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Does Chinese Civilization Come from Ancient Egypt?
- dogma1138 10y agoSince the article doesn't have too much information this seems as just as based on anecdotal evidence as the "theory" that Japanese culture and specifically Shinto has evolved from biblical Hebrews/Israelites: http://www2.biglobe.ne.jp/~remnant/isracame.htm http://www2.biglobe.ne.jp/~remnant/isracame.htm
- Steko 10y agoThat nutjob has been trying to peddle his Nanking Massacre denial bullshit on Wikipedia for years.
- gritzko 10y ago+1 “There is only one major river in the world which flows northwards. Which one is it?” the professor asked. Ob', Yenisej, Lena. All great Siberian rivers flow northwards. I don't intend to explain that ancient Chinese text. The only thing I want to say is that the article is complete BS. So, foreignpolicy.com is a less-trustworthy source.
- kissickas 10y agoI'm sure most people have thought this through since the time they may have been lied to in elementary school, but rivers flow don't flow south, they flow downhill... and there are plenty that flow north.
- gpvos 10y agoLooking at the Wikipedia list of longest rivers, the largest ones flowing northward are Yenisei, Ob, Lena, and Mackenzie. Then there's a bunch in central Europe, but they are smaller.
- gpvos 10y agoApart from the Nile, that is.
- dogma1138 10y agoWhat school do they teach that at? If we take the 2 most famous rivers then the Nile flows from south to north pretty much straight, and the Amazon flows from west to east by north east. It might have been a long time since I was in elementary school but I never heard of "rivers flowing south", could be a US thing since most of the large rivers in the US do flow southish.
- kissickas 10y agoI have no idea where I heard that fact - only remember "trivia" from friends in elementary school telling me that the Nile is the only river that flows north, daddy-longlegs are the most poisonous spiders but their mouths are too small to bite humans, etc. I'm not sure if the anecdote in the beginning is a true one but it says it takes place in Hefei, so I'm not sure it's a particularly American piece of misinformation.
- dogma1138 10y agoDon't know never heard that fact, especially considering that rivers that flow north in Europe are quite common since the norther part of Europe is still rebounding from the last large ice age and it's overall at a lower elevation than southern Europe where you also get the large mountain ranges. So famous rivers like the Sine, Elbe, Oder etc. all flow "north".
- labster 10y agoYou sound like a European. "All rivers flow south" is how all of the "climate scientists" here in the U.S. are educated. Quit pushing your European socialist agenda on us ordinary Americans.
- FreeFull 10y agoVistula too. It might actually be harder to find major rivers that flow "south".
- deleted 10y ago
- Geee 10y agoRivers don't actually flow at all. It's the water.
- gpvos 10y agoNo, you're confusing a river with the river bed.
- Alex3917 10y ago> rivers flow don't flow south, they flow downhill At least in North America though glaciers usually melt from South to North, so downhill isn't necessarily evenly distributed.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoAre there a lot of major rivers with 9/lots of distributaries that flow North?
- GunboatDiplomat 10y agoBetteridge's Law.
- stock_toaster 10y agoThere must be a corollary law, that states: "Any comment that quotes Betteridge's Law will have a large number of down-votes."
- bbcbasic 10y ago"Comments that quote Betteridge's Law get the most upvotes?" Would be an appropriate headline
- Steko 10y agoAnother possible corollary: any page 1 article with a question in the title will have a comment referencing Betteridge's law. This comment will either be the second most upvoted or the most downvoted comment.
- davidgerard 10y agoIndeed. I was hoping for more.
- labster 10y agoSun’s thesis proved controversial when ... Way to be impartial, headlines.
- cpleppert 10y agoThis is false. The Chinese writing system and Mythos have no connection at all with Egypt. Descriptions of rivers predominate in ancient myths and there is no reason to construct a hypothesis that has little explanatory power and even less plausibility.
- wdrw 10y agoI am not at all a linguist and not at all an expert on either writing system, but as a layman looking at both the Chinese and Ancient Egyptian writing systems, one similarity seemed really striking - the notion that a typical word is composed of a 2 parts - a semantic, pictographic "root", combined with another part that indicates pronunciation.
