5000 years of chinese civilization ? Really ?

[NegativeBeef]

What makes you think that modern Chinese are more similar to the Chinese of the Shang Dynasty ? Are you insinuating that China hasn't evolved culturally in 3000 years ?

Just because a civilization has culturally evolved doesn't mean it has changed. America has evolved quite a lot since it was formed but America is still the same America it was 250 years ago.

Where did you get that idea ? Egyptians haven't changed much genetically over time. The Greek, Romans, Arabs and Ottomans had only a very minor impact on haplogroups in Egypt. 95% is still identical to ancient Egypt. As for the language, ancient Egyptian was a Semitic language closely related to Aramaic. Coptic language, spoken by today's Christian community of Egypt, is the direct descendant of ancient Egyptian language. Arabic managed to replace Egyptian, where Greek had failed, because Arabic was almost intelligible to Egyptian speakers. They were both Semitic languages with almost identical grammar. So not a big change there either.

If you read up on some history, the ancient Egyptians (the ones that built the Pyramids) were wiped out by the Romans. The modern day Egyptians are in no way the same as the ancient Egyptians. The best way to show this is with their writing system. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics bear no resemblance to modern day Egyptian text - none whatsoever, zip, nada. On the other hand, you can see a clear resemblance between ancient Chinese text when compared to modern day Chinese text. Please look this up and prove me otherwise.

Not at all. Population migrate and mix. Others disappear. Modern Europeans could be descended directly from Cro-Magnon, who had lived in Europe during the Ice Age. But we now know that only about a quarter to half of the European gene pool come from them, and the rest from later migrants from the Middle East and the Eurasian steppe.

Um what?? Cro-Magnon man wasn't a civilization.

You still don't understand that a country isn't a civilisation, and vice versa. The oldest civilisation if the one that arose in the Middle East (Mesopotamia, Levant and Egypt) and expanded to Europe and South Asia. The second oldest in the East Asian civilisation, which arose around the Yellow River and the Yangtze River.

Although those civilizations are quite old, they no longer exist today. Please show me a modern day Mesopotamian civilization.

Again if you want to argue over what the oldest civilization is, that title goes to the Ancient Sumerians who existed circa 10,000 bc.

[A ke bono kane kotto]

Just because a civilization has culturally evolved doesn't mean it has changed. America has evolved quite a lot since it was formed but America is still the same America it was 250 years ago.

Except that there are 37 new states and a lot more cosmopolitanism.

If you read up on some history, the ancient Egyptians (the ones that built the Pyramids) were wiped out by the Romans. The modern day Egyptians are in no way the same as the ancient Egyptians. The best way to show this is with their writing system. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics bear no resemblance to modern day Egyptian text - none whatsoever, zip, nada. On the other hand, you can see a clear resemblance between ancient Chinese text when compared to modern day Chinese text. Please look this up and prove me otherwise.

Ancient Chinese characters did not look like modern ones at all.



Check the Aramaic alphabet, the one that was used in Mesopotamia from 800 BC. It's almost the same as modern Hebrew, and close to Arabic too. If you can read Hebrew, you can read ancient Aramaic. If you can read modern Chinese, you can't read ancient Chinese. As simple as that.

The mother of all European and Middle Eastern alphabets is Phoenician. It is as old as Chinese characters, but has evolved less in time. The closest modern equivalent is the Greek alphabet. Many letters are identical, apart from some left-right inversions.



The Romans didn't wipe out Egyptian culture or people. Ancient Egyptian language was officially extinct by 600 BC, when Demotic Egyptian replaced it. They continued to speak Demotic Egyptian and write with Hieroglyphs throughout Greek and Roman rule. Egyptians adopted Greek script around 400 AD, then the Arabic script.

Egyptian culture was completely preserved under the Romans, and influenced Roman culture more than the other way round. The cult of Isis became very popular in Italy, Greece and Mesopotamia during Roman rule. It is said that the cult of Isis was replaced by the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary when Roman citizens became Christians. So much for the Egyptians being wiped out.

