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Studying the demise of historic civilisations

274 points by pitzahoy 8y ago

xiaodai 8y ago
Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? They seem to think that Shang and Zhou are different civilisations? Instead of a continuity as they like to call it in China. There are good reasons why they should be considered continuations because they shared a similiar script for writing.
- StefanKarpinski 8y ago
  I had a similar reaction more generally: how meaningful is this without a precise definition of what constitutes a civilization? Still interesting though, even if only as a statistic about the units that historians have decided to split history up into.
- Retric 8y ago
  No. People have been living on the same land in China for a long time and aspects of it’s culture survived, but that’s about it. Rome lasted ~1500 years as a continuous political entity. Zhou dynasty comes is about half that at ~790 years. Though, you can make various arguments around those numbers.
- dak1 8y ago
  The script has changed considerably over time between different dynasties, and different areas have had mutually unintelligible languages, even if sharing similar script. For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese, and Korean and Vietnamese both used to use Chinese characters, but they are all separate languages. Similarly, numerous "dialects" in China are less mutually intelligible than many different Western languages. Compare Portuguese and Spanish to Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hokkien), Fuzhounese, Shanghainese, etc. Not to mention languages like Mongolian (see the Yuan dynasty). And that doesn't even begin to get into even more ethnically diverse regions like Tibet and western China. Then there's also the "warring states period" when, for over 250 years, no fewer than 14 different independently governed states made up what is today eastern China. Claims that China has always been one civilization are politically expedient versions of history that glaze over an enormous quantity of inconvenient facts. Did you know that after the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed viewed himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and declared himself "Caesar of Rome"? China today is as much a continuation of those previous states as Turkey is of the Roman Empire.
  - nitwit005 8y ago
    > Did you know that after the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed viewed himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and declared himself "Caesar of Rome"? I was previously curious how many countries declared themselves to be the heirs of the Roman empire, and I found there is something of a wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome
    - LoSboccacc 8y ago
      putting the EU in that list is fishy and a reminder that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, especially for evaluating contemporary information.
      - nitwit005 8y ago
        I'm sure everyone will be shocked to hear such things of an article that begins with a highlighted "The neutrality of this article is disputed.".
        LoSboccacc 8y ago
        people are literally linking it as source but ok. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
  - hungryhobo 8y ago
    honestly this is just not?true. the Chinese script have evolved, but one can still look at inscriptions from thousands of years ago and understand it. it might be hard for people to understand different dialects in China but they all use the same writing system, standardized in the Qin dynasty. Same with the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean. A native Chinese speaker would have little problem reading those, although the pronounciations might be a little different
    - prevedmedved 8y ago
- Gpetrium 8y ago
  As some have said, the Roman Empire is considered the longest running empire. I think it is worth noting that governments will use stuff like 'oldest civilization' or 'oldest democracy' as a way to propel nationalism.
- tanilama 8y ago
  Zhou defeated Shang, but the culture is inherited like the Chinese Characters. Dynasty usually in China doesn't category as one civilization, it is just a episode in the Chinese history. And this is not a modern invention either, China has the great tradition of 修史, literaly meaning the making of history, which means the later dynasty is responsible of recording the official history of previous dynasty, and by doing so it is treated as a testament to the current dynasty's legimacy. Interestingly, even PRC is somewhat inherited this tradition, where an official account of Qing's history is set to publish this year, which is almost 30 million characters long.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    I note that the author groups the 25-odd Egyptian dynasties into the three traditional empires.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  > Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? Not really. The Chinese tend to emphasize viewing their history through a lens of continuity and a single notional empire whereas the Western history tends to view their history as discontinuous and fractured empires. But when you start comparing the actual effects of these empires and their rises and falls, they are actually much more similar. For example, after the Crisis of the Third Century, the Roman Empire was effectively partitioned into a Western and Eastern Empire. The Western Empire proceeded to decentralize itself out of existence over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, but it recoalesced under the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties into the Holy Roman Empire by 800 (before splitting up into effectively a Frankish kingdom and the Germanic kingdom of the HRE). The Eastern Roman Empire lasted until around 1200, when the Fourth Crusade conquered it instead (a conquest which didn't last, but the Byzantines never recovered and the Ottomans finally put them out of their misery 250 years later). It's worth noting that pretty much all of the people I've cited considered themselves the true heirs of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile in China, the Han dynasty crashed hard in the early 200s, with three major successor states cropping up. One of these managed to conquer the others, so the successive dynasty was the Jin dynasty. Of course, the Jin last control of most of their territory, which fragmented into the Sixteen Kingdoms, but the entire era is still called the Jin dynasty. After the final collapse of the Jin, the north/south dichotomy continued with the Northern and Southern dynasties, which is again a successive series of powers vying for control eventually coalescing into the Sui dynasty after one wins out, which quickly transitions to the Tang dynasty, the first truly unified China since the fall of the Han dynasty. After about 300 years, the Tang dynasty collapses into a major period of disunity, the next truly unified China again taking 300 years to crop up again. There's a lot of similarity. The major difference is that Western Europe never reunified into a single unitary state (unless you want to count the extremely short lived Napoleonic Empire and Third Reich). But Western Europe did have a successor state that directly retained the traditions from the Roman Empire (namely, the Byzantines) and could plausibly claim to have no break in continuity (the Byzantines never called themselves anything other than the Roman Empire), and all of the major successor states directly drew inspiration and customs from the Roman Empire, rather like China. The writing system, the state religion, the bureaucratic apparatus, the legal system--all of these are derived from the Roman Empire in Western Europe, just as much as they are derived from the Qin and Han dynasties in China.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Greeks don't count, then? They have the oldest recorded living language. Give me a metric of how China is a civilization that doesn't make Greece also a civilization. Really they're just land masses with specific ethnic groups and traditions. Greek traditions have probably changed a lot more than Chinese traditions over 3,000 years, but much change determines a civilization?
