Growing up and passing through the woefully inadequate Public School system, I was told that the far east was home to ancient civilizations with grand histories stretching back far, far into the past, being one of the cradles of civilization alongside Mesopotamia, the Nile, and the Indus valley. To little me, that sounded perfectly reasonable. Why not.

Of late, as I’ve continued to correct the shortcomings of my education, I’ve been somewhat shocked by the dates that are coming up in discussions of Asian history. It all seemed so… recent.

So, I began digging, looking to reconcile the information and find out what was true. As with all things historical and archeological, I had to contend with the fact that there are simply gaps in the record. To do my reconciliation of why East Asian history sounded so recent when I’d been assured it was as ancient as the other roots of civilization, I had to establish guidelines or criteria for what I’d regard as the ‘start’ of history in a region. This will be separate from whatever established academia has decided upon because, well, I’m not an academic, I’m just some guy trying to make the facts make sense. I’m going to go with the Greco-Roman idea of a civilization, as in city-builders.

So, What are these criteria? One, we have to have evidence people were there. Since people usually arrived in an area long before anything else in this list, this will be a given. Two, we need evidence that these people were not just transitory. That we’re not dealing with nomadic hunter gatherers who stop by every so often. Why? Because we need to filter out guys who aren’t keeping records. Which we’ll do more solidly with criteria three. Three, some record of the civilization having a degree of sophistication, either their own records or a contemporary account from another if the locals hadn’t developed or imported writing. Four, these sophisticated cultures are shown to be progressing into states with influence over a significant area.

Basically, I want something recognizable that would exclude the millennia of barbarians from which I claim my heritage.

That said, what benchmarks can I put down? Narmer unified upper and lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty sometime between 3275 BC and 2987 BC. Three hundred years is not very precise, but as a ballpark figure, it’ll do. By Narmer’s time, Egypt was settled, agricultural, town-building, and had a written language, otherwise, we’d not know his name. So Egypt easily gets into the Civilization club at an early date, as it crossed the benchmarks sometime in the predynastic era prior to Narmer. This is fairly uncontroversial, which is why I started here.

The city of Eridu near modern Basra is another data point. We can tell it was settled sometime around 5400 BC, but this predates writing, as proto-cuneiform only gelled into a script sometime around Narmer’s day. The younger city of Ur was settled around 3800 BC. But I did include writing in my criteria, so Mesopotamia gets a hard credit at 3300 BC, with the fuzzy date potentially predating predynastic Egypt, as they battle for the dates in the 5-6000s. Either way, both have what we can call ancient civilizations.

I am less well-read on the Indus valley than on any of the other regions we’ll discuss, but the numbers appear to be contemporaneous with our first two, settled agriculture popping up in the 5-6000s, and solid evidence of civilization meeting the criteria around the 3300. Since I’m more focused on East Asia’s odd numbers, I’ll leave this as a given unless I come across something that throws that into doubt.

So, our three archetypical ancient centers of civilization had the same general pattern of early agriculture and were well-established, city-building farmers with writing by 3300 BC. When we pivot to China, we get an interesting observation by the Chinese themselves. Gu Jiegang observed, “the later the time, the longer the legendary period of earlier history… early Chinese history is a tale told and retold for generations, during which new elements were added to the front end.” So we have texts telling of an exceedingly long history, but as we look at the earlier versions of those, the history doesn’t have so much history at the beginning anymore.

This is why I stipulated contemporary accounts for civilizations that didn’t leave text themselves. The earliest claimed Chinese Dynasty that is asserted as historical was never referenced in any of the writings of the people who supposedly supplanted them. The Xia Dynasty is first mentioned two Dynasties later as part of Zhou Dynasty propaganda to support their recent overthrow of the Shang. We know the Shang existed because we have bits of their own writing inscribed on various objects that included things like their own king list. But the Shang Dynasty is a bit of an awkward data point for Ancient China. Those with an interest in making China ancient can only push back the founding of the Shang to 1600 BC.

A date of 1600 BC is respectable, it’s fairly old. But you know what other civilization crossed the finish line for meeting my criteria around 1600 BC? The Olmecs.

Without the Xia, China is only Olmec old, and about two thousand years younger than the three archetypes. And evidence of the Xia is largely in documents from the Han Dynasty – written circa 200-300 BC. With no Shang records, and only an oblique propaganda reference from the Zhou, it’s looking like the Xia is fictional. Now, I’m not claiming there weren’t people there during the time prior to the Shang, we know there were. What I’m saying is that the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys looked a lore more like early predynastic Egypt and pre-Sumerian Mesopotamia. Lands of scattered agriculturalists still conglomerating into what would be recognized as a civilization.

Sure they grew crops, had their chieftains, and waged wars, but so did my Celt forebearers long before they had anything that fit the criteria for civilization we’re working from.

Earlier I used the phrase “Those with an interest in making China ancient”. This is because one of the confounding factors is political. There’s a lot of pressure to keep up the image of “oldest, greatest, first” among civilizations where an Olmec-peer start date would cost a lot of face. People who want to study the archeology can only access the sites and artifacts with the permission of the political party whose interest is in as ancient a China as possible. So, numbers get fudged. If there’s an error margin, put the oldest plausible date on it. If there’s a picture scribed in something, it’s writing. Little things that confound the search for truth to fit the desire for an unearned label.

But there’s another set of dates that really shocked me – Japan. In my ill-educated mind, that triad of East Asian countries of China, Korea, and Japan were supposed to be equally old. In this too, I was misinformed. The native Ainu of Japan were semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers from pre-antiquity until about 1000 BC when the in-migration of the rice-farming Yayoi people took over. As with many of these migrations in antiquity, we are uncertain of how much killing was done, how much was mere displacement north, and how much intermarriage took place. But, from 800 BC to 300 AD, the Yayoi were settled agriculturalists who almost, but not quite, crossed the line to meet the criteria for being counted as a civilization for this exercise. They crossed those lines only between 300 AD and 538 AD as their culture transformed due to imported ideas from the mainland. Their artifacts and manner of building changed, they showed definite signs of unified authority, and in 538, they imported two things – Buddhism, and writing.

The Chinese do have written accounts of Yayoi kingdoms prior to the transformation of that time period, but it’s hard to tell whether it really counted as uncivilized by the criteria short of writing, or if it was just typical Imperial Chinese condescension towards foreigners.

Still, the earliest writing in Japan is from 538.

538.

The Byzantines are fighting the Gothic war. Gregory or Tours is being born. The Coptic Church is schisming from the Catholic.

Japan is Young.