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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

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.

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.