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Isn't that still the case?
Just how old is civilization?
- Thread starter innonimatu
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Boris Gudenuf
Deity
Catal Huyok is just one of many early urban sites that was abandoned almost completely at one time or the other. Early 'cities' no matter what their size, seem to have been pretty fragile, and the first impulse when trouble hit ( drought, plague, raiders - anything that made food production problematical) was to pack up and go back to hunting and gathering.
That makes all the early, neolithic city sites problematic as certain signs of 'civilization' - they were potentially temporary rather than solid bottom rungs on a ladder leading to 'Higher Civilization' (you know, with urban pollution, 'food deserts', Yuppies, Yushies and other signs of Decadence).
The one thing that seems to be an indicator of more resilience and potential permanence in early cities was not so much simple speciation of labor as Hierarchy: the concept that someone other than simply the oldest member of the family or clan could give orders and be obeyed. Sites where all the residences are almost the same size and there are no central communal structures, like Catal Huyok, appear to have been most easily abandoned - everybody just packed up and reverted to group-clan structure and took off. Sites with a central storage/meeting/ceremonial structure or set of structures, and some residences obviously more imposing and 'palatial' and presumably occupied by Important Leaders tend to also be sites that lasted and showed more eventual permanence - like Uruk or some of the neolithic sites in lowland China.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Yes I think it does. Not of our civilization perhaps*, but of civilization, the ability to have civilization. At least that is my main point in remarking it's old.
It's more than a bit of a shame that we still can't understand their script. One reason for me to qualify above with the perhaps. So much has been lost in perishable materials that we cannot rule out our civilization having evolved also from those we now think of as "failed". What if the Indus civilization wrote on some kind of paper and their ideas circulated through trade networks and influenced others? We lost their writings, only have the stones of Egypt and the clay of Summer to read, so mis-attribute stuff to those other civilizations. What if the sumerians didn't ever bake their tablets or store them with combustible materials, what if they only wrote in war? We'd thing Egypt alone was the "cradle" for writing.
We have proto-historic writings that we cannot interpret but seem like inscription, from a number of other places, in stone. For all we are able to know those people may have had their bards who told and retold epics by campfire for thousands of years, passing them down and serving as inspiration to the bards of later "civilization". Weren't the canonical old greek texts started as oral traditions?
One would hope not. That this remains firmly in the realm of fiction!
Does any animal which lives in family groups, trade with stranger groups? I think that was the dawn of civilization.
Absolution
King
Arabs and later European explorers traded with societies that were very much uncivilised and nomadic.
Does it make them civilised?
Ormaybe it doesn't count, because it was initiated by a civilised society?
I assume that some of these societies traded among themselves before the arrival of the more civilised traders, possibly
That really doesn't matter since there clearly already was civilization arriving to the nomads.. Who I would argue are also civilized.
Who were the first trades? Who showed someone else how to make fire? Who then showed a nearby tribe in exchange for goods?
Dawn of trade is dawn of civ for me.
Who were the first trades? Who showed someone else how to make fire? Who then showed a nearby tribe in exchange for goods?
Dawn of trade is dawn of civ for me.
Absolution
King
Then we can be helped by finding a different term to describe what me and the other minimalists here refer to when using the term "civilisation".
According to the maximalist side here - civilisation refers to any society with the slightest complexity - inner tribal politics, trade, building huts.
Then we should find a name to describe these other societies who are settled in the forms of ancient Mesopotamia or China, etc, and onwards. Because there is a clear difference between these two forms of social existance.
I view the semantics of this difference as civilised societies vs uncivilised societies.
If you don't agree with these terms, let's bring up an alternative.
As these differences should not be denied.
According to the maximalist side here - civilisation refers to any society with the slightest complexity - inner tribal politics, trade, building huts.
Then we should find a name to describe these other societies who are settled in the forms of ancient Mesopotamia or China, etc, and onwards. Because there is a clear difference between these two forms of social existance.
I view the semantics of this difference as civilised societies vs uncivilised societies.
If you don't agree with these terms, let's bring up an alternative.
As these differences should not be denied.
Settled and nomadic? I wouldn't regard being settled as proof of civilisation by itself and nomads can be highly organised with complex social hierarchies, organised religion etc.
Agreed.
Absolution
King
Maybe also something to indicate urbanisation.
The Gauls and the Pueblo were settled people generally speaking.
But the Romans and the Tarascans were civilised according to most people.
I think being "civilized" is just relative, the dawn of civilization is a very different thing.
By about 7500 BCE, communities in Mesopotamia were using small clay tokens to keep track goods. The tokens were their way of counting plants and animal production before abstract counting was known. The tokens were a form of concrete counting. As this use of tokens grew more complex over time, it led to the inventio of more advanced accounting and then writing cuneiform.
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/tokens/
Concrete counting – One to one correspondence. A token that represents “one jar of oil” or “one measure of grain” illustrates this concept. In modern society “twins” and “quartet” are examples of modern concrete counting.
I want to make a pun about clay being prehistoric concrete.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Civilization started at least 31000 years ago? When mankind provably first cared for the handicapped in the group?
Zardnaar
Deity
CaffeineJunkie
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5783 years old, according to the Hebrew calendar. 
But seriously...
Humans cracked the secrets of irrigation and pottery around 6,000 BC.
The "Ubaid period" of Sumer began around 5,500 BC.
The Sumerian city of Uruk appeared around 5,000 BC.
The oldest known copper object produced by lost-wax casting dates from around 4,000 BC
Writing first appeared shortly before 3,000 BC. This was also when the upper and lower kingdoms of Egypt were unified, and it's when the Indus River Valley civilization first appeared.
But seriously...
Humans cracked the secrets of irrigation and pottery around 6,000 BC.
The "Ubaid period" of Sumer began around 5,500 BC.
The Sumerian city of Uruk appeared around 5,000 BC.
The oldest known copper object produced by lost-wax casting dates from around 4,000 BC
Writing first appeared shortly before 3,000 BC. This was also when the upper and lower kingdoms of Egypt were unified, and it's when the Indus River Valley civilization first appeared.
Henri Christophe
L'empereur
You can't be more wrong, Civilization didn't began on Greece and the greeks mathematicians (as Thales you said) travel to Egypt in order to learn Maths.
I don't know who is older, Egypt os Sumerians. But since Sumerians was just a bunch of city states (as Greece) and Egypt was the first unified country on the world. Uniting the lower and high Egype around 3200 ac.
If we consider the birth of civilization on Egypt on 3200 ac. so human civilizations are 5200 years old.
Certainly, civilization predates ancient Greece by a few thousand years. Sumerian city states had invented writing by about 3200 BCE and are considered the earliest civilization. Shang Dynasty China was more advanced than their Mycenean Greek counterparts (1750 to 1050 BCE). Even after Greece emerged from its Dark age (~700 BCE) Egypt was many steps ahead of the Greek world. If you compare the Minoan culture prior to the eruption of Thera (between 1650 and 1550 BCE), the Greeks look primitive.
It was meant as joking
Though if you present the view that ancient Greek mathematicians just stole stuff from Egypt etc, now that is wrong. It took the 18th century for maths to provide more discoveries than it did in the greek and hellenistic period, and then explode in the 19th century.
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