
Does Chinese Civilization Come from Ancient Egypt? - DanielBMarkham
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/02/did-chinese-civilization-come-from-ancient-egypt-archeological-debate-at-heart-of-china-national-identity/
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PieterH
Remarkable how rapidly politics comes into the discussion of Chinese history.
Putting that aside, the theory is interesting and plausible for a few reasons,
yet probably wrong. I like it because of the weird connections, like the
ancient ores and the "nine rivers". This is numerology, not science: searching
for support rather than nullification.

The theory is IMO wrong for a much simpler reason. It assumes (as many
theories of history do) that the vastness of our planet means that we used to
live in disconnected communities, islands of humanity spread out and yet not
talking to each other.

You can walk around the globe in 10-20 years. It is unimaginable that trade
routes such as the Silk Road did not carry knowledge such as how to smelt
bronze, like those African ores, and any other precious good. Wherever there
were people, they were innovating and trading goods and knowledge with their
neighbors. Only exceptionally were pockets of humanity actually isolated.

You don't need an emperor and his navy to carry knowledge halfway across the
globe. One or two people, on foot, will do it, and did it, and so, this
nullifies the theory that Chinese civilization somehow sprang from Egyptian
civilization. The two co-developed together with the entire connected world at
the time.

~~~
singularity2001
> You can walk around the globe in 10-20 years.

This is an important footnote that many historians seem to overlook.

However a similar argument makes the seaborne theory plausible too, as it took
less than three years to sail or row around the globe, probably ever since the
invention of the sailboat (~4000BC?).

~~~
PieterH
Yes, navigable water has always been the crucible of trade. Hence the economy
and culture of the Mediterranean even from the early bronze age. And coastal
trade is compelling, you don't need sea-faring ships, just dinghies capable of
sailing to the next beach. So we can, reasonably, argue that there was a
global human economy and civilisation (albeit one that operated really slowly)
as early as 5,000 BCE (date that Wikipedia quotes for earliest depiction of a
sailboat).

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dogma1138
Since the article doesn't have too much information this seems as just as
based on anecdotal evidence as the "theory" that Japanese culture and
specifically Shinto has evolved from biblical Hebrews/Israelites:
[http://www2.biglobe.ne.jp/~remnant/isracame.htm](http://www2.biglobe.ne.jp/~remnant/isracame.htm)

~~~
Steko
That nutjob has been trying to peddle his Nanking Massacre denial bullshit on
Wikipedia for years.

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cpleppert
This is false. The Chinese writing system and Mythos have no connection at all
with Egypt. Descriptions of rivers predominate in ancient myths and there is
no reason to construct a hypothesis that has little explanatory power and even
less plausibility.

~~~
wdrw
I am not at all a linguist and not at all an expert on either writing system,
but as a layman looking at both the Chinese and Ancient Egyptian writing
systems, one similarity seemed really striking - the notion that a typical
word is composed of a 2 parts - a semantic, pictographic "root", combined with
another part that indicates pronunciation.

~~~
nicholas73
It's not uncommon but not typical either in Chinese. My impression is that
those kinds of characters were easier to form through improvisation, and
became standardized without actually fitting usual norms of character
creation. Slang, regional synonyms, loanwords, and the like would be likely
candidates for this process.

~~~
thaumasiotes
It is typical -- now. (Wikipedia provides an estimate of "over 90% of all
characters".) Chinese linguistics traditionally distinguishes six different
classes of character[1], of which one is the semantophore-phonophore pair.
That class is the most numerous now, because most new characters have always
gone into it, because it's easy to devise new characters in that system. (It's
even easier to "devise" characters in the fourth class, but those characters
are by definition not new; see below.)

But when the writing system was new, other classes were a lot more common than
they are now.

[1] The categories, and examples of each, as listed in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification)
:

\- Direct pictorial representation of a physical object, as 水 is just a
picture of water, or 马 is just a picture of a horse. (Both are ridiculous now,
but recognizable in their original forms.)

\- "Pictorial" representation of an abstract idea, as 上 depicts "up", 下
depicts "down", and 三 depicts "three". (These still work!)

\- Semantic compounds, formed from several more basic characters all of which
are used for the meaning. Apparently the subject of much debate, but examples
in the spirit of the category are 森 "forest" = 木 tree + tree + tree; 好 "good"
= 女 woman + 子 child; 尖 "sharp" depicting something which is 小 (small) at one
end and 大 (big) at the other; 歪 "crooked" = 不 not + 正 straight; etc.

\- "Loans", characters which are used solely for their phonetic content. For
example, the character 英 which means "Eng"land is identical with the character
英, pronounced ying but meaning "hero". A lot of characters which were
originally loans like this have subsequently developed distinctions, as 来 and
麦 have.

