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The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)
- docdeek 7y agoI was taught as a child in Australia that the Indigenous Australians were the world’s oldest living/surviving civilization.
- ars 7y agoThey are probably excluded for not having any sort of symbolic communication system (writing, hieroglyphics, knot patterns, stuff like that).
- garmaine 7y agoOr cities, monumental architecture, or unified government. The term "civilization" in this context is an academic category for historical societies, and its absence does not imply the pejorative "uncivilized."
- a_bonobo 7y agoThere were at least message sticks: https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-australia-oceania/aboriginal-message-sticks-and-ancient-system-communication-001670 https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-australia-oce... >For instance, one of the message sticks in the Dandiiri Maiwar Exhibition at the Queensland Museum and Science centre is as follows: Bishop White of Carpentaria described how he delivered a message stick on behalf of an Aboriginal boy in Darwin to a boy in Daly Waters. Bishop White asked the boy from Darwin to explain the message. The boy read the message symbols which requested headbands and boomerangs from Daly Waters. The Bishop delivered the message stick and asked the recipient to tell him what the message was. The boy interpreted the message stick exactly as the boy from Darwin had explained it.
- jacobush 7y agoWhich I understand, but it's also wrong. The dream songs are a symbolic communication and very stable at that, for millennia.
- fit2rule 7y agoThen this should be re-evaluated. They had no need for written communication systems, because they have (had) the most robust word of mouth, oral history of any human society. 40,000 years of oral traditions accurately reproduced over the generations. We 'civilised Europeans' can't even do 80 years. The argument can be made that the FNP of Australia are not only the longest running civilisation, but in terms of actual human activity, the most advanced. Longest-running, still in operation, mineral mines (20,000 years). They had cryptographic systems which not only kept the peace between 300 different languages, but enabled a massive trade network to flourish. Personally, I consider China young in comparison, and the West absolutely juvenile.
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- danieltillett 7y agoYes Australian education leaves a lot to be desired.
- tjmc 7y agoWhy is the parent's statement incorrect? There's significant evidence that indigenous culture in Australia is at least 40,000 years old. Despite the lack of written history, there were some permanent settlements and agriculture. So I guess it comes down to the definition of civilization.
- danieltillett 7y ago1. We have no idea how old indigenous culture is in Australia. By this I mean how stable it is over time. All we know is there wasn’t much technical innovation, but as for language, ritual, religion there is zero data for how old it is. 2. Civilisation != culture. Aboriginal culture might be 40,000 years, but aboriginal civilisation is a little over 200 years old. 3. There are hundreds of different Aboriginal cultures so to make specific claim about them sharing a common feature is meaningless.
- cygx 7y agoWe have no idea how old indigenous culture is in Australia It is suspected that aboriginal stories about eg sea level rise, comets, changes in flora and fauna are based on historical events. Some of those events can be dated, suggesting on oral tradition that goes back 10,000+ years.
- danieltillett 7y agoEven if it is possible that Aboriginal people retain stories from long ago (unlikely in my opinion), this doesn’t prove that Aboriginal culture is unchanged for 40,000 years. I am highly sceptical of all these stories of Aboriginal people retaining non-useful knowledge for thousands of years. It doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world. A really good counter example is the Tasmanian Aborigines forgetting how to fish. They fished (the waters of Tasmania are teeming with fish) until 4000 years ago and then for some reason stopped. If you lose highly useful information like how to fish, how likely is it that you will retain stories from 10,000 years ago of some comet?
- Iv 7y agoDoes it make sense to talk about the Chinese civilization like a single continuous civilization? That's a bit like saying Italy's civilization dates from the first Etruscan settlements or that French civilization is as old as the megaliths in Brittany. I am a bit suspicious of these claims as they are central to Chinese nationalism. In order to hold them you have to disregard the several periods where the country was split in several parts and have to integrate somehow the mongol conquest. To the best of my knowledge, the best claimants to the longest enduring and continuously existing organizations are the Holy See and when it comes to governing bodies, Iceland's Althing (founded in 930)
- brailsafe 7y agoIt depends on how you define civilization I suppose, but there is definitely a difference between nation and civ, as well as sub-civs, and those can be reasonably estimated to date back ~12000 years. Edit: 12k would be the origin of the yellow river and Yangtze river delta civilizations, if memory serves. These would grow into the overarching Ancient China and then into China as a nation.
