Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 August 4

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 4

doubt about 1st civlization

Egypt (c. 3200 BCE),[39] India (c. 3200 BCE),[40] Mesopotamia (c. 3000 BCE) are the first created civilization as per current research then how would possible that Nevada 9500 mummy founded that means 1 st civilization can be more then 5000 BCE -- 07:33, 4 August 2018 Jonamj2u -- 07:20, 4 August 2018 106.51.30.63

I think you are referring to the Spirit Cave mummy. Also mummies are not unique to a specific culture and is not an indicator of civilization. When scholars call Egypt, the Indus River Valley and Mesopotamia as the first civilization, they mean complex urban civilization with stratified social structures, writing and etc. Culture groups exist before these and some were possibly just as complex but without the writing, well planned cities and giant monuments to kings, they were not considered civilization in the traditional meaning of the word. KAVEBEAR (talk) 07:28, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

(duplicate question removed)

Creating a mummy does not require a complex civilization, especially in an arid location where most of the process is semi-automatic. An interesting example is described in our article on the Chinchorro mummies, where there's a combination of natural and artificial mummies; the switch to deliberate creation was likely gradual and developed through trial and error. Matt Deres (talk) 13:37, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

• There is no formal definition of what a civilization is as opposed to other forms of complex culture. And also as Matt Deres says' creating mummies do no require a particularly advanced culture.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 15:18, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

• The OP is perceptive however, and seems to be on a good track to question the sort of traditional historiography of these things. Any student of history should always question traditional narratives that have been set in stone; that doesn't mean they are wrong (for any definition of "wrong"), but it does mean we need to get out of the realm of thinking in hard, bright lines and binary absolutes, and start to look at history in multidimensional, continuum ways. Simply put, to answer the question "What was the first civilization?" we first need to define "What is civilization?". The problem is that historians (and people in general) tend to work their definitions in the other direction, especially once we've already decided we have our answer. This is a perfect example of what is called the No true Scotsman problem, and it works like this 1) We define a concept like "civilization" 2) We find based on that definition that (say) Egypt is the oldest such culture, so we call Egypt "The First Civilization" 3) We later find earlier civilizations that meet out first definition 4) we add additional qualifications on our definition to eliminate the new evidence and keep Egypt as the first civilization. That last bit (4) is the No True Scotsman problem, and history narratives are rife with it. So we ask ourselves how do we avoid this? The answer is to stop thinking in simple binary absolutes, and start thinking in complex, multidimensional continua. Instead of thinking like civilization as a simple thing that you either have, or don't, start thinking of all of the concepts that make up having a civilization, and start thinking of those concepts as existing on a gradual continuum, and start looking for all of the ways those concepts have evolved over time. History becomes not a contest to be won, we we grant awards for being the first one to an arbitrary finish line, but rather its a complex work of art, with a near infinite number of ways of gaining knowledge and finding beauty. Note that I'm not saying that the history narrative is not absolute, that there is not a single correct truth; there absolutely is: Something either happened or it didn't, there aren't alternate facts, and our goal as historians should be to find that truth; what I am saying is that that truth in the Big Picture is not simple and binary. Yes, there is probably a definitive answer for the first time a group of humans buried their dead ceremoniously. There is probably an answer for the first time humans purposely built a group of shelters for permanent settlement. There is probably a time when a group of humans developed a system of writing to represent speech. There is probably a first time that humans developed any number of these traits; instead of looking for the place where they all came together to create some arbitrarily defined "first civilization", look instead at how these processes played out in multitudes of places all over earth, and how they worked together to bring forth humanity writ large. Ultimately, you can still define "the first civilization", but it's a far less interesting view of history than looking at the big picture. </rant> --Jayron32 15:40, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

Anthropologists have a continuum of societies organized at the level of bands, at the level of tribes, at the level of chiefdoms, and at the level of states. It seems clear that to be called a "civilization" in the sense that that Jonamj2u/106.51.30.63 asked about, a society must be organized at at least the level of an incipient state -- and also clear that there were no state-level societies in 9000 B.C. Nevada... AnonMoos (talk) 07:15, 5 August 2018 (UTC)