[LifeStyle] What is the oldest civilization in the world?

[Guest High King Eslam]

Did the first civilization originate in Mesopotamia or elsewhere? Countless civilizations have risen and perished over thousands of years. But which is the oldest recorded?
About 30 years ago, this question seemed to have a straightforward answer. Around 4000 BC, the first phase of Sumerian culture arose as the oldest civilization in the Mesopotamian region in what is now Iraq. The Sumerians were named after the ancient city of Sumer, which was a few miles south of the modern city of Kut in the east of the country. Archaeologists call the first Sumerian phase the Uruk period (the ancient city of Uruk located about 50 miles – 80 kilometers – to the southwest of Iraq) where many of the earliest Sumerian artifacts have been found.

But evidence unearthed in the past few decades indicates that the Sumerians have a few contenders, including ancient Egypt, for the title of "oldest civilisation".
In general, culture must achieve many distinctive features, especially urbanization (i.e. cities), irrigation, and writing; And the Sumerians had these three things. After about 2000 BC, the Sumerian civilization led directly to the Babylonian civilization in Mesopotamia, which is credited with discovering mathematical facts such as trigonometry and prime, square and cubic numbers; These are concepts developed by the ancient Greeks more than 1,000 years later.
The Sumerians may also have invented religion by building tall temples called ziggurats in their cities and establishing priestly orders dedicated to the worship of specific deities, according to American historian Samuel Noah Kramer. Which god was greatest in the vast Sumerian pantheon depends on where and when: the sky god Anu, for example, was popular in early Uruk, while the storm god Enlil was worshiped in Sumer. and Inanna (Queen of Heaven) may originally have been the goddess of fertility in Uruk; Her worship spread to other cities in Mesopotamia, where she was known as Ishtar, and may have influenced the gods of later civilizations, such as Astarte among the Hittites and Aphrodite of Greece, "according to what was published by the specialized scientific website, Live Science.
A story very similar to the story of God's prophet Noah in the Hebrew Bible, who built an ark full of animals to preserve his family during a great flood caused by divine wrath, is linked to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Archaeologists believe it was originally a Sumerian story from around 2150 BC; That is, centuries before the writing of the Hebrew version.
Some scholars argue that other civilizations may be as old or older than the Sumerians.
“I would say that Egypt and Sumer were basically contemporaneous in their emergence,” says Philip Jones, co-curator and curator of collections in the Babylonian section of the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.
Jones adds, “Decades of war and turmoil in Iraq meant that archaeologists were unable to access many Mesopotamian sites, but Egyptologists kept digging. The result is that archaeologists in Egypt have now discovered writings as early as the first writings in Sumer, indicating that the earliest stage of ancient Egyptian civilization appeared at about the same time as the first stage of Sumerian civilization, around 4000 BC.
Still another possibility is the Indus Valley Civilization, which arose in parts of what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and northwest India, and dates back to at least 3,300 BC, according to the oldest artifacts found there, according to Jones, who It is likely, “We may find very early things in the Indus Valley. And I wouldn't be surprised if we discovered something that was so early on.”
Jones suspects that early trade along the edges of the Indian Ocean helped these early Egyptian civilizations along the Red Sea, Sumerian at the northern end of the Persian Gulf, and the Indus Valley civilization further east to develop from the pre-civilization people who lived there before them, by bringing in resources and ideas from farther places. "My gut feeling is that there may have been some trade networks going on in the Indian Ocean," he said.

 

Source: Middle East

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