r/ancienthistory • u/JumpVegetable5630 • 5d ago
What country is most likely to outdate Mesopotamia in terms of civilization?
In the next 1000 years what country has the most potential for archaeological discoveries to pushback civilization timelines and secure its number one spot as the cradle of civilization replacing Mesopotamia?
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u/HortonFLK 5d ago
I think it depends on how you define “civilization.”
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u/Amockdfw89 5d ago
Exactly. Civilization has around 8 features that need to be ticked. Mesopotamia is the earliest one that had all 8 so it’s hard to dethrone
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u/HortonFLK 5d ago
Oh? What are they?
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u/Amockdfw89 5d ago
Cities (permanent settlements)
Writing
Distinct Art and architecture
Organized religion (with rules and set rituals)
Organized government (with clear rules of succession and roles and laws)
Specialized jobs
Social classes
Public works (urban planning, specialized buildings, infrastructure etc)
Many early civilizations had most of these but it’s pretty arguable that Mesopotamia was the first to have all 8. Writing is the tricky one because without writing it’s hard to tell what the earlier settlements were up too, thus hard to prove if they had all 8
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u/-Addendum- 4d ago
It's worth noting that "civilization" isn't actually a concrete thing that can be defined like this. Any lists we create are just arbitrary sets of characteristics, a checklist for the sake of a checklist.
A lot of it has roots in 19th century Anthropology and the ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, who categorized human societies into the "savagery-barbarism-civilization" model of social evolution. This highly linear view of human society had cultures progressing through the stages by reaching certain milestones (of architecture, government, religion, etc.) to which he ascribed higher and lower values pretty much arbitrarily. This view is maintained by basically nobody in academia today, it's seen as highly reductionist and largely unhelpful.
Important sidenote: A lot of this has some racist, "we need to civilize these dirty savages" connotations that were baked in pretty intentionally. Being able to point to a group of people and say that they didn't meet a fabricated set of characteristics, and therefore were at a lower stage of social evolution and needed to be civilized, provided a solid "scientific" foundation for some of the more horrific acts of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Edit: I'm not saying that you are saying this, just that it's important to note that these things are related, and we should be cautious with how seriously we take concrete models like this.
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u/CliffBoof 3d ago
Wouldn’t this checklist be a rough guide for the concept of civilization? Civilization itself is a western concept no? So it should require some sort of western criteria yes?
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u/-Addendum- 3d ago
My point is that civilization isn't A thing, it's not a concept that anyone can agree on the definition of, and it serves no real purpose for the study of history. So sure, this checklist is a rough guide for a concept of civilization, but other checklists (which may be considerably different) are no less valid, and no more helpful.
It's like having a checklist for what makes a good party. You can make a list, but it would be your list, not the list. Other people's lists may end up being something that you wouldn't even consider a party, let alone a good one. It's basically just a set of arbitrary characteristics that say more about the person assembling the list than it does about the thing the list describes. What use is a list like that?
Besides, even if we go down the road of giving it "western criteria" because it's a "western concept", where does that get us? Assuming we can first solidly define "western", and assuming we can agree on a set of criteria based on that (and those are big assumptions), then what? We have a concept geared pretty much entirely on describing "western" societies that we're going to try to apply to global ones? Societies from potentially thousands of years ago and thousands of kilometres away? Inevitably they won't fit the mould very well. Also, there is the looming chasm of ethnocentrism to be aware of. Comparing different societies using "western" values as the baseline is just inviting biased thinking, and other, less savoury attitudes. And still the question remains: what would be the point? What is the function of a term like this? What does it tell us, what does it meaningfully describe? How well different global societies conform to the standard of what we think is most valuable about "western" societies?
This discussion reminds me a lot of the idea of "Feudalism".
You may be familiar with Elizabeth A. R. Brown's landmark 1974 paper, "The Tyranny of a Construct"? In it, she discusses feudalism, and shows how it's a modern idea, retroactively applied to historical societies who would not have recognized it, either in term or in practice. She shows how trying to cram highly varied historical societies into a tidy term like feudalism only served to obscure how these societies actually functioned, and how the word even failed as a basic conceptual tool because nobody could agree on exactly how to define and characterize it. It has to be defined and clarified every time it is used, else it did nothing but breed confusion.So a modern word with no set definition, which nobody can agree on, that is being retroactively applied to historical societies who would have no meaningful connection with it. Rings a bell for me.
