China (1563-1572)
The Chinese Language is the world’s oldest language that is still surviving today. (1563) They called themselves the Zhong Guo which meant Central of Middle Kingdom. The Chinese people say themselves as having some sort of special destiny. When the Chinese people speak of their history, they usually speak of dynasties. The dynasties refer to the governments, way they looked at the universal and moral orders that supposedly have shaped History. Naturally, the Chinese have some of the oldest literature in world and the Daoists and Buddhists priests used priests used stories and parables in religious instruction just like most of us do today.
Scholars say that the Chinese civilization is thought to have developed in the Yellow River basin and along the river’s tributaries, completely separate from other riverine civilizations on the Tigris and Euphrates, Nile, and Indus Rivers. (1565) A strange thing about the Chinese culture is that they do not have any myths about creation. They just have a lot of stories abut the earliest men.
In the Shang Dynasty, a culture that lasted from 1600-1028 B.C.E. people created a religion where ancestors were worshiped. Later, the philosopher Confucius (Kongfuzi, 551-479 B.C.E) defined filial piety as the worship of parents. The odd thing about this is it did not matter if they were dead or alive. This became the foundation fro both family and civic life. Pictographic writings were inscriptions found on bones and tortoise shells. These were used for divinations. This evolved into symbols and characters that could be translated into different sounds. The problem was that there seemed to be about 4,000 different characters in this language which made it very difficult to learn. One of the greatest and earliest works of literure from that time was the Book of Songs, or the Book of Odes. In the Zhou dynasty, King Wu and King Cheng started feudalism where they put different lords over different...