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    much change determines a civilization? Change happens faster in the centers of civilization. So change is as much an indicator of the degree of civilization.
- a2dictator 8y ago
  Not China. Indian (Vedic or Hindu) civilization is the oldest surviving civilization. The Chinese civilization(s) were overran by the Mongols. There was also a stat that 1 in 6 Chinese is a descendent of the Mongol Chengiz Khan. And before you say "Aryans", please know that that has been debunked too many times now.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? More of a metastable meta-civilization. Over thousands of years, they keep collapsing and re-forming the same country.
- tha_nose 8y ago
  The problem is that "civilization" and "china" are hard to define. What we can say is that chinese civilization came into existence a long time ago. Then a serious of dynasty ( some not even "chinese" ) like the mongols or the manchus adopted aspects of chinese civilation. "China" itself didn't survive for thousands of years. The dynasties rose and collapsed. Conquered and got conquered. And "china", for much of its history, didn't even speak the same language. They used the chinese writing system ( which also evolved through time ), but does a writing system entail "part of civilization". Koreans and Japanese used chinese writing system, does it mean they are part of the chinese civilization? Of course not. Much of africa uses latin alphabet, does that mean africa is part of "greco-roman" civilization? Of course not. The chinese capital changed multiple times. There have been periods where "china" had multiple competing capitals. But then you could argue that chinese civilization didn't die out or get supplanted like the egyptian, mayan, mesopatamian, etc civizations. The more you think about it and the closer you look, the more blurry the situation becomes. But like most things history, I guess the best answer is "it's complicated".
- laythea 8y ago
  No it is not true. What is true, is that nobody actually knows, since we have no idea when humans began, other than "some point before X", where X may be a shadily derived date based on pseudo scientific methods. I find the fact that we have no idea quite liberating.
aetiusflavius 8y ago
Sir John Glubb analyzed this in The Fate of Empires: http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
pattisapu 8y ago
These are awfully contested dates. Hun: 100? Vedic: 1000? Etc. These statistics obscure more than they explain, I think.
- noopnoop 8y ago
  I can speak to the Vedic dates. Those are contested but only due to their novelty, meaning they are MUCH older than what western media gives them credit for. And the Vedic civilization exists to this day in India as Sanatana Dharma followers or as the ancient Greeks & the modern Western world calls it - Hindus.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    Though most varieties of modern 'Hinduism'/Sanatana Dharma are rather different from 'Vedism'.
    - noopnoop 8y ago
      That's quite unreasonable to say the least. In any case, I am not familiar with the term "Vedism". Vedas are not the only concept but a very critical pillar of Sanatana Dharma.
      - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
        Why do you think it's unreasonable? In general we don't expect religious systems to be static. Certainly -- although Vedic deities are not entirely absent from modern Hinduism/Sanatana Dharma -- the prominence of different deities is very different. The Rgveda focusses largely on Agni and Indra, and yajna rituals (as opposed to modern puja-type worship) have a central importance. Shiva, assuming he can be identified as Rudra, is not invoked, but rather (being feared) appeased. And so on and so forth. So while modern Hinduism is not unrelated to the practices/beliefs of the Vedas (which I'm referring to vaguely as 'vedism'), it largely pays only lip-service to the Vedas. People might read the Gita, Ramayan, Mahabharata, but rarely the Vedas, which really only make an appearance in special ritualised situations (e.g. marriages involve some Vedic hymns).
tlhunter 8y ago
It looks like the U.S. has another 93 years to look forward to!
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Thats assuming all civilizations don't collapse before then due to environmental destruction.
budadre75 8y ago
The US lasted 243 years. Is it the oldest modern nation? I wonder, how will the modern nations different from the ancient ones?
- yks 8y ago
  it is not, case in point: Great Britain
  - mamon 8y ago
    Also: Poland, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, pretty much every European nation. Edit: Seems that GP conflates "nation" and "state". If we're counting continuity of government, they probably only Great Britain is a good example, other countries had undergone many changes, from absolutism, to constitutional monarchy, to non-existence, to democracy, to fascist dictatorships.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      There's quite a bit of change in Britain as well. There was a fascist dictatorship from 1649 until 1660. Nor is 1688 insignificant. (And it's only Great Britain from 1707).
      - lm28469 8y ago
        And it went from the largest colonial empire / power in the world to an island voting to get out of the EU in a few decades. Sure they're still Britain but it changed a lot. (it also apply to France, Germany, Belgium, and probably a lot more)
        baud147258 8y ago
        I'd argue that France has changed a lot more during the same time, at least regarding the regime changes (from 1788: monarchy, constitutional monarchy, republic (1st), dictatorship, empire (with Napoleon), monarchy, republic (2nd), empire (2nd Empire with Napoleon III), republic (3rd), fascist dictatorship (Vichy), republic (4th & 5th)).
KorematsuFred 8y ago
Typical western garbage. Applying vague nation state ideas to civilization. Hindus for example have seen thousands of years as their own unbroken history. Many mantras that I chant today are at least 1500 year old.
- quaunaut 8y ago
  You understand that an "average" means that many skew higher, often much higher, right? If anything, this shows most ancient civilizations were measured in decades, not centuries. But some did go thousands.
  - KorematsuFred 8y ago
    Yes but they have given specific numbers like Harappan -> 800.
- talonx 8y ago
  I think you are being downvoted for the unneeded name calling. But the article does not seem to do a great job in terms of accuracy or being able to distinguish between civilizations and empires. E.g. "Mahanjanapadas" should be "Mahajanapadas", and the Magadha empire was part of an existing civilization. This is apart from the contested dates that the author seems to accept, without citing any sources.
- baud147258 8y ago
  And the catholic prayers that I chant today are 2000 years old.
titanix2 8y ago
The full article is here: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-... 'Interestingly' the first two listed factors are ecology related, and the biggest thread to the European civilization is not explicitly stated.
- dang 8y ago