[NegativeBeef]

Except that there are 37 new states and a lot more cosmopolitanism.

Yet it is still America. No one considers modern America to be a different civilization or country than it was 250 years ago.

Ancient Chinese characters did not look like modern ones at all.

Actually those ancient Chinese characters do look like modern ones. You're telling me that you can't see the similarity between them and how they've obvious evolved overtime with no outside influence?

As a matter of fact, modern Egyptian and European text look even less similar than their ancient counterparts.

The mother of all European and Middle Eastern alphabets is . It is as old as Chinese characters, but has evolved less in time. The closest modern equivalent is the Greek alphabet. Many letters are identical, apart from some left-right inversions.

What is that suppose to prove? Alphabet is not the same thing as language.

The Romans didn't wipe out Egyptian culture or people. Ancient Egyptian language was officially extinct by 600 BC, when replaced it. They continued to speak Demotic Egyptian and write with Hieroglyphs throughout Greek and Roman rule. Egyptians adopted Greek script around 400 AD, then the Arabic script.
Egyptian culture was completely preserved under the Romans, and influenced Roman culture more than the other way round. The cult of Isis became very popular in Italy, Greece and Mesopotamia during Roman rule. It is said that the cult of Isis was replaced by the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary when Roman citizens became Christians. So much for the Egyptians being wiped out.

If the Romans preserved Hieroglyphics so much why was the Rosetta Stone needed in order to translate ancient Egyptian text? And what does that have to do with being the oldest existing civilization? Japan and Korea have preserved many aspects of Chinese culture. If the Chinese stopped existing today would you consider Japan and Korea to be continuations of China? Of course not. How is this different with the Romans and Egyptians?

In any case, I'm done over here. This thread was completely pointless and ridiculous to begin with. The OP thinks that modern day Iraq is a good representation of ancient Sumerian culture. ROFLMAO. Now I see why no one ever responds to any of his threads.

[Maciamo]

Yet it is still America. No one considers modern America to be a different civilization or country than it was 250 years ago.

America is not a civilisation. It's a country. I don't know how old you are, but I think it's time you understood that, besides the purpose of video games, countries like France, Britain, Spain, or indeed the USA, are not and cannot be called civilisations. They are countries, made up of one or many cultures. For example, Belgium is one country with two distinct cultures; a Dutch-speaking one and a French-speaking one. But even countries that look more homogeneous to the unsuspecting outsider can be composed of many distinct regional cultures. It is the case of Spain, France, Britain, Germany and even Italy. A civilisation is something bigger, encompassing all the cultures that have the same roots, sharing a common heritage. The European civilisation, for instance, shares the same Indo-European, Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritage.

The Middle Eastern civilisation developed from the same Neolithic society, also has a partially Indo-European history (though IE languages only survived on the fringe on the Middle-East, like in Armenia or Iran), was also influenced by Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian values, although Islam (built on Judeo-Christian foundations) and Semitic languages eventually superseded. This is why I see it as a sister civilisation of Europe, daughters of the same ancient civilisation.

I think that what got you confused is that school textbooks and common language usually refer to "Sumerian civilisation", "Babylonian civilisation", "Egyptian civilisation", "Minoan civilisation" or "Mycenaean civilisation" as if they were distinct civilisations in the modern sense of the term. But for historians and archaeologists, they are really just "branch civilisations" (or "sub-civilisations") of the greater Middle Eastern civilisation. It's just more convenient to drop the "sub" part.

Actually those ancient Chinese characters do look like modern ones.

That's just bad faith on your part. You can see how they evolved, but if I gave you a full text in Shang-dynasty characters, could you read it ? (assuming that you can read modern Chinese characters, otherwise I guess you wouldn't have dared replying to this thread )

As a matter of fact, modern Egyptian and European text look even less similar than their ancient counterparts.

So what ? Scandinavians used to write with runes. Does that rule them out as part of the European civilisation ? Grow up.

Then, Egypt isn't the source of the European neolithic; modern Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Greece are.