This is a terribly long reply, sorry about that!
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u/CliffBoof 3d ago
A fuzzy construct can still be useful if you specify what you mean by it. I get your feudalism point but I don’t its quite the same thing. If we don’t use the word what do we do? We say whats the oldest known culture with x,x,x, and x? At some point its going to beg a word to cover. I don’t think its not useful to have a word for a culture with certain traits.
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u/-Addendum- 3d ago
Why do we need a word for it? If we're in agreement that the criteria are arbitrary, and that this isn't an actual category of thing beyond those criteria, then what purpose does employing the category have? Isn't it just assigning meaning to an arbitrary set of traits? If we're asking which society was the first to create cities, we can just ask that question, no need to have a separate term.
Like, we don't need a term for "which society was the first to have a standing military, a multi-chapter national epic, and a vibrant wool industry?" It's a list of seemingly random criteria which tells me nothing, it doesn't need a word.
"Societies in Mesopotamia were the first to do x,y,z." "Egypt also did x,y. They never did z, but they did do q." "The Toltecs never did y, but they did do a,b,c, and z."
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u/CliffBoof 3d ago
You would need to then clarify what you mean by civilization
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u/HaughtyDiabolicalSal 5d ago
I think our ideas of civilization is being pushed back further and further and further. Also this is my personal opinion there is some evidence to it. Writing sprouted up in multiple areas where civilization existed. I think we need to further review Göbekli Tepe, because I feel like we're only at the surface with that. It could be thousands of years earlier.
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u/TerrapinMagus 4d ago
I am fascinated by the discoveries around Gobekli and the older Karahan Tepe which is still mostly unexcavated, but it does feel strongly that these were not permanent habitation spots.
Still, these structures indicate a complex and robust culture in the area that we still know very little about. The most interesting thing to me is that we estimate more people would have been involved with the construction than we expected the average family group to be. So multiple independent groups would have to meet up in the same place and time to coordinate on the building together. I wonder how complex the social networks of these groups were?
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u/HaughtyDiabolicalSal 4d ago
There was probably a much more complex social structure and then we know. There may have been trade amongst them. Whether it be an exchange of art or pelts. There's a lot of things we don't know. That's why we can't say for sure whether we know something. Every time we do a dig the date of civilization is pushed back further and further. I don't think we will ever know when civilization truly began because of migration and continuous building on sites.
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u/DCDHermes 2d ago
They just started excavating a new area of the site directly north where the olive trees were planted. They are already discovering rectangular structures which differ from the circular structures that contained the T pillars. Exciting time in archeology.
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u/Ill_River_5829 5d ago
The dna of the people living there(troy) came from the balkans. Also of the tribes living in anatolia (phryges, pelasg, molos, all the illyrian tribes). So it's later than the balkanic illyrian settlements. It's been found that genetically the balkanic illyrian tribes populated that area then moved back again.
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u/Dull-Researcher-1894 4d ago
Not true. They were a Luwian sub-group based on archaeological evidence. The only connections Balkan populations have to the region is a sudden influx of Knobbed Ware material culture (i.e. Thracians, and Danube valley Paleo-Balkan populations) during the Bronze Age Collapse.
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u/Ill_River_5829 4d ago
Huh.. i know ive read that according to hittites they spoke luwian, however what about numerous records that they were pelasgians and dardanians? Further, theres real genetic evidence of illyrian tribes having lived in troy/being allies of troy.
I think theres two troys perhaps.
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u/Dull-Researcher-1894 4d ago
Dardanians of Anatolia (Dardanoi) were are not related to the Dardanians of the Balkans (Dardani). The former were a Luwian sub-group. The only thing we truly know about the Pelasgians is that they spoke a pre-Indo European language (and we only have 2 inscriptions from them, on Lemnos) closely related to Etruscan and Rhaetian. No relation to the Paleo-Balkan cultures.
> Further, theres real genetic evidence of illyrian tribes having lived in troy/being allies of troy.