  Ok, we've changed the URL to that from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-the-lifespans-of-ancient-civilisations-compared http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-the-lifespans-of-an.... Thanks!
chx 8y ago
The Kingdom of Israel and Judah? While Wikipedia is not a credible source, it's a good summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Israel_(united_monarchy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Israel_(united_mona... > In contemporary scholarship the united monarchy is generally held to be a literary construction and not a historical reality, pointing to the lack of archaeological evidence. See The Bible Unearthed for a more authentic source. I am slightly biased because I have been to Tel Hazor after and because of reading that book. (No matter who ruled at the time but a 25 x 21 m citadel with two-meter thick walls built three thousand years ago is just jaw dropping.) Also, Vedic Civilisation [1000]? What evidence do we have that calls for this period to be called a single civilisation...?
- a2dictator 8y ago
  We have a LOT of evidence. The vedas have been universally agreed to be written before 3500 BC, at least. They are much older according to Indian / Eastern researchers. The Vedas talk about a river Saraswati. This river has been proven with archeological & satellite evidence to have dried up in 1900 BC. That means the Vedas & the Vedic civilization are much older & from an era when the Saraswati river was flowing. There are even more evidences. Many celestial events described in the Vedas completely match celestial events mathematically & corroborate with each other, and they have been dated to be about 7000+ years ago.
neom 8y ago
Absolutely fantastic book:- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/dp/0307719227 https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/d...
supernova87a 8y ago
You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old". "Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the goals and priorities of a nation, and it loses its drive to be scrappy, make sacrifices, and do the innovative things when one does when young and poor. You have generations who want to extract the gains put in by past generations. Or it costs too much to change people's behavior. That's what I think is happening to western Europe and the US. Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices that the generation previously were forced to, by unfortunate circumstance. Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans. Unless you have a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves, this sets in. Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country...
- jlawson 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure "getting old" has always been a big part of the collapse of civilizations. I can think of few that were truly destroyed by unstoppable external forces (maybe the Byzantine Empire being attacked by Muslims?). Most of them seem to have rotted from the inside and were easily knocked over by opportunists (Rome). That said I'm no historian so examples would be interesting. Also interestingly, America is 243 years old - 93 years to go! Sounds reasonable.
- digitaltrees 8y ago
  Get rid of multi generational transfers of wealth. Make each generation start from scratch. I know it's easier said than done as not all assets are fungible or distributable (social networks, geography etc) but it would make a difference. I read recently that the same families that controlled most the wealth in Florence in the 1600 still control most the wealth now, that's probably not good for scrappy innovation.
  - avinium 8y ago
bsanr 8y ago
Let me throw a wrench into things with a provocative statement (which I have no intention of citing support for): The affluence of Western Europe and the US was not built on hard work and ingenuity so much as the exploitation of cheap labor and the sudden access to deep veins of basic resources or economic/industrial efficiencies which were either already extant but inaccessible without a critical mass of capital, or else were inevitable on an imminent timescale given past development. Have at it.
- dcow 8y ago
  And now, good ol’ western civilization experiences regression to the mean.
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    Economic and industrial efficiencies don't just inevitably "run out."
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      Externalities do, such as colonies or environment or mines or resources. Efficiency is not a one way street. You need people with will and knowledge to operate the machinery or further research. Otherwise you will inevitably be eclipsed. Recent lessons happened to Great Britain (colonies), Europe (know how and funding, war devastation), Ming China (complacency and bureaucracy), Japanese tech dominance (population got old and crammed in), Soviets (political pressure and mismanagement). It is happening to USA right now.
    - usrusr 8y ago
      They stop exponential growth, and that's a good thing in the end.
- tomt2323 8y ago
  While I agree with the point you're trying to make, I don't think that's a provocative statement for the rest of the world (or even all of the people living in Western Europe and the US), especially now as increased communication and analytic tools help us to better understand the ways in which massive transfers of wealth are still happening from the rest of the "postcolonial" world. I suppose an argument could be made that it was built on hard work and ingenuity in much the same way that you can say politicians really are better at something than everyone else. It's just not necessarily the thing you'd want them to be good at. In this case, that would be that the powers we're talking about made some incredible innovations in terms of colonialism and internal methods of quelling the dissent of the aforementioned cheap (or enslaved) labor. Of course, it's not at all clear to me that this hasn't been the case for every single past (or emerging) empire. But the "self-made civilization" is maybe even more ridiculous a concept than the "self-made man".
bilbo0s 8y ago
Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? Serious question. It just seems that a lot of entries on this list are actually part of the same civilization. In the same way that I would consider the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and the American Empire to be really all a part of the same Western Civilization. But maybe my thinking is totally wrong and that's not what "civilization" means?
- geowwy 8y ago
  >>> Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? They even got that wrong. The Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire are the same political entity. Arguably the Ottoman Empire was as well, since the Ottomans basically left the Byzantine bureaucracy intact. The Sultan even used the title Caesar and declared himself protector of the Eastern church.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Good point. I was so taken by the fact that they were conflating "political entity" with "civilization" that I didn't even realize that they were even breaking up political entities and calling them different "civilization"s.
  - mcv 8y ago
