My Chinese friends and acquaintances say it is the Chinese civilization. When I ask why that happened they say it is because Chinese people are superior.
When I tell them that is racist they laugh at me.
From LiveScience, May 28:
Is the longest-lasting civilization China, ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia? Here's a look at the evidence for each of these enduring cultures.
Ancient Egypt, China and Mesopotamia are all frequently cited as long-lasting civilizations, enduring for thousands of years. But which of these societies lasted the longest?
It turns out, that's not a straightforward question, for a few reasons. First, modern historians and archaeologists don't agree on a single definition of a civilization, including when one begins and when one ends, and many experts are doubtful whether civilizations can be measured in this way.
Second, all great civilizations had periods when they were ruled by "foreigners" — the Hyksos in Egypt, for example — which complicates whether they should be considered continuous civilizations.
Third, the culture near the beginning of a civilization might have been different from the culture near its end. As a result, many modern historians and archaeologists do not consider the idea of "civilization" useful; instead, they talk of "cultures" and "traditions."
The situation was different 100 years ago, when historians and archaeologists were happy to label some cultures as "civilizations." In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was "a complicated acceptance of a hierarchy of human societies," in part to justify European colonial empires, Rowan Flad, an archaeologist at Harvard University, told Live Science.
"There was no difficulty for people who were coming from a European or American standpoint to identify certain traditions and certain cultures as being civilized, and others not," he said.
Is China the longest-lasting civilization?
By most measures — the use of writing, the establishment of cities (what "civilization" originally meant) or continuous traditions — it seems the Chinese civilization may be the longest-lasting. How it should be measured, however, is disputed.
"It depends on how you define civilization and how you define Chinese, because I think there are reasonable multiple ways you can define both of those concepts," said Flad, an expert in the emergence of complex societies in China.
As an example, he highlighted Chinese writing; forms of the same symbols are used today and on the 3,200-year-old Oracle Bones, the earliest examples of writing in China.
"When you think about the [Chinese] written language, there's absolutely no controversy that there's continuity from 3,250 years ago or so to the present," he said.
But the same criterion can't be used elsewhere, Flad said. For example, the earliest writing in the Americas is attributed to the Olmecs in about 900 B.C. Writing was also known to the Maya after about 250 B.C. But the Incas, who ruled parts of South America for about 400 years until the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, seem to have had no writing (although they used knotted cords called quipu or khipu to encode information.)
Ancient and modern China....
....MUCH MORE
Also at LiveScience, a slightly different question:
What's the world's oldest civilization?