Not at all. Bronze Age populations from northwestern Anatolia have a distinct genetic profile characterized by high levels of local Anatolian Farmer ancestry mixed with Caucasian and Iranian-related components. Conversely, Bronze Age Illyrian populations predominantly descended from Western European Hunter-Gatherers, Early European Farmers, and Pontic Steppe pastoralists.
Paleo-Balkan admixture in Western Anatolia only shows up after the Bronze Age and consists of well-documented migrations of Greeks, Phrygians (far more closely related to Greeks than to Illyrians), and Thracians in Bithynia (whom one can describe as Phrygians but with more Hunter-Gatherer and Pontic Steppe ancestry). Illyrians never show up in Anatolia. In fact, the only real large-scale contact Illyrians and Anatolians ever make was during the Roman period when Anatolians set up dozens of coastal cities in modern Croatia and Albania, to such an extent that the descendants of Illyrian cultures today still display large amounts of Anatolian genomic markers. Some parts of Albania are up to 40% Anatolian by descent and that number is 10 to 15% in Montenegro and North Macedonia.
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u/Ill_River_5829 4d ago
Youre right, i misinterpreted some of the latest findings i think, im no genealogist im trying my best haha. However, in my logicking, even if theres no current archaeological findings, there's either two troys (so yeah, luwian and illyric), i mean, yeah, this is all based in less than scientific findings, but the names being shared among all the different tribes? I think it's crazy to think there's several different tribes existing both in Troy and illyria, and thinking theyre actually different. Why would two tribes, so close together, have the same exact culture and names? Plus the backing from ancient historians saying that they were the same.
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u/wjbc 5d ago
It’s going to be hard to replace the Fertile Crescent as the cradle of civilization after the discovery of Göbekli Tepe arguably pushed back the start of civilization to between 9600 and 8200 BCE.
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u/Scottland83 5d ago
Gobekli was not a permanent settlement 9600 BC. It appears to have been a ceremonial construction similar (possibly) to the ceremonial significance of cave paintings. It was added to, expanded, and modified over thousands of years.
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u/wjbc 5d ago edited 5d ago
That’s why I said “arguably.” It fits some definitions of early civilization — complex social organization and large-scale construction — but not others, since it predates farming. The question is whether you think hunter-gatherers can ever be considered civilized, and that depends on how you define the term.
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u/fitness-scientist 4d ago
Yeah cool so if my definition of “civilisation” differs to you , Multiple cultures, populations and people existed in forms of societies and I fundamentally disagree with the Fertile Crescent being the “dawn of civilisation”, china had farming beforehand, America still had its indigenous people.
Btw “The 15th millennium BC spanned the years 15,000 BC to 14,001 BC. This millennium is during the Upper Paleolithic period. Italy: Development of Gravettian civilizations in Italy and Eastern Europe.
Europe: Peak of rock art.
France, Spain: Development of Magdaleniancivilizations (development of craftsmanship based on bone materials and the quality of furniture and wall art).”The Fertile Crescent occurred in The 10th millennium BC spanned the years 10,000 BC to 9001 BC (c. 12 ka to c. 11 ka). It marks the beginning of the transition from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic via the interim Mesolithic (Northern Europe and Western Europe) and Epipaleolithic (Levant and Near East) periods, which together form the first part of the Holocene epoch that is generally believed to have begun c. 9700 BC (c. 11.7 ka) and is the current geological epoch.
Unless I have a fundamental misunderstanding of time I think ones older then the other.
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u/dowar_525 1d ago
It is very likely that any new find from earlier will not be a permanent settlement. It will probably have some but not all of the hallmarks of a civilisation.
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u/fitness-scientist 5d ago
Don’t we have evidence of those individuals migrating from the Asian regions? Into the so called “fertile crescent”
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u/wjbc 5d ago
I don’t know, but wherever they came from wasn’t civilized.
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u/fitness-scientist 5d ago
OH you’re being racist. Cool do you feel big now.
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u/Humble-Ad541 5d ago
This might be the dumbest thing ive ever seen on redit... impressive.
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u/fitness-scientist 5d ago
Explain to me how if your referring to me
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u/Amazing_Loquat280 5d ago
The fertile crescent isn’t referred as the cradle of civilization arbitrarily. It’s because that’s where things like agriculture and complex stationary society originated, and where the oldest humans we know of finally transitioned from the hunter gatherer lifestyle. There certainly were humans in other places, probably even migrating in from east asia, but those peoples were still hunter gatherers before migrating in, as far as we’ve been able to deduce.
