Does Chinese Civilization Come From Ancient Egypt?

Foreign Policy ^ | 02 September 2016 | Ricardo Lewis

[Theoria]

A new study has energized a century-long debate at the heart of China's national identity.

On a cool Sunday evening in March, a geochemist named Sun Weidong gave a public lecture to an audience of laymen, students, and professors at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, the capital city of the landlocked province of Anhui in eastern China. But the professor didn’t just talk about geochemistry. He also cited several ancient Chinese classics, at one point quoting historian Sima Qian’s description of the topography of the Xia empire — traditionally regarded as China’s founding dynasty, dating from 2070 to 1600 B.C. “Northwards the stream is divided and becomes the nine rivers,” wrote Sima Qian in his first century historiography, the Records of the Grand Historian. “Reunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the sea.”

In other words, “the stream” in question wasn’t China’s famed Yellow River, which flows from west to east. “There is only one major river in the world which flows northwards. Which one is it?” the professor asked. “The Nile,” someone replied. Sun then showed a map of the famed Egyptian river and its delta — with nine of its distributaries flowing into the Mediterranean. This author, a researcher at the same institute, watched as audience members broke into smiles and murmurs, intrigued that these ancient Chinese texts seemed to better agree with the geography of Egypt than that of China.

In the past year, Sun, a highly decorated scientist, has ignited a passionate online debate with claims that the founders of Chinese civilization were not in any sense Chinese but actually migrants from Egypt.

[Theoria]

The Filament Across Eurasia

[Theoria]

eypt china trade ping

[GraceG]

Lot more ancient trade in the ancient world than anyone has realized yet.

[yarddog]

Maybe they were talking of the St. Johns river.

[BigEdLB]

How do you say, "So let it be written, so let it be done.", in Mandarin?

[drpix]

All the geographic agreement possible means nothing - if the human DNA does not bear the human migration from Egypt to China.

[palmerizedCaddis]

Allagash
Orinoco
New River

caddis the elder

[drpix]

CORRECTION

bear ^OUT the human migration

[indcons]

Ping GGG

[SeeSharp]

Except as a rule Egyptians didn’t found colonies or emigrate to other lands. According to their religion they couldn’t be reincarnated unless they were interred in Egypt.

[lepton]

On the other hand....the rulers don’t need to be the populace.

[chajin]

There’s a “the Chinese are in de Nile” joke hidden in this somewhere...

[Buttons12]

All the geographic agreement possible means nothing - if the human DNA does not bear the human migration from Egypt to China.

Yes, it should be easy to determine if there's anything to it. Which I doubt.

[ronnietherocket3]

All the geographic agreement possible means nothing - if the human DNA does not bear the human migration from Egypt to China.

It may not actually. If not many Egyptians migrated to China The genetic anomalies may get pushed below natural variation. They may have been able to insert themselves into Chinese culture without changing the genes much. E.g., what if no Europeans followed Cortes to the New World? He had still conquered Mexico and Aztec culture would have fallen/changed significantly, but there would be few Europeans to breed with.

[glorgau]

“There is only one major river in the world which flows northwards. Which one is it?”

The Rhine?

[blueunicorn6]

Possum Creek?

Oh, dang it, that one flows downhill, not northwards.

[golux]

Nu? אחרי כל כך הרבה שנים We can buy anything we want at Wal-Mart except another Exodus!

[jjotto]

Eh...

Mere speculation that the supposed translation means what is claimed. There are certainly great rivers in what is now Russia that flow north, and they are much closer to China than the Nile.

[TexasFreeper2009]

Interesting since when I visited a traveling Egyptian exhibit when I was young the first thought I had was... they look Asian!