What Is the Longest-Lasting Civilization?

Spoiler alert—there is no clear winner in the battle for the longest-lasting civilization. The trouble starts with defining what exactly qualifies as a civilization.  

Traditionally, the hallmarks of civilization include the development of large cities, a complex division of labor and social classes, government administration, the construction of monumental structures and the advent of written language.  

In recent decades, however, scholars have questioned nearly all of those criteria, arguing that some nomadic cultures should qualify as civilizations, as well as ancient people without a written language. The Inca, for example, left no written records, but they conducted censuses and maintained accounts using a system of knotted ropes called khipu.  

"If you go back to the lexicographical origin of the word ‘civilization,’ it implies the existence of cities,” says John Coleman Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale University. “Most people don't use it that way anymore. In the modern world, ‘civilization’ often gets used interchangeably with ‘culture’ or it's reserved for a more advanced type of culture.”  

If that’s the case, is it possible to identify the precise moment when a culture becomes advanced enough to qualify as a “civilization”? And who decides?  

Despite those challenges, here are the three top contenders for the longest-lasting civilizations, including one that’s still going strong.  

The unification of Egypt in 3100 B.C. is the standard starting date for ancient Egyptian civilization. Egypt’s original name meant “the Two Lands” because it was divided between Upper Egypt (in the South) and Lower Egypt (in the North).  

In 3100, a southern king named Menes (or Narmer) conquered the north and founded what’s known as “Dynasty 0,” the very first Egyptian dynasty.  But Darnell contends that the real origins of Egyptian civilization began centuries before.  

“Egyptian culture, based on Egyptian art and writing as a continual development that we can trace—I would say you would have to begin its origins no later than 4000 B.C.,” says Darnell.  

That might seem very early, but Darnell says that the common vocabulary of images used in Egyptian hieroglyphics was created during the Naqada culture that flowered in Upper Egypt before unification.  

“The Egyptians, prior to developing what we think of as writing, had created a way of commenting on and even describing the cosmos using certain groupings of images,” says Darnell. 

In his fieldwork, for example, Darnell found a set of monumental, rock-carved hieroglyphics dating to 3250 B.C. containing images of bulls, storks, ibises and other symbols. Those same hieroglyphic motifs first appeared in the Naqada period and continued throughout ancient Egyptian history.  

When did Egyptian civilization end? That’s another tricky question. Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C., but Egyptian civilization retained its gods and pharaohs for centuries. The Ptolemaic Dynasty, established by Macedonian Greeks, ruled in Egypt as pharaohs, including the famous Cleopatra VII.  

In 31 B.C., the Roman Emperor Octavian (Augustus) defeated Cleopatra and Marc Antony, ending pharaonic rule and folding Egypt into the Roman Empire. Darnell argues that Egyptian civilization continued until the “triumph of Christianity” in the Byzantine Era, but 31 B.C. is a more conservative cut-off. 

Depending on whether you accept Darnell’s earlier date of 4000 B.C. or prefer the unification of Egypt in 3100 B.C., ancient Egypt lasted for either roughly 3,100 years or 4,000 years.   

The first people settled the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (modern-day Iraq) as early as 14000 B.C. But by roughly 3500 B.C., Mesopotamia had achieved all of the classical milestones of civilization.  

Mesopotamians built the world’s first large cities, including Uruk, home to more than 50,000 people at its peak. They constructed monumental temples to their chief god, Marduk. In addition to farming, Mesopotamians worked as potters, metalworkers, priests and government administrators. And they kept detailed records using arguably the first system of writing, cuneiform.  

"Cuneiform developed as a series of notational marks for economic transactions,” says Darnell. “So, whereas Egyptian hieroglyphics began as religious commentary used in art, cuneiform started as kind of an economic, transactional system that only later became phonetic writing.” 

For three millennia, Mesopotamia was ruled by a series of powerful cultures and empires, including the Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians. In 539 B.C., Babylon was invaded and overtaken by Cyrus II of Persia, bringing an end to one of the first and longest-lasting civilizations in history.  

If modern China is considered an unbroken continuation of ancient China, then China certainly deserves a place among the longest-lasting civilizations of all time. But is China really “5,000 years old,” as traditional Chinese history claims?  

Not likely, says Paul Goldin, a historian of classical China at the University of Pennsylvania. 

“The ‘5,000 years’ figure is based on a Chinese calendar that starts with a legendary figure called the Yellow Emperor,” says Goldin. Also known as Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor is one of five mythological figures credited with founding Chinese civilization around 2700 B.C.  

Most scholars also doubt the existence of the Xia Dynasty, dated by traditional Chinese calendars to 2000 B.C. and founded by another legendary figure, Yu the Great.   

For Goldin and other historians, the first Chinese dynasty for which there is solid archeological evidence was the Shang Dynasty, founded in 1600 B.C. And even then, Goldin thinks that the starting point of Chinese civilization should be 400 years later, when Chinese writing was invented.  

“I think it's reasonable to start talking about civilization when you have a writing system—a fully-fledged writing system—not just pottery marks that may or may not be writing,” says Goldin. “And in the case of China, we're talking about 1200 B.C.” 

The very earliest examples of Chinese writing are found on Oracle Bones, pieces of animal bone and turtle shell used to record divination rituals during the Shang Dynasty. While the Chinese characters on the Oracle Bones would be indecipherable to most Chinese people today, says Goldin, they are clearly ancient ancestors of the modern script.  

If the clock of Chinese civilization started with the invention of Chinese writing in 1200 B.C., then it’s been running continuously for more than 3,200 years—and counting.