- rsj_hn 7y agoAs of what is known today, the earliest Chinese writing dates to ~ 2K BC, or about a thousand years later than earliest written languages in Mesopotamia. The Chinese Bronze Age starts at 1600 BC, whereas you have the Bronze Age starting around 3000 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia. All evidence points to Chinese civilization being about 1000-2000 years "younger" than Mesopotamia or Egypt, and also younger than India.
- brailsafe 7y agoThose may be true, but it seems like you're just defining civilization as the point at which a given group of people developed a writing system, and also pointing to a lot non-mutually exclusive events. That's far from "all evidence" and you're just describing multiple civilizations occurring at different times. You also had the Indus Valley Civ around the same time. Likewise, even if one is younger than the other, obviously doesn't mean it's considered to have the same longevity.
- _iyig 7y agoTo what extent did the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and destruction of the "Four Olds" (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas) damage this extensive cultural and historical tradition? Was the damage mostly material e.g. temples razed and books burnt, or did China's early Communist period have significant cultural/behavioral impacts as well? I've heard some commentators say that Taiwan preserves much of this "lost" Chinese culture and history, but outside of temples and dragon dancing, I don't really know what this means. Could anyone shine a light?
- garmaine 7y ago> I've heard some commentators say that Taiwan preserves much of this "lost" Chinese culture and history, but outside of temples and dragon dancing, I don't really know what this means. Could anyone shine a light? Also the writing script and literary tradition, as well as a general appreciation of erudition. Pre-revolutionary family and social values.
- joe_the_user 7y agoMy great grandfather was missionary in China and founded a university there. Some relatives visited the university a while ago and it was apparently a local technical college (still with the same name and even plaque honoring my great grand father). The photos made it look a lot like a typical American community colleges. Which is to say that I suspect that, despite all the tumult of the cultural revolution, just modernization has likely been the largest force upending the previous culture order. You see the thing about virtually all pre-industrial societies is that only a quite small minority of the population were at all educated in the intricacies of the culture - with most people having to work as farmers to simply support the society, few people could be educated, few people could read, etc. So most people educated today have been educated in the process of industrialization and so they have whatever knowledge was being handed out, and they got it in the way that modern people are educated.
- roca 7y agoWhen they fled to Taiwan the KMT crated as many treasures from the capital, in particular the Forbidden City, as they could, given the chaotic conditions, and took them to Taiwan. This probably saved a lot of them from being destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Many of them are now on display at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, which is an amazing place to visit.
- analyst74 7y ago> Until the Japanese invasion her conquerors have been barbarians who looked up to the higher civilization of China and eagerly adopted it. I always thought this is uniquely Chinese thing, but recently learnt that Athens had a similar history. Many of Athens architectures are actually built by its conquerors who admired its culture.
- _iyig 7y agoThe echoes of Roman (and Greek) admiration are still visible in Europe, and even throughout the Americas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_architecture Another example - the common language of ancient Rome, Latin, is still the official spoken language of the Catholic Church. Until the 1960s, priestly instruction and most Catholic masses were conducted in Latin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_u...
- dingle_thunk 7y agoLook up Rajasthan architecture.
- adictator 7y agoThe oldest surviving civilization is the Indian Saraswati civilization (aka as the Indus Valley civilization). The Saraswati civilization is about 30,000 years old & continues to this day.
