It isn’t just in the Middle East that ancient history is a hot political item. The Chinese are very invested in the antiquity and uniqueness of their civilization. The earliest known “Chinese civilization” was in Dongshan Village about 8,000 years ago:
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has announced the country’s top six archaeological discoveries of 2009. Among them are the Neolithic Ruins at Dongshan Village in eastern Jiangsu province. The site has evidence of the earliest Chinese civilization ever found.
The Neolithic Ruins at Dongshan Village allows us to better understand prehistoric culture in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River.
The size of the excavation covers more than 2,000 square meters. It’s divided into two parts: the eastern area where eight tombs have been found with over 200 pieces of jade, stone vessels and pottery and the western part where a number of small tombs and house ruins have been discovered.
All the tombs are strictly organized into social levels. It’s the earliest proof of China’s ancient hierarchy system. The discovery of these tombs has pushed the research of the tribe in the era of the Songze culture forward.
I suspect that the truth is more complicated than political orthodoxies will allow. For example, I don’t believe that China’s civilization developed in isolation but that for as long as we will be able to discover and long before there was a “Western civilization” or “Chinese civlization” people in what is now called the West and people in what is now called China were learning from each other and teaching each other.
The antiquity of Chinese civilization is a particularly thorny question. Until the discovery of Dongshan Village and other fairly recent discoveries there had been something of a mounting body of evidence that China’s development had lagged behind the Middle East’s and, possibly, the West’s in the development of agriculture, the use of bronze, and the use of iron. Although recent discoveries haven’t supported the 10,000 year age of the popular imagination, they have served to restore a bit of the Chinese pride of place.
Well, the earliest pottery fragments have been found in China nowadays. The West is truly the culture that lagged, sadly for Western pride. Desperate attempts to deflate other cultures pride only makes the Westerner seem more and more pitiful.