- nicholas73 10y agoIt's not uncommon but not typical either in Chinese. My impression is that those kinds of characters were easier to form through improvisation, and became standardized without actually fitting usual norms of character creation. Slang, regional synonyms, loanwords, and the like would be likely candidates for this process.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoIt is typical -- now. (Wikipedia provides an estimate of "over 90% of all characters".) Chinese linguistics traditionally distinguishes six different classes of character[1], of which one is the semantophore-phonophore pair. That class is the most numerous now, because most new characters have always gone into it, because it's easy to devise new characters in that system. (It's even easier to "devise" characters in the fourth class, but those characters are by definition not new; see below.) But when the writing system was new, other classes were a lot more common than they are now. [1] The categories, and examples of each, as listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati... : - Direct pictorial representation of a physical object, as 水 is just a picture of water, or 马 is just a picture of a horse. (Both are ridiculous now, but recognizable in their original forms.) - "Pictorial" representation of an abstract idea, as 上 depicts "up", 下 depicts "down", and 三 depicts "three". (These still work!) - Semantic compounds, formed from several more basic characters all of which are used for the meaning. Apparently the subject of much debate, but examples in the spirit of the category are 森 "forest" = 木 tree + tree + tree; 好 "good" = 女 woman + 子 child; 尖 "sharp" depicting something which is 小 (small) at one end and 大 (big) at the other; 歪 "crooked" = 不 not + 正 straight; etc. - "Loans", characters which are used solely for their phonetic content. For example, the character 英 which means "Eng"land is identical with the character 英, pronounced ying but meaning "hero". A lot of characters which were originally loans like this have subsequently developed distinctions, as 来 and 麦 have. - Phono-semantic compounds. The topic of discussion here. As 切 qie "cut" sounds similar to 七 qi "seven", but means similarly to 刀 dao "knife", or 到 dao "to" sounds similar to 刀 dao "knife", but means similarly to 至 zhi "to", or 打 da "strike" sounds similar to 丁 ding "fourth in a sequence", but means similarly to 手 shou "hand". - A mystery category, involving pairs of related characters, that we no longer understand. Example: 考 / 老. This pretty well covers all the logical possibilities: direct representations, compounds involving only meaning, characters used only for sound (a compound would be superfluous there), and compounds involving meaning and sound together.
- arca_vorago 10y agoThis is when my mind links a particlar myth of both cultures and more about a fish man showing up and teaching people the ways of civilization. As I remember it was Mesopotamia, China, and the Indus valley, and maybe a few more? I think its plausible that civilization itself spread via sea faring peoples, so perhaps it was some hyksos like people that brought not their genetics, but knowledge.
- PieterH 10y agoRemarkable how rapidly politics comes into the discussion of Chinese history. Putting that aside, the theory is interesting and plausible for a few reasons, yet probably wrong. I like it because of the weird connections, like the ancient ores and the "nine rivers". This is numerology, not science: searching for support rather than nullification. The theory is IMO wrong for a much simpler reason. It assumes (as many theories of history do) that the vastness of our planet means that we used to live in disconnected communities, islands of humanity spread out and yet not talking to each other. You can walk around the globe in 10-20 years. It is unimaginable that trade routes such as the Silk Road did not carry knowledge such as how to smelt bronze, like those African ores, and any other precious good. Wherever there were people, they were innovating and trading goods and knowledge with their neighbors. Only exceptionally were pockets of humanity actually isolated. You don't need an emperor and his navy to carry knowledge halfway across the globe. One or two people, on foot, will do it, and did it, and so, this nullifies the theory that Chinese civilization somehow sprang from Egyptian civilization. The two co-developed together with the entire connected world at the time.
- singularity2001 10y ago> You can walk around the globe in 10-20 years. This is an important footnote that many historians seem to overlook. However a similar argument makes the seaborne theory plausible too, as it took less than three years to sail or row around the globe, probably ever since the invention of the sailboat (~4000BC?).
- PieterH 10y agoYes, navigable water has always been the crucible of trade. Hence the economy and culture of the Mediterranean even from the early bronze age. And coastal trade is compelling, you don't need sea-faring ships, just dinghies capable of sailing to the next beach. So we can, reasonably, argue that there was a global human economy and civilisation (albeit one that operated really slowly) as early as 5,000 BCE (date that Wikipedia quotes for earliest depiction of a sailboat).
- douche 10y ago
- mikhailfranco 10y agoAny theory that uses the Hyksos (Sea Peoples) as an explanation is usually wrong. Crackpots use them because so little is known about who they were, and where they came from, hence any wild claims are harder to disprove. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_Hyksos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_Hyksos For a good up-to-date erudite but readable account, see '1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed' by Eric Cline. [prologue] http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/p10185.pdf http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/p10185.pdf
- Tergmap 10y agoFor ForeignPolicy to pick this up, it would be something with potential to cause trouble inside China. The simplest explanation is that trade existed even in prehistoric times. It did not have to be the same person that took ore from African mines all the way to China. While merchants traveled a lot, those in high ranks did not have a reason to travel much. This story appears to be on par with Jesus Christ being from India.
- ajuc 10y agoVistula is flowing north. Not as major as Nile, but why does it have to be? It is still huge. The theory is inspiring, but doesnt seem probable.
- known 10y agoReligions are ~2000 years old; Humans are ~200,000 years old; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_ancient_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_ancient_history Religion was born when first con-man met the first fool; "Earth is flat" --Religion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth