A History of the World by Andrew Marr

stories, Noah and the rest, the historian Ian Morris asks, ‘Could climate change have brought on an Old World-crisis?’ 20 The same annals that describe Da Yu speak of rain continuing for nine years, causing catastrophic flooding.
    But there is no Noah, no Ark: China starts with a public-servant hero, an organizer working for the state. There is something here that feels very unWestern.
    From almost the beginning, Chinese culture looks, as well as feels, distinctively Chinese. Put a reasonably educated person from anywhere in the world in front of certain late-Neolithic pottery, or very early bronze vessels, or show them the first symbols being used for writing – and even if they have never seen such things before, they will probably instantly declare: ‘Chinese.’ The origins of the Chinese are shrouded in archaeological uncertainty and political argument. Many Chinese insist they did not emerge, like the rest of the world’s human population, out of Africa, but evolved separately from an earlier ape migration, that of
Homo erectus
, in China. Thus they are biologically distinct from foreigners – satisfying to the Chinese world view, even if the scientific consensus outside China is that they are wrong.
    Overall, human development in China followed along similar lines to that of the Fertile Crescent, but around two thousand years later – though in some things, like pottery, it was more advanced. The breakthroughs in the taming of plants and animals, the appearance of villages, graves suggesting ancestor worship, are all relatively similar. Yet by the time myth first begins to edge into history, Chinese objects are already different-looking. Today’s archaeologists tend to emphasize the variation and complexity of ancient China – many cultures, many different kinds of pottery and building, scattered over a wide area. Recent finds have upended the old idea of there being one central Chinese civilization, in the north, which spread to the rest and has carried on more or less intact. But what is very different from the European experience is the emotional grip of a continuity with earliest times on the Chinese imagination.
    For instance, the culture known as Longshan lasted for around athousand years, from roughly 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, about the same time as the various phases of the Neolithic cultures of Britain. But while Europeans have lost any record or memory of the Stonehenge people, Chinese history claims a link with the first kings and cultures. There were five mythical emperors, primordial godly rulers who gave mankind the key inventions of civilization such as cooking, farming, fire, medicine, marriage, the domestication of animals. The last of these mythic rulers is said to have introduced writing, pottery and the calendar – the very inventions which indeed mark out the Longshan culture from earlier settlements. 21 (In claiming that humans began as parasites or worms on the body of the creator, Pan Gu, there may be an element of early human self-criticism too.)
    After the five emperors come the dynasties that are considered the beginning of historic China – the Xia, the Shang and the Zhou. In the almost two thousand years they cover, we have the names of kings, increasingly complicated and beautiful artefacts, evidence of cities, temples and fortresses, and writing that is clearly the predecessor of modern Chinese. In short, we have China.
    Right at the beginning of this, however, we are still in the dim and misty place where there is more myth than evidence. Of around 300 BC , the
Shang-Shu
, or ‘Book of History’, is the first written text about what is called China’s first dynasty, the Xia. The same account talks of ten thousand states coexisting at the same time, so clearly the Xia were hardly China-straddling. Archaeology suggests numerous rival chiefdoms. The Xia are said to have been founded in 2205 BC by our remarkable tamer of rivers and floods, Da Yu. All early Chinese history is