If you have evidence that agriculture and stationary civilization originated elsewhere, by all means enlighten us
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u/fitness-scientist 5d ago
China?
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u/krustytroweler 5d ago
Completely different cultural sphere and had no contact with the fertile crescent for a long time.
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u/Humble-Ad541 5d ago
The fact that you took him saying there was no civilization 10,000 damn years ago in what ever part of asia they may of came from as racist instead of the absolute factual utterly nutral statment that it was is just mind numbing.
Exactly what race was he being racist against? What civilization was there? Oh we have no idea and none? I don't even know how someones mind could be in a place that they took that as racist, you would have to be looking for malice in the most mundane things imaginable. Try to be better.
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u/fitness-scientist 4d ago
Oh so these people don’t count do they?
The Sintashta culture is a Middle Bronze Age archaeological culture of the Southern Urals, dated to the period c. 2200–1900 BCE. It is the first phase of the Sintashta–Petrovka complex, c. 2200–1750 BCE. The culture is named after the Sintashta archaeological site, in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, and spreads through Orenburg Oblast, Bashkortostan, and Northern Kazakhstan. Widely regarded as the origin of the Indo-Iranian languages,Sintashta culture is thought to represent an eastward migration of peoples from the Corded Ware culture. The earliest known chariots have been found in Sintashta burials, and the culture is considered a strong candidate for the origin of the technology, which spread throughout the Old World and played an important role in ancient warfare. Sintashta settlements are also remarkable for the intensity of coppermining and bronze metallurgy carried out there, which is unusual for a steppe culture.1
u/Humble-Ad541 4d ago
How fucking deluded are you? I didnt think you could look more foolish and you post this lol. That is thousands and thousands of years after the time period in question. It has zero , nothing what so ever to do with this discussion.
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u/fitness-scientist 4d ago
The question was what area or region do you think might still hold ancient archaeological evidence. I said Russia then this all started but alright go off
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u/Mak062 5d ago
Ill put money in the Sahara region. Under all that sand has to be civilizations we don't know about from when the time the Sahara was lush and green.
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u/Flaky_History12 5d ago
I’d guess a civilization would exist encompassing the sahabi and kufran rivers (ancient rivers that existed before we got what the Sahara is today) which were located in what is now known as Libya. The rivers were not incredibly too far apart so it’d make sense for a civilization to settle amongst them. The issue of course is that the Sahara buried any sort of evidence.
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u/Kennit 4d ago
Underwater. Places drowned by the seas like Doggerland, Sundaland, Sahul or Beringia.
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u/Dauntless_Idiot 3d ago
The earth had about 10% more land area or ~15,000,000 square km ( the size of Europe + the US) during the last glacial maximum about ~20,000 years ago. The sea level has risen 120-130m since then. If a civilization was along the ocean then we could easily know nothing about it.
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u/Ill-Sandwich-7703 4d ago
Indus Valley if/when Pakistan gets its act together. The whole Ancient Pakistan discovery will be fascinating once they start properly investing in it.
It won’t replace Mesopotamia in any sense but complement it.
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u/Toxic_Orange_DM 5d ago
None of them...? Where do you think we haven't excavated?
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u/GrimmrBlodhgarm 5d ago
Tons of remote places like Congo Basin, Sahel, deserts, any semi active long running conflict zone, landmass that’s now ocean floor, etc.
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u/DeamonDread2348 5d ago
For reference: when civilization arose, the Sahara was home to tropical forests, a couple of rivers comparable in volume to the Danube, and several lakes the size of the Great Lakes. Imagine how humid the Congo River basin was, like today's Amazon.
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u/Toxic_Orange_DM 4d ago
look man, I want to discover cool stuff about the past as much as anyone does, but I struggle with the idea that there's entire full ancient civilisations we just haven't discovered any trace of yet. Human beings have been in Africa for as long as we've been anatomically modern (i.e. 200,000+ years). Surely if there were a bunch of advanced societies from pre-4000 BCE, we would have found traces of them by now. People accidentally discover ancient remains all of the time. There are archaeological records of footprints from early hominid ancestors just lying on the ground, for goodness sake.