    They share their origin in the same political entity, but have clearly different cultures and developed in different directions. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire had a massive impact on Western Europe. There's also the medieval Holy Roman Empire which was officially a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and at odds with the Byzantine Empire because they considered themselves the only legitimate Roman Empire, and these are all related but clearly different cultures. And then there's the vikings which were clearly a different culture, arguably a different civilisation, but infused themselves in every corner of Europe, from England to Russia to Sicily and Byzantium. Civilisations do not have clear boundaries, both geographically and temporally, and you certainly can't equate them with empires. I think civilisations rarely truly collapse (except under the impact of invasion or colonialism maybe), but they do change, and sometimes dramatically. The collapse of empires is sometimes dramatic, as in the case of the Western Roman Empire, and sometimes barely noticeable, as in the case of the Holy Roman Empire.
drallison 8y ago
Ignoring the difficult task of actually deciding when a civilization starts and stops, is there some theory that suggests that duration is the right measure? Don't we need a reasonable model of how civilizations work. It would be interesting to incorporate and merge the data from Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies with the data presented here.
skookumchuck 8y ago
Now that the citizens have discovered they can vote themselves money out of the treasury, and politicians vie to outdo each other in promising free stuff, we'll see how long the US lasts.
Tomminn 8y ago
Alternative title: The average length of time an ancient civilization had to last in order to be noticed by us is 336 years.
serkanyersen 8y ago
Ottoman empire lasted 624 years and it's not mentioned in this article. They mention 'Western Turk (70)' and I've no idea what that means.
- barberousse 8y ago
  Politically my guess is modern Turkey but 'Western turk' is legit term to distinguish, culturally, from Eastern turks such as Siberians, Kazahks, etc whom the Turkish language, spoken in Turkey, descends from
mmjaa 8y ago
I'm quite disappointed that the aboriginal cultures of Australia are not factored into this. Bias against the idea that they might have been a civilisation? Oldest oral traditions of any human culture. Oldest, still being worked, mining operation of any human culture. A hippocratic oath encoded in their culture while we, white Europeans, bled people to their deaths. I think this report, while interesting - is not quite as complete a view of human civilisation as it could be. Australian aborigines throw out the whole idea - until white guys came along and genocided them, they were the oldest, longest-running civilisation of humankind, ever.
- bloak 8y ago
  Perhaps I'm being too literal and etymological, but to me "civilisation" means towns and cities. Towns and cities lead to economic specialisation, a legal system, civil service, taxation, and so on. Nomads and people living in villages may have a complex culture but it's rather different from city life, even a low-tech city life like in ancient Egypt, for example.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  > A hippocratic oath encoded in their culture while we, white Europeans, bled people to their deaths. But those doing the bleeding were following the hippocratic oath. They were trying to do good. The issue was stupidity (or, more charitably, lack of knowledge) rather than malice.
iceninenines 8y ago
That seems a bit longer than the 250 years or about 10 generations that I've heard on Thom Hartmann and from other sources.
foreigner 8y ago
we have the unique advantage of being able to learn from the wreckages of societies past Why do we have that unique advantage? Plenty of civilisations had historians.
- rvn1045 8y ago
  the number of recent discoveries in just the last 100 years is astonishing. the Indus valley civilization was not even discovered until 1929. We have a fuller picture of human history than ever before.
dagaci 8y ago
Many of these great "empires" were simply extended looting machines, once they ran out of looting opportunities they collapsed in the same way that a Ponzi collapses when it run out of new "investors". While things were good, it was all golden, glitter and glam, and many tall buildings. Loot of course takes many forms, gold, silvers, the work of serfs, the work of slaves, monopolies on trade routes, monopolies on trades itself and of course looting of weak environments itself. The aftermath is what is sustainable, but this difference between the glitter and the sustainable is very boring and what the historians call a dark age or dark period because its not newsworthy even thought it is actually the origin of the next age of expansion.
- Jedi72 8y ago
  I think this is a fantastic point, but it leads to the next question which is that are the current world powers any different?
  - Fordec 8y ago
    See: > looting of weak environments itself
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    Looting for oil thanks to a powerful army, increasing inequality and oligarchy, environmental degradation, climate change. ...it rings a bell.
  - tim333 8y ago
    There's less looting these days and more making stuff.
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      >more making stuff... Well, they must make stuff out of other stuff. Those raw materials have to be extracted from Mother Earth at some point I'd imagine.
- dalbasal 8y ago
En_gr_Student 8y ago
This clearly has outliers from fantastically ancient civilizations. Give it a qqnorm and you would see. The median age is much more interesting than the mean, and more relevant for today.
rafiki6 8y ago
My take on this is that once an economic model begins to fail, the society that is based on it will inevitably also fail. Eventually wars breakout (usually resource wars), and a new dominant player emerges and their economic model gets implemented until it fails. Usually what causes the failure is that the economic model has reached it's growth or sustainability limit. I actually think company life cycles are very analogous and can teach us much about societies and their growth and decline but on a faster timeline. Companies operate very much like mini-societies with their own culture, beliefs and ingrained practices. They have business models which are constantly evolving. Most if not all of them grow and eventually decline if they fail to adapt. I'm of the opinion we are experiencing this now with whatever economic model we have in developed nations. It's a never ending cycle, at least until the human species evolves or is eradicated.
dgudkov 8y ago
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention destructive ideologies. Early Christianity contributed to the demise of Roman empire. Marxism and fascism destroyed quite a few nations.
laythea 8y ago
I just started researching this subject recently. Graham Hancock is a very interesting speaker regarding the subject. I highly recommend that anyone interested in this subject to have a listen. Seems we are on a cycle of occasional doom and gloom, caused by nature. Think ice age cycles.
stareatgoats 8y ago
> While there is no single accepted theory for why collapses This kind of reasoning rests on the success of disciplines like physics and chemistry where scientists have found general laws upon which they can build solid models of reality (within some extreme limits). History doesn't lend itself well to this kind of thinking IMO, and only serves to cloak the innermost nature of history: it's uniqueness. Instead we should realize the unique characteristics of our culture vs all preceding (and similarities too, by all means). It is a much more difficult exercise, but also much more rewarding since it can lead to a much better understanding of our predicament. One thing that comes to mind is our complete interconnection and dependency on a few points of failure like no previous civilization. Our demise might not take several decades like the Roman empire, it might be over in a few days if we don't change course(s) and build better resiliency.

