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Even in Chinese schools we are told in history classes that we really don't have five thousands years of real history. It is just an often used, maybe canonized
by runeblaze 8y ago
Even in Chinese schools we are told in history classes that we really don't have five thousands years of real history. It is just an often used, maybe canonized, phrase to emphasize our long history. I really would not get distracted over it.
- bordercases 8y agoIt's rhetoric, then.
- starbeast 8y agoOn the other hand, the Kurds who run the phone shop up the road from where I used to live, can lay claim to about 7000 years of continuous recorded history, as they are Erbil locals.
- adrianratnapala 8y agoYes it's astonishing how Alexander and people had dealings with Kurds who seemed to interact politically with the rest of Mesopotamia much as they do today.
- qlk1123 8y agoI totally understand that situation because I have been through similar education in Taiwan about twenty years ago as well. Thankfully the history education here is saner now. Back to the 5K-year claim. It seems just rhetoric, but it actually enlarges unnecessary national pride, and then rhetoric becomes an unchallengeable truth. The "truth" then sounds so true that foreigners starts to believe it without hesitation. Once I had a chat with an American friend, about Chinese character system and its ability to maintain information through the past five thousand years. I was astonished that nowadays some foreigners might still view East Asia as the mysterious Far East.
- est 8y agoThe truth is China has at least 4000 years of history https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/08/04/legends-say-china-began-in-a-great-flood-scientists-just-found-evidence-that-the-flood-was-real/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2... > In a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science, Wu and his colleagues describe geological evidence for a catastrophic flood on the Yellow River in about 1900 B.C. — right around the time the “Great Flood” was said to have taken place.
- jcranmer 8y agoArchaeology is easy to do badly. It is usually the case that the same evidence fits multiple interpretations. The proper way to do it is to treat archaeology as a process of winnowing out theories as they are found to be inconsistent with evidence. The wrong way to do it is to pick a theory you want to be true and to show how to fit the evidence into that theory (especially because the temptation is strong to discard evidence that is inconvenient for the theory, hoping no one will notice).
- est 8y agohttps://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5805/ https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5805/ There are tons of cases of non-myth non-bullshit sites in China, and yes, unrecorded in traditional history.
- wavefunction 8y agoI imagine the Yellow River has suffered numerous catastrophic floods in its history, and some must certainly 'line up' with various other historical and ahistorical events.