\- Phono-semantic compounds. The topic of discussion here. As 切 qie "cut"
sounds similar to 七 qi "seven", but means similarly to 刀 dao "knife", or 到 dao
"to" sounds similar to 刀 dao "knife", but means similarly to 至 zhi "to", or 打
da "strike" sounds similar to 丁 ding "fourth in a sequence", but means
similarly to 手 shou "hand".

\- A mystery category, involving pairs of related characters, that we no
longer understand. Example: 考 / 老.

This pretty well covers all the logical possibilities: direct representations,
compounds involving only meaning, characters used only for sound (a compound
would be superfluous there), and compounds involving meaning and sound
together.

~~~
brisance
木does not mean tree. It means wood. Tree is 树.

~~~
thaumasiotes
So what? 木 means wood _now_. (Well, no it doesn't. 木头 means wood now. 木 is not
a word in modern Chinese.) It _meant_ tree, which is relevant to the
construction of 森, 本, 休, 树, etc.

It took me all of a few seconds to look up the proverb 独木不成林 "one tree alone
is not a forest". What do you think the 木 means there?

~~~
Gigablah
> 木 is not a word in modern Chinese

Eh, 木 is used commonly by itself.

这张椅子是用木做的。 (This chair is made of wood)

~~~
thaumasiotes
Fair enough.

------
kissickas
I'm sure most people have thought this through since the time they may have
been lied to in elementary school, but rivers flow don't flow south, they flow
downhill... and there are plenty that flow north.

~~~
dogma1138
What school do they teach that at? If we take the 2 most famous rivers then
the Nile flows from south to north pretty much straight, and the Amazon flows
from west to east by north east. It might have been a long time since I was in
elementary school but I never heard of "rivers flowing south", could be a US
thing since most of the large rivers in the US do flow southish.

~~~
kissickas
I have no idea where I heard that fact - only remember "trivia" from friends
in elementary school telling me that the Nile is the only river that flows
north, daddy-longlegs are the most poisonous spiders but their mouths are too
small to bite humans, etc.

I'm not sure if the anecdote in the beginning is a true one but it says it
takes place in Hefei, so I'm not sure it's a particularly American piece of
misinformation.

~~~
dogma1138
Don't know never heard that fact, especially considering that rivers that flow
north in Europe are quite common since the norther part of Europe is still
rebounding from the last large ice age and it's overall at a lower elevation
than southern Europe where you also get the large mountain ranges.

So famous rivers like the Sine, Elbe, Oder etc. all flow "north".

~~~
FreeFull
Vistula too. It might actually be harder to find major rivers that flow
"south".

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mikhailfranco
Any theory that uses the Hyksos (Sea Peoples) as an explanation is usually
wrong. Crackpots use them because so little is known about who they were, and
where they came from, hence any wild claims are harder to disprove.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_Hyksos](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_Hyksos)

For a good up-to-date erudite but readable account, see _' 1177 B.C.: The Year
Civilization Collapsed'_ by Eric Cline.

[prologue]
[http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/p10185.pdf](http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/p10185.pdf)

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arca_vorago
This is when my mind links a particlar myth of both cultures and more about a
fish man showing up and teaching people the ways of civilization. As I
remember it was Mesopotamia, China, and the Indus valley, and maybe a few
more?

I think its plausible that civilization itself spread via sea faring peoples,
so perhaps it was some hyksos like people that brought not their genetics, but
knowledge.

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known
Religions are ~2000 years old;

Humans are ~200,000 years old;

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_ancient_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_ancient_history)

Religion was born when first con-man met the first fool;

"Earth is flat" \--Religion

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth)

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Tergmap
For ForeignPolicy to pick this up, it would be something with potential to
cause trouble inside China.

The simplest explanation is that trade existed even in prehistoric times. It
did not have to be the same person that took ore from African mines all the
way to China. While merchants traveled a lot, those in high ranks did not have
a reason to travel much.

This story appears to be on par with Jesus Christ being from India.

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ajuc
Vistula is flowing north. Not as major as Nile, but why does it have to be? It
is still huge. The theory is inspiring, but doesnt seem probable.

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GunboatDiplomat
Betteridge's Law.

~~~
stock_toaster
There must be a corollary law, that states: "Any comment that quotes
Betteridge's Law will have a large number of down-votes."

~~~
bbcbasic
"Comments that quote Betteridge's Law get the most upvotes?"

Would be an appropriate headline

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labster
_Sun’s thesis proved_ controversial when ...

Way to be impartial, headlines.