274 points by pitzahoy 8y ago

Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? They seem to think that Shang and Zhou are different civilisations? Instead of a continuity as they like to call it in China. There are good reasons why they should be considered continuations because they shared a similiar script for writing.

StefanKarpinski 8y ago
I had a similar reaction more generally: how meaningful is this without a precise definition of what constitutes a civilization? Still interesting though, even if only as a statistic about the units that historians have decided to split history up into.
Retric 8y ago
No. People have been living on the same land in China for a long time and aspects of it’s culture survived, but that’s about it. Rome lasted ~1500 years as a continuous political entity. Zhou dynasty comes is about half that at ~790 years. Though, you can make various arguments around those numbers.
dak1 8y ago
The script has changed considerably over time between different dynasties, and different areas have had mutually unintelligible languages, even if sharing similar script. For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese, and Korean and Vietnamese both used to use Chinese characters, but they are all separate languages. Similarly, numerous "dialects" in China are less mutually intelligible than many different Western languages. Compare Portuguese and Spanish to Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hokkien), Fuzhounese, Shanghainese, etc. Not to mention languages like Mongolian (see the Yuan dynasty). And that doesn't even begin to get into even more ethnically diverse regions like Tibet and western China. Then there's also the "warring states period" when, for over 250 years, no fewer than 14 different independently governed states made up what is today eastern China. Claims that China has always been one civilization are politically expedient versions of history that glaze over an enormous quantity of inconvenient facts. Did you know that after the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed viewed himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and declared himself "Caesar of Rome"? China today is as much a continuation of those previous states as Turkey is of the Roman Empire.
- nitwit005 8y ago
  > Did you know that after the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed viewed himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and declared himself "Caesar of Rome"? I was previously curious how many countries declared themselves to be the heirs of the Roman empire, and I found there is something of a wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
    putting the EU in that list is fishy and a reminder that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, especially for evaluating contemporary information.
    - nitwit005 8y ago
      I'm sure everyone will be shocked to hear such things of an article that begins with a highlighted "The neutrality of this article is disputed.".
      - LoSboccacc 8y ago
        people are literally linking it as source but ok. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
- hungryhobo 8y ago
  honestly this is just not?true. the Chinese script have evolved, but one can still look at inscriptions from thousands of years ago and understand it. it might be hard for people to understand different dialects in China but they all use the same writing system, standardized in the Qin dynasty. Same with the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean. A native Chinese speaker would have little problem reading those, although the pronounciations might be a little different
  - prevedmedved 8y ago
Gpetrium 8y ago
As some have said, the Roman Empire is considered the longest running empire. I think it is worth noting that governments will use stuff like 'oldest civilization' or 'oldest democracy' as a way to propel nationalism.
tanilama 8y ago
Zhou defeated Shang, but the culture is inherited like the Chinese Characters. Dynasty usually in China doesn't category as one civilization, it is just a episode in the Chinese history. And this is not a modern invention either, China has the great tradition of 修史, literaly meaning the making of history, which means the later dynasty is responsible of recording the official history of previous dynasty, and by doing so it is treated as a testament to the current dynasty's legimacy. Interestingly, even PRC is somewhat inherited this tradition, where an official account of Qing's history is set to publish this year, which is almost 30 million characters long.
- mcguire 8y ago
  I note that the author groups the 25-odd Egyptian dynasties into the three traditional empires.
jcranmer 8y ago
> Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? Not really. The Chinese tend to emphasize viewing their history through a lens of continuity and a single notional empire whereas the Western history tends to view their history as discontinuous and fractured empires. But when you start comparing the actual effects of these empires and their rises and falls, they are actually much more similar. For example, after the Crisis of the Third Century, the Roman Empire was effectively partitioned into a Western and Eastern Empire. The Western Empire proceeded to decentralize itself out of existence over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, but it recoalesced under the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties into the Holy Roman Empire by 800 (before splitting up into effectively a Frankish kingdom and the Germanic kingdom of the HRE). The Eastern Roman Empire lasted until around 1200, when the Fourth Crusade conquered it instead (a conquest which didn't last, but the Byzantines never recovered and the Ottomans finally put them out of their misery 250 years later). It's worth noting that pretty much all of the people I've cited considered themselves the true heirs of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile in China, the Han dynasty crashed hard in the early 200s, with three major successor states cropping up. One of these managed to conquer the others, so the successive dynasty was the Jin dynasty. Of course, the Jin last control of most of their territory, which fragmented into the Sixteen Kingdoms, but the entire era is still called the Jin dynasty. After the final collapse of the Jin, the north/south dichotomy continued with the Northern and Southern dynasties, which is again a successive series of powers vying for control eventually coalescing into the Sui dynasty after one wins out, which quickly transitions to the Tang dynasty, the first truly unified China since the fall of the Han dynasty. After about 300 years, the Tang dynasty collapses into a major period of disunity, the next truly unified China again taking 300 years to crop up again. There's a lot of similarity. The major difference is that Western Europe never reunified into a single unitary state (unless you want to count the extremely short lived Napoleonic Empire and Third Reich). But Western Europe did have a successor state that directly retained the traditions from the Roman Empire (namely, the Byzantines) and could plausibly claim to have no break in continuity (the Byzantines never called themselves anything other than the Roman Empire), and all of the major successor states directly drew inspiration and customs from the Roman Empire, rather like China. The writing system, the state religion, the bureaucratic apparatus, the legal system--all of these are derived from the Roman Empire in Western Europe, just as much as they are derived from the Qin and Han dynasties in China.
peterwwillis 8y ago
Greeks don't count, then? They have the oldest recorded living language. Give me a metric of how China is a civilization that doesn't make Greece also a civilization. Really they're just land masses with specific ethnic groups and traditions. Greek traditions have probably changed a lot more than Chinese traditions over 3,000 years, but much change determines a civilization?
- stcredzero 8y ago
  much change determines a civilization? Change happens faster in the centers of civilization. So change is as much an indicator of the degree of civilization.
a2dictator 8y ago
Not China. Indian (Vedic or Hindu) civilization is the oldest surviving civilization. The Chinese civilization(s) were overran by the Mongols. There was also a stat that 1 in 6 Chinese is a descendent of the Mongol Chengiz Khan. And before you say "Aryans", please know that that has been debunked too many times now.
stcredzero 8y ago
Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? More of a metastable meta-civilization. Over thousands of years, they keep collapsing and re-forming the same country.
tha_nose 8y ago
The problem is that "civilization" and "china" are hard to define. What we can say is that chinese civilization came into existence a long time ago. Then a serious of dynasty ( some not even "chinese" ) like the mongols or the manchus adopted aspects of chinese civilation. "China" itself didn't survive for thousands of years. The dynasties rose and collapsed. Conquered and got conquered. And "china", for much of its history, didn't even speak the same language. They used the chinese writing system ( which also evolved through time ), but does a writing system entail "part of civilization". Koreans and Japanese used chinese writing system, does it mean they are part of the chinese civilization? Of course not. Much of africa uses latin alphabet, does that mean africa is part of "greco-roman" civilization? Of course not. The chinese capital changed multiple times. There have been periods where "china" had multiple competing capitals. But then you could argue that chinese civilization didn't die out or get supplanted like the egyptian, mayan, mesopatamian, etc civizations. The more you think about it and the closer you look, the more blurry the situation becomes. But like most things history, I guess the best answer is "it's complicated".
laythea 8y ago
No it is not true. What is true, is that nobody actually knows, since we have no idea when humans began, other than "some point before X", where X may be a shadily derived date based on pseudo scientific methods. I find the fact that we have no idea quite liberating.

