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As 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 Ch
by rsj_hn 7y ago
As 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.
- rsj_hn 7y agoI did not invent the criteria. When we talk about "civilization", we mean a writing system, public buildings, centralized government with some formalized structure. If you are just talking about tribes of people with some arts and crafts, then you can find cave paintings in Spain dating back 35,000 years (https://www.oldest.org/artliterature/cave-paintings/ https://www.oldest.org/artliterature/cave-paintings/), a structured society living in caves in Sri Lanka 35,000 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archaeological_sites_by_continent_and_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archaeological_sites_b...) or the Gobekle Teple (the world's oldest temple) in Turkey 11,000 years ago -- and they even had "scripts" there. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worl... The point is, humans migrated out of Africa a _long_ time ago and there is a long history of things like tool making, cooking, art, making structures, making symbols in proto languages, which is scattered all across the world from Latin America to Europe to Asia. But none of these by themselves constitute what is traditionally considered a "civilization", although of course this is just a long standing convention. Having a written language and organized public buildings is required for that.
- cygx 7y agoThere is a bit of a case insofar that we have a (limited) form of macro-organization along songlines.