Many people look at Ancient Egypt and Sumer as the beginnings of civilization and rarely think about what came before. How many settlements or large scale constructions do you know that pre-date Egypt and Sumer?

cormac

I give up. How many?

Pre-flood civilization...

...I always wonder.

Baalbek?

aren't the egyptians and sumerians regular little chatterboxes on the subject?

you know what was where when cormac mac ats. logically where should we look? whats going on there? has anyone every done that [looked i mean]?

I'm not sure how justified that statement is. Some people think about it. Professionally. There's plenty of investigation into Pre-Dynastic Egypt and the Ubaid/Uruk periods that predate Ancient Sumerian civilisation. I might have to invoke Jaylemurph's law that "Just because you don't know about it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist." There's plenty of investigation in other, earlier places as well:

Catal Hyuck and Jericho are both urban centres that both date back further than Egypt and Sumer, and sort of prove (as many seem to insist) that civilisation developed magically overnight.

--Jaylemurph

That's just it.

If you were to ask the average person on the street what came before Ancient Egypt or Sumer, chances are they wouldn't have a clue. History for them seems to start with those two areas. There is so much more to our history than that.

cormac

I would call it pre-history. History started with written records.

Technically, you're right. But you get what I'm saying, I think?

cormac

I do...but given our forum, next we would have somebody claiming that history stated 23.000 BC because somebody was capable of building a wall around a village. So better to clarify now.

Don't forget Malta http://www.art-and-archaeology.com/malta/malta.html

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/132/

Surely you mean "a super-advanced being using alien technology built a wall around a village".

But good call on naming Malta, red hen.

--Jaylemurph

with sticks and stones...as usual you are so right....

Ya coz like they used their anti gravity rays to lift the big stones....and learned the stupid humans math so that they could perfectly align them to the dog star, and also tolded them the secret properties of the wood that they used so that it could channel the earths energies into the buildings so that they could use it to make pies for the 'canids' (aliens from the dog-star if youz didnt knowd).
well thats my theory, theres no scientific evidence to prove me wrong.

here's the link to the website that will explain it all to you skeptics, but you probly wont get it coz your too closed minded.

http://OnebornEveryMinute.com/AlienVisitors/dogpeepl/html

I think about this question of what came before all the stuff we attribute to Egypt and Sumer constantly. I look about and I see examples of genetic engineering everywhere. Who did that work? I wrote a little book about what took place 4 million years ago called The Enigmni. I have written hundreds of papers such as The Secret of the Zebra that is on this site. Most of what I have written comes from my imagination but I always wonder about the Jomon of Japan and the Vedic Traditions of ancient India and then there is China. Russia has many ancient sites that hardly ever get expressed. Of course my favorite is Mars and the Exploded Planet. The concept of the universe being Holographic is also something I dwell upon considering the concept of us being only information that is localized by DNA programs. It seems that everything is alive and I have often wondered if I have always existed in differing forms. After all we are entities occupying forms in a physical environment...called Time/Space. Are we a projection and has this thing we ride always existed? Always is a concept that few of us approach...but what if Always is the base of this experience.

Cheers,
Orion

Lets start analizing the simple stuff:
They had some knowledge or maths, at least i would hope they did.
Egypt is in the desert so they wanted to build big and they did.
They believed in Gods, surely they had reasons for why they started, I recently read an account of a classis alien abduction except the alien claimed to be a messenger from god.

Werent there conspiricies aboue roads being hundreds of meters long, although they had no use back then, aliens?
What did they use to pile the stone blocks up?

seems like almost everyone dug a "hole"


looks like a magic shovel

lol that is a funny image. the king, or divinity, who sort of looks like bin laden, asking the guy with a shovel to dig a whole this big, and the guy's head spins...

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead they speak of a time Sep Tepy and a civilization where the Gods walked with Mankind.
There was Atlantis, well maybe . . . go away Agent. Mulder!!

apparently it was a big hole. there are no reports of what ptah said but yima was not pleased. i think the little tiny navvy on that shovel is not enthusiastic..