What is that suppose to prove? Alphabet is not the same thing as language.

So what's your point at the end ? You argue that the Egyptian culture was "wiped out" because they traded the Hieroglyphic alphabet for a more convenient one, then when A ke bono kane kotto shows you that the 3000-year old Phoenician alphabet is quite similar to modern Western alphabet, you just turn your back on what you said earlier and it suddenly doesn't matter any more. Such bad faith ! If you can see a continuity between ancient and modern Chinese alphabet, then you just cannot deny the continuity between Phoenician and Roman, Greek Cyrillic, Hebraic or Arabic alphabets.

Languages evolve with time. That's inevitable. It's completely unreasonable to expect Egyptian language not to change in 5000 years. Just look at how much English changed in just 1000 years. What you obviously do not understand is that modern Arabic dialects of Egypt and Iraq are related to the ancient languages spoken there. They are all part of the Semitic family. Sumerian may be an exception, but so in Basque in Europe. Yet who would argue that modern Basque are not culturally European ? And if you think that ancient Chinese was pronounced anything like modern Chinese, you are just as wrong. 3000-year old Chinese, or for that matter 1000-year old Chinese, is just as incomprehensible to modern ears as Anglo-Saxon is to modern English speakers.

If the Romans preserved Hieroglyphics so much why was the Rosetta Stone needed in order to translate ancient Egyptian text?

The Rosetta stone was not a Roman attempt at translating an ancient Egyptian text. It was purposefully written in the three languages in use at the time in ancient Egypt. For all we know the original was probably issued in Latin, then translated into Egyptian so that locals could read it. Multi-lingual texts were common elsewhere too, with texts in Aramaic and Assyrian in Mesopotamia, or even in Greek and Sanskrit in India during the Maurya period.

And what does that have to do with being the oldest existing civilization? Japan and Korea have preserved many aspects of Chinese culture. If the Chinese stopped existing today would you consider Japan and Korea to be continuations of China? Of course not. How is this different with the Romans and Egyptians?

If China stopped existing today, it wouldn't erase history, nor that fact that Korean, Japanese or Vietnamese cultures were offshoots of Chinese culture. I don't see how you cannot understand that. If Scandinavian cultures in Denmark, Norway and Sweden were to be replaced, by say, Italian culture, would that make any difference in the Scandinavianness of Iceland ?

[yoruba]

Maciamo, great argument. I, myself, have bought into the 5,000 year continuity of Chinese civilization that is so widely propagated, but now I see why that really isn't the case. But I don't think any educated person--except maybe Chinese nationalists--believes China is the oldest civilization, however, so that part of your argument is mute.

Nonetheless, I think it's important to keep in mind that archaeology in China is still in its nascent stages and important finds in the last decades and the reexamining and analyzing of old and new ancient sources, have both been constantly challenging how old and what civilization in China really is. A lot of what we understand as modern Chinese historiography is based on Western European models and interpretations, which has its own biases and obvious shortcomings. Shiji, an early pioneering work of homegrown Chinese historiography, was not even taken seriously by Western European scholars as late as 50 years ago. It wasn't until the discovery of Qin Shi Huang's tomb and Terracotta soldiers as described in Shiji, and the findings on Oracle Bones which verified many of the sovereigns listed by Sima Qian, that Shiji was taken as a serious collection of annals by Western historians. Yet, Chinese archaeologists attempt to match cultures that predated the Shang with ones described by Sima Qian has been seen by Western archaeologists as delusional revisionism and "PRC propaganda." In the eyes of Western historians, the Xia Dynasty, which links well with the Erlitou culture, is still a myth; and Jiahu symbols that date to 6,600 BCE is not considered writing, yet the similar oldest extant cuneiform is.

Another interesting thing to keep in mind is that Western civilizations has one very important advantage over the East: preservation. The dryer, desert climate of the Middle East preserves evidences of agriculture, among other indicators of civilization such as documents--whether written on stone or more perishable materials--and remains of cities and towns, much better than the wetter humid climate of China.