Merciless Ancient Flood Carried 300,000 Lives Away
Source: ancient-origins.net
Date: 6 March, 2020
A new paper provides evidence that a historic Yellow River flood in China killed an estimated 300,000 people, suggesting the city of Kaifeng was to killer floods, what Pompeii was to mega-volcanoes.
The Chinese city of Kaifeng was a former imperial capital and a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides geological and archaeological evidence supporting old literary accounts found in historical documents, that a catastrophic flood in 1642 AD destroyed the inner city and “entombed its inhabitants” within several meters of silt and clay.
Dr. Michael Storozum is a Doctor of Philosophy at Shanghai’s Fudan University Institute of Archaeological Science and, as lead author of the new research paper, he said this flood was particularly “catastrophic” because the city’s defensive walls had partially collapsed during a military siege which caused the floodwaters to become trapped inside.
Kaifeng is located on the southern bank of China’s Yellow River’s in the modern central Henan province and in antiquity it was one of the world’s largest cities serving as an imperial capital for several Chinese dynasties . The Yellow River is known to have flooded more than a thousand times in the past 2,000 years causing some of the deadliest flood disasters in recorded history, having claimed an estimated million lives. And over the past 3,000 years, while the Yellow River has flooded Kaifeng city around 40 times, according to the new paper, the 1642 AD event was “perhaps the most devastating of them all”.
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/yellow-river-flood-0013382
