What is the longest living civilization?

Originally posted by perikles Yes everyone hates Turks. We all understand whos is blind. They are asking you to provide prooves and you just insulting people. Please behave And because i don't know how to search, i mean i always find sites of haters, can you provide a website or a book which is of course objective and you are using as your source. I will appreciate if you do that. Thank you!!!

We keep insulting? Look, the three statements you made about Sel�uks, Tatars and The T�rkish Language are all subjects everyone should know if they do know something. But, guys like you are the ones who are insulting us with your racist, hating vision time after time. It is your racist, hating vision i cant accept, the thruth is obvious.

The turks could also be the oldest. maybe the so called Indo European Aryans from the Steppes were the originators of the turks. That would make the turks the oldest in the world & the most developed. They had similiar otigins, cultures, history, way of life etc..

The So Called Aryans / Indo Eurpeans had similiar nomadic origins as the turks, similiar So Called place of origin in central asia, spread out in similiar fashion etc...

These so  Called Aryans / Indo Eurpeans were also the most developed in their times, hence the statement.

Off course this is just a thought.

They still are the strongest muslim country, despite the hollow nuke rhetoric of pakistan.

The oldest CIVILIAZATION was in mesopotamia in modern day Iraq. These people were of nomadic indo-aryan descent from the steppes of Asia.

oldest or longest surviving civlization is india.

Originally posted by MidEast_Beast How is Hiduism the worlds oldest religion, when Zoroastianism was practiced in Persia before anyone heardof Hinduisim?!

If you define "civilization" as any culture, then I think some obscure Amazonian tribe would be considered the longest living civilization.

The problem with this question though is where would you put the "origin" of a civilization? Is it when they begin to speak the language, adopt the religion or some other event? Aspects of civilization defined as that of a certain civilization have their origins at different time in history. To use India/Hindu civilization as an example, you could argue a "proto-Shiva" was part of the Harappan pantheon and even if that was really the case Hinduism as we recognise it did not come about until thousands of years later. For China, you could say a culture that was recognisably Chinese exists back in the time of the Shang dynasty, but China was not "united" until the Qin, and after that it experienced several periods of disunion. For the Turks, you could trace the origins of the Turkic languages back to X millenium BC, but the Turks as dud pointed out were largely nomadic until c.AD1000. Additionally, if a civilization drastically changed its character (say, adopt a different religion) would it still be considered the same civilization? (for example, Greece, Iran, etc).

It depends on what one means by "civilization". Minoan, Graeco-Roman, and Western civilizations, for example can be seen as either separate civilizations with an ancestor-descendant relationship or as 3 phrases of a single civilization. I prefer the first approach.

Thus, I would have the civilizational timeline of Eurasia as something like this:


**********************Orthodox Christian
**********************/
----Minoan-----Graeco-Roman---Western
********\
Egyptian---Irano-Levantine---------Islamic
********/
--Sumerian---Babylonic---x
********\
********Hittite---x******SE Asian
*********************/
-----Harrapan----------Vedic-------Hindu
*********************\
--------------------Sinic--------East Asian
****************\
****************Japanese

Going by my definition the oldest civilization is the East Asian, which emerged out of the aftermath of the collapse of the Han dynasty and the rise of Mahayana Buddhism.