Doesn't the indus valley civilisation predate that of the ancient egyptians and the sumerians?

The Mesopotamian civilization is considered the first and oldest established civilization in the world. Civilization simply means the development of agriculture and urbanization. Without those two components there is no civilization.

The oldest known ceramic is the Venus of Dolni Vestonice as well as other figurines found alongside in the same area. That dates back 29000-25000 BCE. It was found in what is now the Czech Republic.

With this simplification then Catalhoyuk (7500 BCE ) pre-dates Mesopotamia ( 5000 BCE ) making it an earlier civilisation.

...ermmm...


Ancient painting of Nuwa and Fuxi(First woman and man as Serpent Beings)


Neolithic


List of Neolithic cultures of China


Dated English name Chinese name Modern-day location
7500 BCE – 6100 BCE Pengtoushan culture 彭頭山文化 central Yangtze River region in northwestern Hunan
7000 BCE – 5000 BCE Peiligang culture 裴李崗文化 Yiluo River valley in Henan
6500 BCE – 5500 BCE Houli culture 后李文化 Shandong
6200 BCE – 5400 BCE Xinglongwa culture 興隆洼文化 Inner Mongolia-Liaoning border
6000 BCE – 5500 BCE Cishan culture 磁山文化 southern Hebei
5800 BCE – 5400 BCE Dadiwan culture 大地灣文化 Gansu and western Shaanxi
5500 BCE – 4800 BCE Xinle culture 新樂文化 lower Liao River on the Liaodong Peninsula
5400 BCE – 4500 BCE Zhaobaogou culture 趙宝溝文化 Luan River valley in Inner Mongolia and northern Hebei
5300 BCE – 4100 BCE Beixin culture 北辛文化 Shandong
5000 BCE – 4500 BCE Hemudu culture 河姆渡文化 Yuyao and Zhoushan, Zhejiang
5000 BCE – 3000 BCE Daxi culture 大溪文化 Three Gorges region
5000 BCE – 3000 BCE Majiabang culture 馬家浜文化 Taihu Lake area and north of Hangzhou Bay
5000 BCE – 3000 BCE Yangshao culture 仰韶文化 Henan, Shaanxi, and Shanxi
4700 BCE – 2900 BCE Hongshan culture 紅山文化 Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, and Hebei
4100 BCE – 2600 BCE Dawenkou culture 大汶口文化 Shandong, Anhui, Henan, and Jiangsu
3400 BCE – 2250 BCE Liangzhu culture 良渚文化 Yangtze River Delta
3100 BCE – 2700 BCE Majiayao culture 馬家窯文化 upper Yellow River region in Gansu and Qinghai
3100 BCE – 2700 BCE Qujialing culture 屈家嶺文化 middle Yangtze River region in Hubei and Hunan
3000 BCE – 2000 BCE Longshan culture 龍山文化 central and lower Yellow River
2800 BCE – 2000 BCE Baodun culture 寶墩文化 Chengdu Plain
2500 BCE – 2000 BCE Shijiahe culture 石家河文化 middle Yangtze River region in Hubei
2100 BCE – 1500 BCE Erlitou culture 二里頭文化 Yanshi, Henan Province



The Neolithic age in China can be traced back as early as 10,000 BC[5] Early evidence for proto-Chinese millet agriculture is carbon-dated to about 7,000 BC.[6] The Peiligang culture of Xinzheng county, Henan was excavated in 1977.[7] With agriculture came increased population, the ability to store and redistribute crops, and to support specialist craftsmen and administrators.[8] In late Neolithic times, the Yellow River valley began to establish itself as a cultural center, where the first villages were founded; the most archaeologically significant of those was found at Banpo, Xi'an.[9] The Yellow River was so named because of the loess that would build up on the bank and down in the earth then it would sink creating a yellowish tint to the water.[10]

The early history of China is complicated by the lack of a written language during this period coupled with the existence of documents from later time periods attempting to describe events that occurred several centuries before. The problem in some sense stems from centuries of introspection on the part of the Chinese people which has blurred the distinction between fact and fiction in regards to this early history. By 7000 BC, the Chinese were farming millet, giving rise to the Jiahu culture. At Damaidi in Ningxia, 3,172 cliff carvings dating to 6,000-5,000 BC have been discovered "featuring 8,453 individual characters such as the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing." These pictographs are reputed to be similar to the earliest characters confirmed to be written Chinese.[11][12] Later Yangshao culture was superseded by the Longshan culture around 2500 BC.