aetiusflavius 8y ago

Sir John Glubb analyzed this in The Fate of Empires: http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

pattisapu 8y ago

These are awfully contested dates. Hun: 100? Vedic: 1000? Etc. These statistics obscure more than they explain, I think.

noopnoop 8y ago
I can speak to the Vedic dates. Those are contested but only due to their novelty, meaning they are MUCH older than what western media gives them credit for. And the Vedic civilization exists to this day in India as Sanatana Dharma followers or as the ancient Greeks & the modern Western world calls it - Hindus.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  Though most varieties of modern 'Hinduism'/Sanatana Dharma are rather different from 'Vedism'.
  - noopnoop 8y ago
    That's quite unreasonable to say the least. In any case, I am not familiar with the term "Vedism". Vedas are not the only concept but a very critical pillar of Sanatana Dharma.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      Why do you think it's unreasonable? In general we don't expect religious systems to be static. Certainly -- although Vedic deities are not entirely absent from modern Hinduism/Sanatana Dharma -- the prominence of different deities is very different. The Rgveda focusses largely on Agni and Indra, and yajna rituals (as opposed to modern puja-type worship) have a central importance. Shiva, assuming he can be identified as Rudra, is not invoked, but rather (being feared) appeased. And so on and so forth. So while modern Hinduism is not unrelated to the practices/beliefs of the Vedas (which I'm referring to vaguely as 'vedism'), it largely pays only lip-service to the Vedas. People might read the Gita, Ramayan, Mahabharata, but rarely the Vedas, which really only make an appearance in special ritualised situations (e.g. marriages involve some Vedic hymns).

tlhunter 8y ago

It looks like the U.S. has another 93 years to look forward to!

baroffoos 8y ago
Thats assuming all civilizations don't collapse before then due to environmental destruction.

budadre75 8y ago

The US lasted 243 years. Is it the oldest modern nation? I wonder, how will the modern nations different from the ancient ones?

yks 8y ago
it is not, case in point: Great Britain
- mamon 8y ago
  Also: Poland, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, pretty much every European nation. Edit: Seems that GP conflates "nation" and "state". If we're counting continuity of government, they probably only Great Britain is a good example, other countries had undergone many changes, from absolutism, to constitutional monarchy, to non-existence, to democracy, to fascist dictatorships.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    There's quite a bit of change in Britain as well. There was a fascist dictatorship from 1649 until 1660. Nor is 1688 insignificant. (And it's only Great Britain from 1707).
    - lm28469 8y ago
      And it went from the largest colonial empire / power in the world to an island voting to get out of the EU in a few decades. Sure they're still Britain but it changed a lot. (it also apply to France, Germany, Belgium, and probably a lot more)
      - baud147258 8y ago
        I'd argue that France has changed a lot more during the same time, at least regarding the regime changes (from 1788: monarchy, constitutional monarchy, republic (1st), dictatorship, empire (with Napoleon), monarchy, republic (2nd), empire (2nd Empire with Napoleon III), republic (3rd), fascist dictatorship (Vichy), republic (4th & 5th)).

KorematsuFred 8y ago

Typical western garbage. Applying vague nation state ideas to civilization. Hindus for example have seen thousands of years as their own unbroken history. Many mantras that I chant today are at least 1500 year old.

quaunaut 8y ago
You understand that an "average" means that many skew higher, often much higher, right? If anything, this shows most ancient civilizations were measured in decades, not centuries. But some did go thousands.
- KorematsuFred 8y ago
  Yes but they have given specific numbers like Harappan -> 800.
talonx 8y ago
I think you are being downvoted for the unneeded name calling. But the article does not seem to do a great job in terms of accuracy or being able to distinguish between civilizations and empires. E.g. "Mahanjanapadas" should be "Mahajanapadas", and the Magadha empire was part of an existing civilization. This is apart from the contested dates that the author seems to accept, without citing any sources.
baud147258 8y ago
And the catholic prayers that I chant today are 2000 years old.

