was the tribal alliance leader before Dayu a rotation system? Because the transportation capacity at that time was not enough to make the tribes strong enough to have a strong enough connection with each other, even if there was an alliance leader, his position was unstable, and when other tribes were disobedient, the alliance leader was not able to carry out the conquest. In other words, in the era when horses were not tamed, the actual ruling power of the alliance leader could not reach another tribe.

The infantry would dominate for a long time, but reconnaissance and intelligence had always been associated with horses, and an army could do without cavalry and chariots, but it could never be without scouts and food and horses, and the chief could not run through the fields of hope like a soldier. This situation has been around since the time of Dayu.

Because of the emergence of horse taming technology, it made large-scale collaboration possible, Dayu and his son this tribe can lead the Central Plains to gain authority in the history of the largest water conservancy project, the tail is not down, even if the fake model of the alliance leader Zen to Boyi, Yu's son also quickly subverted Boyi's regime, became Xia Wangqi, and defeated other tribes in the battle of Gan, creating the Xia Dynasty for hundreds of years.

The development of technology is often the dominant thing in the course of human history, and the beginning of Chinese civilization is an extremely clear example of technology changing the world. It's just that even the parties Dayu and Xia Qi don't know that it is the technology transmitted from Central Asia that has changed the political pattern of the Central Plains.

The scale of the Xia Dynasty may not have reached the point where it could be discovered by later archaeological discoveries, but there should be no doubt that the introduction of horse taming technology brought about an unprecedented large-scale conflict and integration on the eve of the Central Plains Dynasty. Even if there is no Dayu, there will be Da Li, Da Zhang and Lao Wang, and other tribal leaders, competing for unprecedented royal power.

The rise of the Chinese Dynasty stemmed from the horse-taming in the heart of the World Island, and the influence of the heart of this world is like that of the biological heart, and the surging heartbeat spreads the vibrant blood throughout the ancient civilizations, in addition to the Yellow River civilization, the two river basins, ancient Greece, ancient India, and ancient Egypt.

Perhaps, at this moment when the heart of the earth's civilization pulsates, it has been determined that the most powerful civilization in the future, the industrial civilization, will almost certainly appear in the west of the heart, not the Yellow River civilization, which is the most closed of the four ancient civilizations.

Although the land of the Central Plains is large, it is not big enough, in terms of land, the scale of the eighteen provinces of the Han Dynasty is on the same level as that of Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, and in terms of arable land, one India surpasses the whole of China.

What's more critical is the diversity of civilizations, the ancient Greek civilization, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamian and ancient Indian civilizations to the west of the heart all have long-term continuous exchanges, and finally, the European civilization that was differentiated from the original Indo-European language, and the European civilization inherited from ancient Greece and ancient Rome gave birth to industrial civilization.

The isolated Chinese civilization in the Far East is obviously in an irresistible evolutionary law in this natural selection of civilization, and we, only the Far East, no matter how much we love our own culture, are just an isolated island that will inevitably break away from the evolution of the world island civilization.

What is an island? There are large mammals on the isolated island that are not afraid of humans, so the New Zealand moa, which stands three meters tall, has become extinct, so the Mauritian dodo, which is waiting to be caught, is also extinct.

The islands of civilization will naturally be at a disadvantage in the evolution of civilization, and the Chinese civilization competes with ancient Greece that invented geometry, the Indian civilization that invented Arabic numerals and zeros, the ancient Babylonian civilization that invented the Code of Hammurabi that invented the first systematic law, the Arab civilization that invented the spinnaker, the well-informed nomads who traveled long distances on the steppes, and the Vikings who drove longships to plunder the world.

The more thoroughly it is connected to this super-civilizational complex, the more likely it is that industry and modern science will evolve, and it is clear that there is little chance of a Chinese civilization in the Far East.

In our past, because of the instability of the Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road, we were beaten by industrial civilization, and our future depends on whether we are open enough to be able to interconnect all APIs with the world's super civilization complex.

The heart of the world island has long been a matter of things, and the complex of civilizations still exists. If countries can evolve alone, we will not lose to any country in the process of development, but the role we play in the super-civilization complex is far from being understood.

That's all for this episode of the show, I'm your little white teacher! Thank you for coming, and we'll talk about it next time. 】