Here's the LINK of ancient china history

Woven clothing dates back 27,000 years

Evidence that hunter-gatherers wore woven clothing, and used baskets, nets and other loom-made textiles some 27,000 years ago has been found in central and western Europe.

The evidence, found by Olga Soffer of the University of Illinois, consists of textile impressions on about 90 fragments of clay from a number of well-dated sites in the Czech Republic, including Dolni Vestonice and Tavlov. The impressions represent by far the world's oldest evidence of weaving yet found. Previously, it was thought weaving was invented by the first settled farmers only 10,000-5,000 years ago.

Detailed examination of the impressions has revealed a huge variety of fine weaving techniques, including open and closed twines and plain weave, basketry and nets. According to Dr Soffer, twining can be done by hand but plain weave requires a loom.

Some of the impressions may have been created accidentally - for example, by sitting on a freshly-laid clay floor, or leaning against a wet wattle-and-daub wall. Wet clay may also have been carried in bags. `Other impressions may have been caused by deliberate action, such as lining a basket with clay to make it airtight,' Dr Soffer said.

Following the clay-impression discoveries, a number of contemporary `Venus' figurines were examined from sites across central and western Europe. Many were found to be wearing clothing including basket hats and caps, bandeaus - straps of cloth wrapped around the body above the breast - and belts worn at the waist or low-slung on the hips, some with string skirts attached. `These figurines have been studied for decades but no-one has paid any attention before to the clothing,' Dr Soffer said.

britarch

Great info on the woven clothing.

As for Malta, which I find interesting to the extreme, what is noticeable there is the ancient structures are all temples and religious buildings, there appears to be no evidence of residences, which doesn't really qualify it for an ancient civilisation. This is turn adds interest to the cart tracks for me. The island of Malta appears to be a place people travelled to to practice religion, not actually live at, making it a realm comparable to maybe Mt Olympus where no residences are only temples, it was only a place to go to worship. The cart tracks in Malta I believe were comparable to a magnetized monorail system that took passengers back and forth to the temple island, since it would obviously be too far to walk to. I've been thinking about the Cart Ruts for a while now, does anyone have a better explanation for them?

Mmmmm i'm fairly sure the indus valley civilisation dates to 6000 bc.

No. The Indus Valley civilisation dates back to about 3000 BCE, 2,000 years /after/ the rise of Sumer and two centuries after Dynastic Egypt.

--Jaylemurph

Sumer is the oldest known civilization, if you go by the definition of "civilization" used by Anthropology.

All that blather about the Chinese is rather tiresone.

The Jomon culture was creating fired pottery around 15,000 BCE.

Clovis' example of the Venus of Dolni Vestonice is the earliest example I know of of fired ceramic artwork. But the Jomon made the first utilitarian ceramics, as far as we know. This means pots, urns, etc. that are created for a particular purpose.

I'd pick them for the earliest civilization, if we are going to throw the generally agreed-upon definition completely out the window.

Harte

Hmmm, probably smaller agricultural settlements and portable hunter gatherer settlements. But I'm a newbie and might be missing the point.

It is not clear if Catolhoyuk was horticultural or proto-agricultural. There is no proof it had fully developed agriculture so it does not classify as civilization. There are signs of crops but they fall into the horticultural definition. Agriculture requires more developed methods such as irrigation, crop rotation, devoting large swaths of land to one particular crop, instead of mixed-farming in small plots which would be horticultural. There are also signs they were hunters if we go by the murals depicting aurochs and other animals. Catolhoyuk also has no evidence of public buildings and only had domestic quarters as well as some open spaces whose purpose, religious or just communal gathering places, have not been determined. Civilization requires greater stratification which is part of the definition of urbanization. Urbanization requires government and public buildings which Catalhoyuk as most neolithic societies were more egalitarian.

