Schneider, an expert in China's history, noted that pro-Chinese politicians and historians sometimes claim China's civilization is the world's longest-lasting, as 'a point of legitimacy.' But 'what was Chinese? - that is the problem.' The region encompassed a vast area and many different ethnicities at different times, and what happened in the Chinese heartlands could be 'culturally very far away' than what happened elsewhere, she said. Related: Have any human societies ever lived underground? By one estimate, measuring from the time of the first pharaohs and the use of.

'I don't think that what is happening today in China is closely related to things that happened, say, before 1949 or 1911 ,' Julia Schneider, a conceptual historian at University College Cork in Ireland, told Live Science. Next to China, ancient Egypt and then Mesopotamia are usually considered the longest-lasting civilizations. But some historians see China's present as too different from its past for it to qualify as one continuous civilization. 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 Chinaįog along the Great Wall of China (Image credit: Darrell Gulin via Getty Images)īased on the archaeology of early states in what's now Chinese territory, including Neolithic ruins of the Liangzhu culture in the Yangtze River Delta, it's sometimes claimed that Chinese civilization is over 5,000 years old. Writing was also known to the Maya after about 250 B.C. For example, the earliest writing in the Americas is attributed to the Olmecs in about 900 B.C. 'When you think about the written language, there's absolutely no controversy that there's continuity from 3,250 years ago or so to the present,' he said.īut the same criterion can't be used elsewhere, Flad said. '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.Īs 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.

How it should be measured, however, is disputed.

(Image credit: The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)īy 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. The Agartha Network and the other breakaway ancient civilizations were not alone in establishing refuges in underground locations throughout Earth’s turbulent surface history. This Chinese text may be the oldest known atlas of the human body.

Ancient breakaway civilization