The legends say that Yu worked on the river for thirteen years without ever returning home. Because he tamed the Yellow River and made it possible to cultivate rice and millet, Yu became a popular hero. (查看原文)
Oracle bones were the principal instruments used by fortune-tellers in ancient China.
...In China, diviners used specially prepared broad bones, such as the shoulder blades of sheep or turtle shells. (查看原文)
Known in China as the Chang Jiang ("Long River"), the Yangzi carries enormous volumes of water: 6,300 kilometers (3,915 miles) from its headwaters in the lofty Qinghai mountains of Tibet to its mouth near the modern Chinese cities of Nanjing and Shanghai, where it empties into the East China Sea. (查看原文)
The Hebrew scriptures do not offer reliable historical accounts of early times, but they present memories and interpretations of Hebrew experience from the perspectives of later religious leaders who collected oral reports and edited them into a body of writings after 800 B.C.E. (查看原文)
It is perhaps significant that many groups of Indo-European speakers considered themselves superior to other peoples: the terms Aryan, Iran, and Eire (the official name of the modem Republic of Ireland) all derive from the Indo-European word aryo, meaning "nobleman" or "lord." (查看原文)
But Confucius was a strong-willed man who often did not get along well with others. He could be quite cantankerous: he was known to lodge bitter complaints, for example, if someone undercooked or overcooked his rice. (查看原文)
Epidemic Diseases
During the second and third centuries c.E., the Han and Roman empires suffered large-scale outbreaks of epidemic disease. The most destructive diseases were probably smallpox and measles, and epidemics of bubonic plague may also have erupted. All three diseases are devastating when they break out in populations without resistance, immunity, or medicines to combat them. As disease ravaged the two empires, Chinese and Roman populations declined sharply. During the reign of Augustus, the population of the Roman empire stood at about sixty million people. During the second century c.E., epidemics reduced Roman population by about one-quarter, to forty-five million. Most devastating was an outbreak of smallpox that spread throughout the Mediterranean basin during the years 16... (查看原文)
In 184 c.E. peasant discontent fueled an immense uprising known as the Yellow Turban rebellion, so called because the rebels wore yellow headbands that represented the color of the Chinese earth and symbolized their peasant origins. (查看原文)
