Which is the oldest civilization in the world? What an interesting question, one to which many can risk an answer based on what they know, what they have heard, what they have seen in the media or at school.
Today it is accepted that the oldest civilization in the world It is the Sumerian civilization, but let us learn more about the very concept of civilization and the Sumerians.
Civilization
In principle, let's say that Civilization is any complex society that is characterized by a significant development of urbanization, social stratification, state, and that has symbolic systems of oral and written communication.
Civilizations are organized into densely populated urban settlements, with a division of classes and labor specific, combining urban and agricultural sectors. A civilization has power over the rest of nature and other men. It is often thought that a civilization is synonymous with development, with human groups that are ahead of others, as opposed to, for example, nomadic tribes or more primitive societies.
Finally, the word "civilization" itself comes from the Latin civitas, city, civilis, civil, civilians, citizen.
The oldest civilization in the world
The truth is that since the world began, many civilizations have arisen and fallen, but which was the first?
After giving the matter much thought about thirty years ago an answer was found: the oldest civilization in the world was the Sumerian, the earliest phase of this wonderful culture.
The Sumerian civilization It arose in Mesopotamia, in the rich and fertile region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, today most of Iraq.The name derives from the name of the city of Sumer, formerly located a few kilometers south of the present-day city of Kut, in eastern Iraq.
Archaeologists have found here remains of what is now called the early Sumerian phase of the Uruk period, named after a city, Uruk, located about 80 kilometers to the southwest. If we think of the Sumerian civilization and the very concept of "civilization" that we presented above, then the title is appropriate: It had a writing system, cities, tax systems, irrigation systems for the lands, etc.
Furthermore, after two thousand years The Sumerian civilization led to the Babylonian civilization in the same place, to whom is attributed the discovery of mathematics (prime number, trigonometry, etc.), later developed by the Greeks more than a thousand years later.
The Sumerian religion is rich and lush: the most powerful god of the Sumerian pantheon was the King of Heaven Anu, at first, later Enlil, follows Inanna, the queen of heaven or Ishtar. Today it is said with a fair degree of certainty that some of the stories in the Bible actually come from Sumeria. For example, the story of the Great Flood, which among the Sumerians is told by Utnapishtin and appears in the epic of Gilgamesh, more than 2 thousand years BC
But is there any civilization older than the Sumerian? Many think so, in fact many think so. The Egyptians are contemporaries of the Sumerians, at least in its emergency.
It is a fact that much is known about ancient Egypt, and it has never ceased to be studied or explored, while the political situation in Iraq has never been of much help to archaeologists and other scholars.
That is why there has been a certain change of thought regarding Egypt and it has been brought quite closer to Sumeria, since thanks to these studies, for example, writings as old as the Sumerian ones have been found today, so one could think then that the emergence of the ancient Egyptian civilization almost occurred at the same time as the early phase of the Sumerian civilization: both around 4 thousand BC
On the other hand, there is also the possibility that Indus Valley Civilization, which emerged in parts of what is now Pakistan, northwestern India and Afghanistan, did so at least 3.300 years BC. For now, there may be more finds that take us further back in time.
Early trade on the shores of the Indian Ocean is thought to have helped these early civilizations (Sumerian on the Persian Gulf, Egyptian on the Red Sea, Indus Valley to the east) to develop from a pre-civilized people who lived before them all and who were their source of development.
Until now, at school or even at university, a lot of these civilizations, these parts of the world, are studied, with little mention of Asia. My father and my sister are both history teachers and they tell me that there is very little to no mention of Asia, at least in the compulsory curriculum.
Now, my father studied in the 60s and my sister in the 90s. Today the world is different and luckily universities have opened their points of view, of course, You can't leave China out, can you?
I read in X a Chinese saying that Chinese civilization is the only very ancient civilization that has never ceased to be a civilization since it began.It grew, it developed, but it never collapsed or ceased to exist.
The history of China is ancient, its origins are remote. China has the longest continuous ancient history of any country in the world: 3500 years! And written history!
China already had a civilization similar to that of Europe before the Industrial Revolution, and even superior. Its agriculture was similar, it had irrigation canals, a huge network of canals, superior technology and of course a mastery of ceramics and silk.
And not to mention Writing, the Chinese have known how to use it as a vehicle of civilization and government much more extensively than the Europeans. There is no shortage of Chinese people today who say that a modern Chinese person can read Chinese from 3 years ago, something that neither a Spaniard nor an English person can do. First, because those languages did not exist, but even today we would have a hard time reading medieval Spanish or English, while the Chinese have it easier.
Finally, let us know that the Chinese did not come to China from somewhere else, but are believed to be direct descendants of the first settlers, the prehistoric cavemen who lived in northern China thousands of years ago.
Chinese civilization as we know it first developed along the Yellow River valley, where the land was fertile and easy to work. From here it expanded north, east and south until by the time of Confucius, 500 AD, it had occupied the entire country between the Yangtze River and the Great Wall.
Up to this point, The oldest civilizations in the world. Today, we are writing another chapter in history.