2,500-year-old sculpture discovered at UNESCO site in Turkey
theartnewspaper.com29 points by speckx 5 days ago
29 points by speckx 5 days ago
I guess it’s unrelated to this particular find but is Turkey now the place where civilization first started or Gobekli Tepe and the other similar sites are not considered civilizations at this point?
There isn’t really a settled definition of “civilization” but usually one of the requirements is developing some kind of writing system without outside influence. As far as we know the people at Gobekli Tepe did not have one.
Granted you can also argue the same about Incans and to some extent Mesoamericans, so it’s kind of debatable.
I think you need evidence of a system of government, agriculture, culture, laws to dispense justice predictably and a writing system to track and record aspects of the above. Hence we can have Egyptian, Indus, etc., but not prehistoric civilizations. The human organizations just didn’t have enough progress to be considered civilized. Thats not to say they were not advanced vis a vis their other contemporaries but rather didn’t meet certain milestones that mark a civilization.
A distinctly Western European perspective.
I would rate Narwala Gabarnmang as one of the earliest sites of civilization, personally.
Most early civilizations arose in the East (today’s India, Egypt, China, etc., not Europe but that’s the normal take on what constitutes civilization) else we verge on saying any human organization is civilization (which I would disagree with).
Doesn't civilization just literally mean a system of living together in a city? There doesn't need to be any written record of how they did it does there, just evidence that they did?
Urbanization is one qualifier but not the only one. Plus even today we could have such chaos in a town where laws are absent and justice is that dispensed by the strongman/woman warlord and that would hardly be considered civilization.
Uncivilized does not mean stupid or brutes.
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