titanix2 8y ago

The full article is here: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-... 'Interestingly' the first two listed factors are ecology related, and the biggest thread to the European civilization is not explicitly stated.

dang 8y ago
Ok, we've changed the URL to that from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-the-lifespans-of-ancient-civilisations-compared http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-the-lifespans-of-an.... Thanks!

chx 8y ago

The Kingdom of Israel and Judah? While Wikipedia is not a credible source, it's a good summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Israel_(united_monarchy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Israel_(united_mona... > In contemporary scholarship the united monarchy is generally held to be a literary construction and not a historical reality, pointing to the lack of archaeological evidence. See The Bible Unearthed for a more authentic source. I am slightly biased because I have been to Tel Hazor after and because of reading that book. (No matter who ruled at the time but a 25 x 21 m citadel with two-meter thick walls built three thousand years ago is just jaw dropping.) Also, Vedic Civilisation [1000]? What evidence do we have that calls for this period to be called a single civilisation...?

a2dictator 8y ago
We have a LOT of evidence. The vedas have been universally agreed to be written before 3500 BC, at least. They are much older according to Indian / Eastern researchers. The Vedas talk about a river Saraswati. This river has been proven with archeological & satellite evidence to have dried up in 1900 BC. That means the Vedas & the Vedic civilization are much older & from an era when the Saraswati river was flowing. There are even more evidences. Many celestial events described in the Vedas completely match celestial events mathematically & corroborate with each other, and they have been dated to be about 7000+ years ago.

neom 8y ago

Absolutely fantastic book:- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/dp/0307719227 https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/d...

supernova87a 8y ago

You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old". "Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the goals and priorities of a nation, and it loses its drive to be scrappy, make sacrifices, and do the innovative things when one does when young and poor. You have generations who want to extract the gains put in by past generations. Or it costs too much to change people's behavior. That's what I think is happening to western Europe and the US. Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices that the generation previously were forced to, by unfortunate circumstance. Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans. Unless you have a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves, this sets in. Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country...

jlawson 8y ago
I'm pretty sure "getting old" has always been a big part of the collapse of civilizations. I can think of few that were truly destroyed by unstoppable external forces (maybe the Byzantine Empire being attacked by Muslims?). Most of them seem to have rotted from the inside and were easily knocked over by opportunists (Rome). That said I'm no historian so examples would be interesting. Also interestingly, America is 243 years old - 93 years to go! Sounds reasonable.
digitaltrees 8y ago
Get rid of multi generational transfers of wealth. Make each generation start from scratch. I know it's easier said than done as not all assets are fungible or distributable (social networks, geography etc) but it would make a difference. I read recently that the same families that controlled most the wealth in Florence in the 1600 still control most the wealth now, that's probably not good for scrappy innovation.
- avinium 8y ago

bsanr 8y ago

Let me throw a wrench into things with a provocative statement (which I have no intention of citing support for): The affluence of Western Europe and the US was not built on hard work and ingenuity so much as the exploitation of cheap labor and the sudden access to deep veins of basic resources or economic/industrial efficiencies which were either already extant but inaccessible without a critical mass of capital, or else were inevitable on an imminent timescale given past development. Have at it.

dcow 8y ago
And now, good ol’ western civilization experiences regression to the mean.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  Economic and industrial efficiencies don't just inevitably "run out."
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Externalities do, such as colonies or environment or mines or resources. Efficiency is not a one way street. You need people with will and knowledge to operate the machinery or further research. Otherwise you will inevitably be eclipsed. Recent lessons happened to Great Britain (colonies), Europe (know how and funding, war devastation), Ming China (complacency and bureaucracy), Japanese tech dominance (population got old and crammed in), Soviets (political pressure and mismanagement). It is happening to USA right now.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    They stop exponential growth, and that's a good thing in the end.
tomt2323 8y ago
While I agree with the point you're trying to make, I don't think that's a provocative statement for the rest of the world (or even all of the people living in Western Europe and the US), especially now as increased communication and analytic tools help us to better understand the ways in which massive transfers of wealth are still happening from the rest of the "postcolonial" world. I suppose an argument could be made that it was built on hard work and ingenuity in much the same way that you can say politicians really are better at something than everyone else. It's just not necessarily the thing you'd want them to be good at. In this case, that would be that the powers we're talking about made some incredible innovations in terms of colonialism and internal methods of quelling the dissent of the aforementioned cheap (or enslaved) labor. Of course, it's not at all clear to me that this hasn't been the case for every single past (or emerging) empire. But the "self-made civilization" is maybe even more ridiculous a concept than the "self-made man".

bilbo0s 8y ago

Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? Serious question. It just seems that a lot of entries on this list are actually part of the same civilization. In the same way that I would consider the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and the American Empire to be really all a part of the same Western Civilization. But maybe my thinking is totally wrong and that's not what "civilization" means?

geowwy 8y ago
>>> Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? They even got that wrong. The Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire are the same political entity. Arguably the Ottoman Empire was as well, since the Ottomans basically left the Byzantine bureaucracy intact. The Sultan even used the title Caesar and declared himself protector of the Eastern church.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Good point. I was so taken by the fact that they were conflating "political entity" with "civilization" that I didn't even realize that they were even breaking up political entities and calling them different "civilization"s.
- mcv 8y ago
  They share their origin in the same political entity, but have clearly different cultures and developed in different directions. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire had a massive impact on Western Europe. There's also the medieval Holy Roman Empire which was officially a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and at odds with the Byzantine Empire because they considered themselves the only legitimate Roman Empire, and these are all related but clearly different cultures. And then there's the vikings which were clearly a different culture, arguably a different civilisation, but infused themselves in every corner of Europe, from England to Russia to Sicily and Byzantium. Civilisations do not have clear boundaries, both geographically and temporally, and you certainly can't equate them with empires. I think civilisations rarely truly collapse (except under the impact of invasion or colonialism maybe), but they do change, and sometimes dramatically. The collapse of empires is sometimes dramatic, as in the case of the Western Roman Empire, and sometimes barely noticeable, as in the case of the Holy Roman Empire.

drallison 8y ago

Ignoring the difficult task of actually deciding when a civilization starts and stops, is there some theory that suggests that duration is the right measure? Don't we need a reasonable model of how civilizations work. It would be interesting to incorporate and merge the data from Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies with the data presented here.

skookumchuck 8y ago

Now that the citizens have discovered they can vote themselves money out of the treasury, and politicians vie to outdo each other in promising free stuff, we'll see how long the US lasts.