- bra4you 7y ago"Until the Opium War of 1840–42 the European merchants and voyagers who reached the distant land of China had looked upon the Chinese with a good deal of awe as a people of superior culture." Bullshit and Chinese Propaganda with their "5000 years old culture". 5000 years ago we are talking about bones inscribed with precursors of the Chinese writing system. Not bad, but compare this to the Pyramids at the same time? Around the year 0 the Chinese culture was en par with the level of western culture and technology - speak Rome. Only during the middle ages the west fell so far beyond and Chinese had indeed a superior level of technology, knowledge and administration. Things reversed again with the industrial revolution and the center of industrial GDP moved to the west again. Now since China and the rest of Asia has also industrialized and due to far more people in Asia, the center of world GDP has shifted back to the East. If you can really talk about a "continuous civilization" for 5000, 3500 or even 2000 years is doubtful. The experience from businessman with Chinese: 30 years ago they had an inferior complex because they were technological too far behind and a feeling of cultural superiority. Now the have the feeling of technological superiority combined with cultural superiority. Chinese culture has a lot of strengths. But it also comes with a lot of weaknesses. I am skeptical about the "Chinese Century"
- amriksohata 7y agoContinuous civilisatiins can exist for that long if they aren't targetted by the greed of invaders, in this case there weren't large scale invasions big enough to topple it
- ravish-tech 7y agoThat’s based on what we found of once humans started writing. Civilisation have been going on long before that. Many cultures like Hindus preferred oral methods to written books so no single person/object has the power. Having said that. China did give the world lot of things and I respect them food it.
- beardedman 7y agoI wonder how connected our deep desire for culture (community) is connected to having far right/left views.
- amriksohata 7y agoReading about the GDP of India and China, both two were the richest countries in the world before Mughal and British invasions. There was a reason they called India the jewel in the crown, it was the biggest transfer of wealth from the east to the west
- elfexec 7y agoAs awful as the theft of wealth was, the bigger crime was the prevention of industrialization. India was directly stopped by britain from industrializing because britain didn't want a competitor and rather wanted to use india for resources to power its industrialization. China directly somewhat, but mostly indirectly was prevented from industrialization by western powers ( and eventually japan ) who destabilized china and seized its major ports, industries, resources, etc. If india and china were able to free itself and industrialize when japan did, india and china would easily have the two largest economies in the world today. It's disheartening thinking about all the wealth, knowledge, goods, discoveries etc the world missed out because of shortsighted greed and brutality.
- amriksohata 7y agoIndia before industralisation, did not need industralisation. It was rich because it had the oil of the time, which was cotton, spices, fertile land. The industry was removed and moved to Britain. Britain needed the industry as it was a relatively poor country, India did not.
- sifar 7y agoI think you are conflating industry and markets. Britain already had the industries when it started colonizing India. What it needed were the markets to sell the factory produce. That is what they traded in return for the spices and raw materials. Hence it destroyed the competing industries in it's colonies like India - which was a huge market.
- amriksohata 7y ago
- peteretep 7y ago> Even a poor Chinese with no education is likely to have the instincts and bearing of an educated man. He sets great store by such things as personal dignity, self-respect, and respect for others. I get the impression that Taiwanese and Hong Kong people might not agree with this point to describe the mainlanders.
- H_Pylori 7y agoThe article was written before communism. I've heard from different accounts that communism has had a deleterious effect on people's manner. I don't know if this is true or not, but it's a reasonable explanation.
- swebs 7y agoWow, I didn't even realize this article was written in 1944.
- ekianjo 7y ago> communism has had a deleterious effect on people's manner. Thats an understatement. Look at the history with the Great Leap Forward and how it changed chinese culture forever.
- osullivj 7y agoYes - "bourgeois" manners were rejected as affectation.
- tomThom 7y agoLots of white supremacism here.
- m-app 7y agoRelated to this, reading some Chinese science-fiction (mainly Ken Liu's translations of full books and collections of short stories) has made me realize the gap in knowledge I have with regards to Chinese history. In some of the time travel-related stories some dynasties and other historical events are mentioned as easily as we do our Roman or Greek histories for example, which of course makes sense. Does anyone have any recommendations on books covering the major Chinese historical eras? This article and the diagram in it are a great start that I would love to dig deeper into.