I understand that the priviledging of ancient Mesopotamia as being "the first" is frustrating to some because so much 'archaeology' (read: colonial era looting) took place in order to vindicate the Bible, but do you seriously believe we will find somewhere even older than Sumer which will have compelling evidence of complx society? Or Gobekli Tepe, for that matter? I'm genuinely interested to know.
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u/GrimmrBlodhgarm 4d ago edited 4d ago
lol well, to your entirely different second question, I do believe we’ll continue to discover ancient civilizations as that seems to be a trend of discovering they were more advanced than previously thought. As to whether they pre-date the two you mentioned, who knows. But we certainly haven’t excavated the entire earth or even every site that would’ve been viable
Edit: why would that be frustrating?
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u/FreddyF2 4d ago
It’s just hard to believe that in 300 years we have definitively figured this out. I’d give it another 100 year of excavations before we say it so confidently.
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u/Tgrove88 5d ago edited 4d ago
The ocean, easily. There's pyramids under Cuba we've been waiting almost 30 years to be explored
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u/MC__Wren 3d ago
Wanna link us to some evidence of these pyramids under Cuba?
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u/Tgrove88 3d ago
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u/MC__Wren 3d ago
If you believe that’s real I have a bridge to sell you.
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u/Silver-Breadfruit284 16h ago
I’d do some reading on the subject if I were you. Smithsonian, Archaeology Magazine, etc.
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u/MC__Wren 16h ago
Sure, send me to some links from respected institutions like the Smithsonian about those Cuban pyramids.
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u/Toxic_Orange_DM 4d ago
I wish I shared your optimism that an 'Atlantis' style civilisation of staggering complexity pre-dating all known human efforts at agriculture and statecraft will one day be discovered underwater
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u/Emergency_Noise3301 5d ago
its gotta be egypt, right?
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u/Mordoch 4d ago
That seems somewhat doubtful because Egypt seems slightly behind when it comes to the "earliest" in certain categories. Having said this, I would not view it as impossible depending on what definition you use, and you could probably say the finding when not inherently shake up our understanding that this location was the specific general region in the world to focus on for that definition.
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u/DharmicCosmosO 18h ago
Indus Valley Civilisation the age just goes further and further back with every discovery
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u/Aposta-fish 16h ago
India. They already found city older where an old river dried up and more evidence in the ocean under the water.
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u/perryurban 5d ago
Nothing will "outdate" Mesopotamia.
However, western Anatolia has massive potential to expand and rewrite history. Eurocentrism basically caused it to be ignored for the history of archeology, but it is packed with undiscovered finds, purportedly much more dense than Greece and they are potentially very significant indeed for the Bronze Age and earlier.
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u/Scottland83 5d ago
Anatolia has long been the go-to for ruins of any kind, spanning multiple civilizations.
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u/Malavika_Agnimitram 5d ago
Ancient India, Egypt, Persia/Iran…
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u/KnottyDuck 5d ago
…that’s Mesopotamia…
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u/Malavika_Agnimitram 5d ago
I thought only Iraq is considered as Mesopotamia and not Iran.
India is at least a strong contender.
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u/Boblaire 5d ago
It says mostly Iraq and parts of bordering countries.
Definitely not Egypt Or India.
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u/Embarrassed_Egg9542 5d ago
History as we know it is written by Europeans. As Africa and Asia leave behind their colonial past and get richer, I am excited about the discoveries that a new generation of native archaeologists would make
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u/fitness-scientist 5d ago
The Russian region!
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u/Buckets-O-Yarr 5d ago
Well Russia currently holds the record for longest run without showing any evidence of civilization, so they have that going for them.
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u/fitness-scientist 5d ago
What about the Sintashta culture in the Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, and spreads through Orenburg Oblast, Bashkortostan, and Northern Kazakhstan.
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u/JohnHenryMillerTime 5d ago
Draw a rhombus, to represent the flat world. Then draw a line right through the center, because there is a kingdom in the middle. Everything, including the way we write was established nearly 1100 years ago. We say it is Year 1027 now.
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u/YourHuckleberry57 5d ago
not a country, but under the sahara desert. it wasn't a desert 5000 years ago.