The Advance of Civilizations

Welcome to Episode 85 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will take on the most ancient civilization on earth today. Most ancient not in the sense that it has been around before all the others – that wouldn’t be true, for it was a rather late comer in the early days. Most ancient only in the sense that of all today’s existing cultures, it can trace itself in time as an uninterrupted cultural legacy farther back than any other modern culture. There were cultures existing before it was formed, but none of them survived for such a long time. Or some modern cultures may look back and imagine that they have something to do with some culture two millennia ago, but in reality, they have nothing in common. (Think modern Egyptians and ancient Egypt, or modern French and the ancient Gauls, etc.) This culture has remained stable for so long that a modern representative of that culture can actually look at a literary artifact of three thousand years ago and read what is written with only a little trouble. How many people can you find in Ireland that can read the Ogham alphabet that was used only 1,400 years ago? Or how many Norwegians or Swedes can read their Runic alphabet that was in use at the time of the Reformation, 500 yeas ago? I don’t even want to mention Cyrillic, the alphabet of my native language, Bulgarian, which was created only about 1,200 years ago; and I even have trouble reading some of the texts written 400 years ago. And this culture we are going to be talking about has an uninterrupted literary tradition that is older that any name of any nation or any geographical toponym in Europe. Even Hellas, the native name of modern Greece, the oldest surviving name in Europe, is younger than than the literary tradition of that culture. So, while there is a dark side to that consistency over the ages – and we will shortly see what it is – it still commands a certain level of respect.

It’s the Chinese culture. We have to hand it to the Chinese; they arethe oldest existing culture today. We can legitimately overlook their other boasting: scientific or technological discoveries, or philosophical systems, or systems of social and military organization, etc. I mean, those are great, if they were true, it’s just they were never developed into large-scale civilizational advances, so we can easily ignore them. (For example, the ancient Greeks invented a steam engine but they used it for religious special effects, not for any useful work. So we say that it was invented by James Watt and others in England in the 18thcentury. He put it to work right away.) But as far as culture is concerned – which means, the overall norms and habits and cultural expectations and especially ethical-judicial principles – a modern Chinese would feel much more at home with the Chinese of 2,000 years ago, than any modern Englishman would with the Angles of 2,000 years ago, or any modern Russian would feel with the Russians of 2,000 years ago. For one, he would be able to read the street signs, right? It surely is impressive, isn’t it? Now, whether it is something to be proud of is a completely different issue, and we will get to it in a few minutes. Anyway, that is the culture I am going to be talking about today; or rather, will be using as an example of an ethical-judicial principle about the advance of civilizations.

It ain’t gonna be easy, though, and here I want to start with a disclaimer. I will be talking partly about the Chinese culture, and about some of its collective psychology. I know there are Chinese folks among our listeners, and there are some among then that grew up in that culture. They know it inside out: all its details, nuances, backgrounds, contexts, biases, prejudices internally and externally, all the things that I can’t know exhaustively simply because I have not grown in it. To be sure, I have always tried to be a sincere and unbiased student of Asia and its cultures and history ever since I got involved in Eastern martial arts and had interest in Eastern religions. (That before I became a Christian.) I even took a basic course in Chinese characters – not to learn them in depth, but to understand the principle behind them. But I am a European who is learning from other Europeans; and, unfortunately, most of the studies of East Asian cultures come from European observers. For some reason, there are very few Chinese, Japanese. Korean, or Vietnamese writers who undertake the task of explaining their cultures to Europeans. In psychological terms, East Asian cultures are rather shy and introvert, and opposed to the extrovertness of the European cultures, not to mention the sometimes crass self-promotion and bragging of the American culture. Thus, I plead guilty from the very beginning: you will certainly find fault with some of my analysis. But I also want you to understand: The truth of the conclusions in this episode is not affected by how detailed my knowledge of China is. I am only using China as an example; but I could use any other culture, and the conclusions will be the same. The reason China is a good example is because it has been the culture that, in the last century, has had a very keen interest in the question of how civilizations advance. But I am getting ahead of myself here.

Three years ago, in March 2016, a Chinese chemist named Sun Weidong delivered a lecture to a diverse audience of professors, students, and just ordinary science enthusiasts at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, a large city (about 8 million population) in Eastern China. But he didn’t talk about chemistry. He talked about history. Not strange, by the way, given that much of his scientific career has been related to radiometric analysis of different historical artifacts. The strange part was the content of the lecture itself.

Sun started his lecture with a passage from one of the most venerated historical texts in Chinese historiography, the Shi Ji, simply, The Historical Record, known to Western historians as Records of the Grand Historianby Si Ma Chien, a palace historian for the Han Dynasty in 2nd century BC. Si Ma was a very interesting and colorful personality himself, and we know a lot about his life, but I will resist the temptation to give details here. Suffice to say, he is considered the father of Chinese historiography, and his Record is considered the “foundational text of the Chinese civilization.” It is truly believed that through it, Si Ma really created the Chinese civilization as a civilization, by giving it intellectual cohesion that would make it survive as a culture for two more millennia, even in the midst of constant civil wars and foreign invasions, and even foreign rule for several centuries. In it, Si Ma put together, from earlier sources, the history of the Chinese civilization, starting from its early mythical origins in the Yellow Emperor (and even the three god-kings before him) before the 3rdmillennium BC, going through all the early dynasties before the Han dynasty, writing down a number of biographies of important historical figures compiled from a multitude of earlier sources, some of them lost to us today. The Record is written in more than half million Chinese characters (that’s separate words, folks), and is longer than the Old Testament, while, unlike the Old Testament, is written by one man only. If you want to delve into ancient Chinese history, the book is free online, in Chinese-English interlinear.

The text that Sun Weidong quoted was from Si Ma’s history of the Xia Dynasty, the first Chinese dynasty that followed directly after the mythical period of the Three God-Kings and the Five Emperors. The Xia Dynasty itself is half-mythical, half-historical. You know how every culture on earth has its own myths and legends about the Great Flood; well, in Si Ma’s history, that flood happened during the Xia Dynasty; clearly wrong, but no doubt he simply recorded it faithfully from older records. The text in question here, however, is not the Great Flood but the geography and topography of the empire of that first Chinese dynasty, considered the mother dynasty of the Chinese nation. Here is the text in question:

“Northwards, the stream is divided and become the Nine Rivers. Reunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the Sea.”

Sun then asked the question: “There is only one major river in the world that flows northwards. Which one is it?” A member of the audience replied, “The Nile.” Then Sun showed a map of the Nile River and its delta: truly, a stream that flows northward and is divided into nine tributaries, some of which “re-unite” into “opposing” (that is, “on the other side”) rivers.

He then continued with his thesis: according to him, the roots of Chinese culture should be sought not in any natural cultural evolution of the local population, but were planted sometime in the mid-2nd millennium BC by migrants from Egypt. The Xia Dynasty, he believes, was in fact the Hyksos: a Semitic nation that ruled Egypt as “foreign rulers” in the 17ththrough the 16thcenturies BC, declined in power in the mid-16thcentury BC and was expelled by a popular uprising, after which the native rule over Egypt was restored. (Just to mention, he, of course, follows the modern accepted secular chronology of Egypt. I think that chronology is mistaken: the Hyksos’s rule was in the 15th– 13thcenturies BC, and the Hyksos were the Biblical Amalekites. But this discrepancy is not important to my thesis here.) The Hyksos were known to have had advanced bronze weapons before most other cultures, and they are also known to have developed superior seafaring technology. Sun argues that they might have