Interesting time line regarding China Rebelle. China did develop agriculture independently and its grand history is one of farming. Though it might not have fully achieved agricultural techniques until the Spring and Autumn period in the 1st century BCE. I might be mistaken. Either way that does not mean civilization had been developed and today the village mentality in China persists even as new mega-cities are now being developed but this is mostly recent in their history.

The Xia Dynasty is the first in China and began in 2100 BCE. Though this is as you have stated part fact and part legend. The Shang was highly feudalistic. Not until the Qin Dynasty in 221 BCE did the formation of the state as an entity become developed in China.

I agree with Weareallsuckers in that was an interesting post shemTov. Clothing and fashion are interesting topics. It reminds me of the Celtic patterns found in the Xinjiang region of China.

But King Ashbinapal stated that he could read the writings that existed before the flood. Given that statement, we can easily assume that civilizations with writing skills did exist. While I agree basically with your comment, we must consider that any written record prior to the flood would have been destroyed but that does not exempt the possibility of well advanced civilizations from that pre-flood era.

Right, and Gilgamesh claimed to have reached the hauntings of the immortals in India...pleezze

There are many structures that correspond to pre-history, and there are many civilizations that have no prior history that just sprung up and built their own civilization.

So we are to compare the statements of a king with the mythology of many centuries before him? If that is the case, we can put the Psalms in the wastebasket and discard the wisdom of Solomon. Ashbinapal was a real and historically recognized personality . . . . Gilgamesh was not. The comparison is unfair.

Even though some of my ancestors are screaming for my head now: The bible contains many "embellished" stories that were never factual nor historically accurate. Some of it is only good as propaganda pamphlet.

Now, for Ashbinapal .... he would not be the first to brag a little about his capabilities... and certainly not the last.

And, according to the Tumal inscription, Gilgamesh was very real and lived around 2600 BC

The Bible is not the only reference to the Great Deluge. It could have been a regional event.

It was a very local event according to archaeologists .... but that does not mean that anybody was capable of meaningful writing before (where meaningful is that the tradition has been carried on and whatever they "wrote" could be identified as such)

And yes, the Gilgamesh Epic also talks about the deluge, so does the Popol Vu.

The Popul Vuh is not very local but it also mentions other worlds and how they were destroyed...before this one. The Fifth Sun.

I'm not aware of /any/ civilisation that sprung up literally out of nowhere. Every society we know of had antecedents, contrary to what hucksters like von Daniken would have you believe.

--Jaylemurph

I heard the key to humanities beginning lies within the Senmut Tomb ... w/e the hell that means
dont they have some sort of 'Ask A Freemason' like ask yee congressman?
hahooo

Hi questionmark,

Ashurbanipal's possibly being able to read the writings from before the flood is more possible than some might think. According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the city of Kish was one of the first cities built after the Flood. Kish is known to date to about 2700. There is very large scale flood in the Tigris-Euphrates area that can be dated to the period of 2750 - 2900 BC. Writing in the area occured well before that, so it is possible for something written before the event to be readable after it.

Back on topic, many are making the original question more complicated than what was intended. I believe it was "settlements" or "large scale constructions". One example, while there are many cultures, and many have been presented here, can anyone name a settlement or large scale construction from any of them. I don't think my original question was as limiting as some might have understood it.

cormac

Nobody disputes a very local flood, evidence of one can also be found in Anatolia (though several thousand years before the time you mention). Even if there was a flood 2900 BC it would be after the time when the Sumerians started writing (around 3000 BC). In any case that would not be the "great flood" of the bible because, as is known, the Sumerian civilization survived it without major disruption.

