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The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

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Re: The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

#51

Post by oblio »

austincheney wrote: post #41
Iv wrote: post #3

Does 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…

Continuous civilization only means the defining characteristics of civilization remain unbroken through regime change. Only China and India have had continuous civilization from the ancient to the present. That remains true even though the Yuan dynasty were foreign invaders. Contrast that to the Saxon invasion of Britain or the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs or the gothic conquest of Italy.

India has had multiple competing civilizations at the same time for centuries. Saying that India was a single civilization for thousands of years is incorrect.

Re: The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

#52

Post by elfexec »

bra4you wrote: post #50
elfexec wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bullshit It wasn't bullshit. Generally, the merchants and voyagers who reached china were in awe. It was why europeans wanted to get to china in the first place and not the other way around. Even decades after the opium wars, europeans were still in awe even while burning and pillaging. "... I have done well. The [local] people are very civil, but I think the grandees hate us, as they must after what we did the Pal…

> It wasn't bullshit. Generally, the merchants and voyagers who reached china were in awe. Well, this was after Rome, and while after the middle ages, still before the industrial revolution. > It was why europeans wanted to get to china in the first place and not the other way around. The reason why Europe explored more during that time says more about China than Europe. "Even decades after the opium wars, europeans…

> Well, this was after Rome, and while after the middle ages, still before the industrial revolution.

I don't know what you are trying to say here.

> The reason why Europe explored more during that time says more about China than Europe.

No. It says more about Europe than China. It shows that china had what europe needed/wanted/etc. Also, europe wasn't "exploring" at first. They were seeking a path to china/india/etc after their overland access to china ended with the turkish conquest of constantinople and the russian overthrow of the golden horde. It isn't an accident that europe started "exploring" soon after their trade route to china was cut.

> Why should they?

Ask them. All I said was that they were. You claimed they weren't and I just wanted to correct you. I'm not saying they should've have been or not. I'm just saying they were.

> we had Roman writers write too about "superior Germanic culture" (bellum germanicum).

And? I'm trying to make sense of your response so far and I can't.

> By the way, do you know why the Opium war happened? Besides having the inferior technology on the Chinese side? Do you know what the reasons was?

Yes. China has superior products that europe desired and ran a deficit...

> It should be a warning to China today.

Not quite. Different type of trade system and different environment. The deficit back then aren't the same as it is today. The chinese didn't use the trade deficit to buy british debt/treasuries/etc. As strange as it sounds, but it's china that's really running a deficit and it should be a warning to us.

It's naive to think we are in the same situation as in the early 1800s. We are not. The roles are reversed. It's china who is in awe of the west. It's china who wants western goods. It's china who wants to come to the west. It's china that's hungry and ambitious. It's china sending people all over the west to trade, learn, etc.

Re: The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

#53

Post by mdiesel »

cygx wrote: post #43
geowwy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think you've got shifting definitions of…

That's not the impression I get from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/byzantine-philosophy/ Quote: There was never in Byzantium anything resembling the autonomous universities of the Latin West. Higher education was designed to train officials of the state and church, not masters of the arts and sciences. edit: I guess that's a reference to later developments, though...

I can only really comment on UK institutions.

The article is talking about between 730 and 1453. Oxf*rd wasn't teaching until 1096, so I think it's fair to say England was behind for at least 300 years. It wouldn't be until the renaissance (after 1450) that you started seeing a break from scholastic teaching and academics like Bacon.

Re: The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

#54

Post by ginko »

austincheney wrote: post #41
Iv wrote: post #3

Does 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…

Continuous civilization only means the defining characteristics of civilization remain unbroken through regime change. Only China and India have had continuous civilization from the ancient to the present. That remains true even though the Yuan dynasty were foreign invaders. Contrast that to the Saxon invasion of Britain or the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs or the gothic conquest of Italy.

What about Persia/Iran? Or Ethiopia.

Re: The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

#55

Post by danieltillett »

tjmc wrote: post #31
danieltillett wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Australian education leaves a lot to be desired.

Why 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.

1. 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.

Re: The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

#56

Post by rsj_hn »

brailsafe wrote: post #40
rsj_hn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those 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, o…

I 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/), a structured society living in caves in Sri Lanka 35,000 years ago (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-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.

Re: The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

#57

Post by usrusr »

haecceity wrote: post #20
bra4you wrote: post #14

"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?…

> Bullshit and Chinese Propaganda with their "5000 years old culture". This is actually propaganda from the US War Department.

Propaganda nonetheless, and this is what makes it interesting. Was ror just a bit of the-enemy-of-my-enemy posturing to make Japan look bad (not much to do there in 1944 America), or were they mentally preparing for a possible intervention in China post VJ? Given the military presence America had on mainland China before the war this must have been a rather natural idea to some.

The linked text is part of a bigger publication, it's linked at the bottom. Scanning through it revealed some juicy "dictator, but a good one" love notes to Chiang Kai-shek.

Re: The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

#58

Post by cygx »

rsj_hn wrote: post #56
brailsafe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 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, o…

I 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/ ), a structured society living in caves in Sri Lanka 35,000…

There is a bit of a case insofar that we have a (limited) form of macro-organization along songlines.

Re: The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

#59

Post by usrusr »

jacobush wrote: post #21
amriksohata wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continuous 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

That's a very fluffy definition. Also "China" was invaded all the time. You could argue that Europe and some kind of continuum over the Middle East / North Africa also preserved a civilization.

That's the entire point I think: Chinese cultural identity is broad enough to consider all those numerous competing kingdoms of its past predecessors in direct line. Contrast this with Europe, where almost everybody has at some point in time claimed succession to the Roman Empire but even something as small as a united Italy is actually a fairly recent invention, with forced language unification and all that.

Egypt, to take an example GP used, had numerous cultures and languages sweep through its geographic location so that modern Egypt has nothing in common with the one 5000 years ago except for the fact that some pyramids are still standing.

Perhaps the secret to perceived Chinese contiuity is (besides considerable geographic isolation) the non-phonetic writing system which should be relatively stable when dialects inevitably diverge when regions shift apart politically for more than a few decades.

Re: The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

#60

Post by cygx »

danieltillett wrote: post #55
tjmc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why 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.

1. 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 culture…

We 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.

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