Tomminn 8y ago

Alternative title: The average length of time an ancient civilization had to last in order to be noticed by us is 336 years.

serkanyersen 8y ago

Ottoman empire lasted 624 years and it's not mentioned in this article. They mention 'Western Turk (70)' and I've no idea what that means.

barberousse 8y ago
Politically my guess is modern Turkey but 'Western turk' is legit term to distinguish, culturally, from Eastern turks such as Siberians, Kazahks, etc whom the Turkish language, spoken in Turkey, descends from

mmjaa 8y ago

I'm quite disappointed that the aboriginal cultures of Australia are not factored into this. Bias against the idea that they might have been a civilisation? Oldest oral traditions of any human culture. Oldest, still being worked, mining operation of any human culture. A hippocratic oath encoded in their culture while we, white Europeans, bled people to their deaths. I think this report, while interesting - is not quite as complete a view of human civilisation as it could be. Australian aborigines throw out the whole idea - until white guys came along and genocided them, they were the oldest, longest-running civilisation of humankind, ever.

bloak 8y ago
Perhaps I'm being too literal and etymological, but to me "civilisation" means towns and cities. Towns and cities lead to economic specialisation, a legal system, civil service, taxation, and so on. Nomads and people living in villages may have a complex culture but it's rather different from city life, even a low-tech city life like in ancient Egypt, for example.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
> A hippocratic oath encoded in their culture while we, white Europeans, bled people to their deaths. But those doing the bleeding were following the hippocratic oath. They were trying to do good. The issue was stupidity (or, more charitably, lack of knowledge) rather than malice.

iceninenines 8y ago

That seems a bit longer than the 250 years or about 10 generations that I've heard on Thom Hartmann and from other sources.

foreigner 8y ago

we have the unique advantage of being able to learn from the wreckages of societies past Why do we have that unique advantage? Plenty of civilisations had historians.

rvn1045 8y ago
the number of recent discoveries in just the last 100 years is astonishing. the Indus valley civilization was not even discovered until 1929. We have a fuller picture of human history than ever before.

dagaci 8y ago

Many of these great "empires" were simply extended looting machines, once they ran out of looting opportunities they collapsed in the same way that a Ponzi collapses when it run out of new "investors". While things were good, it was all golden, glitter and glam, and many tall buildings. Loot of course takes many forms, gold, silvers, the work of serfs, the work of slaves, monopolies on trade routes, monopolies on trades itself and of course looting of weak environments itself. The aftermath is what is sustainable, but this difference between the glitter and the sustainable is very boring and what the historians call a dark age or dark period because its not newsworthy even thought it is actually the origin of the next age of expansion.

Jedi72 8y ago
I think this is a fantastic point, but it leads to the next question which is that are the current world powers any different?
- Fordec 8y ago
  See: > looting of weak environments itself
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  Looting for oil thanks to a powerful army, increasing inequality and oligarchy, environmental degradation, climate change. ...it rings a bell.
- tim333 8y ago
  There's less looting these days and more making stuff.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    >more making stuff... Well, they must make stuff out of other stuff. Those raw materials have to be extracted from Mother Earth at some point I'd imagine.
dalbasal 8y ago

En_gr_Student 8y ago

This clearly has outliers from fantastically ancient civilizations. Give it a qqnorm and you would see. The median age is much more interesting than the mean, and more relevant for today.

rafiki6 8y ago

My take on this is that once an economic model begins to fail, the society that is based on it will inevitably also fail. Eventually wars breakout (usually resource wars), and a new dominant player emerges and their economic model gets implemented until it fails. Usually what causes the failure is that the economic model has reached it's growth or sustainability limit. I actually think company life cycles are very analogous and can teach us much about societies and their growth and decline but on a faster timeline. Companies operate very much like mini-societies with their own culture, beliefs and ingrained practices. They have business models which are constantly evolving. Most if not all of them grow and eventually decline if they fail to adapt. I'm of the opinion we are experiencing this now with whatever economic model we have in developed nations. It's a never ending cycle, at least until the human species evolves or is eradicated.

dgudkov 8y ago

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention destructive ideologies. Early Christianity contributed to the demise of Roman empire. Marxism and fascism destroyed quite a few nations.

laythea 8y ago

I just started researching this subject recently. Graham Hancock is a very interesting speaker regarding the subject. I highly recommend that anyone interested in this subject to have a listen. Seems we are on a cycle of occasional doom and gloom, caused by nature. Think ice age cycles.

stareatgoats 8y ago

> While there is no single accepted theory for why collapses This kind of reasoning rests on the success of disciplines like physics and chemistry where scientists have found general laws upon which they can build solid models of reality (within some extreme limits). History doesn't lend itself well to this kind of thinking IMO, and only serves to cloak the innermost nature of history: it's uniqueness. Instead we should realize the unique characteristics of our culture vs all preceding (and similarities too, by all means). It is a much more difficult exercise, but also much more rewarding since it can lead to a much better understanding of our predicament. One thing that comes to mind is our complete interconnection and dependency on a few points of failure like no previous civilization. Our demise might not take several decades like the Roman empire, it might be over in a few days if we don't change course(s) and build better resiliency.