Considering the Bible even indicates that the Ancient Hebrews started out in Sumer, the biblical account of the flood was written down a few millenia after the event and there is no archaeological/geological evidence of a great, world encompassing flood, especially within recorded history, what better evidence is there? Also, a great world encompassing flood from the Hebrews perspective does not automatically equate to the same from our perspective. Realistically, what would a wandering band of nomads living in the Middle East know about whole world nearly 5000 years ago? Where they lived and what they could see could just as well have been their "whole world".

cormac

Not really, at the end of the stone age/ beginning of the copper age there were already large trade routes. The world that could be reached by foot or by simple boats, was reached for trade. The world was much bigger than we suppose.

For example, it is demonstrated more and more that Stonehenge 1 was a pan-european effort (by finding graves of people of Central European origin). Same applies for the observatory in Bebra. And that is more or less the time we talk about.

While I do believe there was a high level of civilization before Sumer and Egypt, including technology that is all simply lost now, none of it can be proven at all. It is simply a belief and a half hearted one at that. And not sure if I am completely understanding the question but even one city that had a government and its own dedicated year-round agricultural supply would constitute a civilization. It would be a city-state proper. There just is no proof of any city having all this before Eridu, the city of Enki, which was founded circa 5400 BCE. Sumerian mythology dates it before the Great Deluge. This is the founding date of the village though and there might have been other agricultural villages founded before this date that did not progress into a city-state. Having to go out and hunt though part of the year takes away from other cities being fully agricultural. Without a government it cannot be classed as a city.

While I would agree that the ancient Hebrews would have traded with peoples from many places, that also doesn't automatically equate to knowing about "the whole world".

For one to take the Biblical account as an historical account they would have to accept the Hebrew calendar, beginning in 3160 BC. So again, any Great Flood would have happened within recorded history and there is no evidence. Also, the Biblical account is from the Hebrew perspective, not the Sumerian one. Obviously there would be differences.

cormac

You are also ignoring the fact that there were no "Hebrews" at the time. And according to newer research it seems to be that the first time Hebrews saw Babylon, or Sumeria, as a collective was at the time of the diaspora around 750-530BC, which funnily also coincides with the first written versions of the Old Testament and the Talmud. The accuracy of anything mentioned before that should be taken with caution, especially because there is hardly a mention of any Hebrews among the neighbors capable of keeping written records, which indicates that they either did not exist or were an isolated and/or unimportant tribe.

Take a look at the funny genealogy in Genesis (just as an example), the age indications alone strongly shows some "math" errors, typical of those who make up a history for propagandistic reasons.

Another reason to look upon the bible with caution as "historical document" is the archaeological evidence that non pork eating tribes (with a significant number of members) did not appear in the Middle East until about 1500 BC. Not eating pork is one of the characteristics of the Hebrews.

I haven't ignored anything, if you are talking about Hebrews during the time of the Mesopotamian flood dated to 2750 - 2900 BC, I never mentioned any. I did say that the Bible story suggests that they originated from there. I also mentioned that if one were to take the Biblical account as fact, then they would also have to take into account the Hebrews had their own calendar. Whether it's the Hebrew story or the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which I believe likely to be versions of the same event, both would indicate an event happened within recorded history, since at least 2900 BC.

While they may currently be considered Jews and at least from the Diaspora, Hebrews, there is no real indication of what they considered themselves prior. Also, there can be no clear cut indication of when the Hebrews, as a people, originated a prohibition against the eating of pork or even if they themselves did or acquired it from someone else.



Considering that there is evidence that many places were destroyed during the Mesopotamian flood and there are no historically verified accounts of Sumerian kings or other information about their reigns from before the event, it's clearly not "without major distruption".

cormac

Just some questions, when did the exodus supposedly happen? According to the bible the food rules were made at that time. After about 2500 BC there should have been no pork eaters in Palestine. That is just a small example of the accurateness of the Hebrew calender.

Along the Mississippi many places are being destroyed right now...how much does it disrupt your life? Why do you suppose that it was any different in Mesopotamia? People send some care packages and received the displaced relatives in their houses and that was the end of the story.

And precisely the absence of records and administrative orders makes archaeologists suppose that life continued without major disruption despite signs of major floods. You have to remember that these people kept record of every grain of wheat dispersed in the kingdom and of everything dispersed among the citizens.