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World Civilization

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World Civilization
During my study in the World Civilizations class, it occurred to me that although many ancient civilizations established far apart and independent from each other, yet somehow we can trace tremendous evidences showing us that their cultures, beliefs, world views, traditions are somewhat similar to one another. I am very interested in discover more details about when those ancient civilizations was formed, the people at that time did not have effective transportations or contact methods like us today, so why there are so many similar myth? For many cultures they even praise the same God. Could this mean that there is really a ‘God’ there who was present at that time to different group of people? Or was it true that some stories said it was the aliens who fled to earth and taught wisdom to people from all parts of the world?

Since in order to figure this out, we need to dig deep in to history of mankind, and it will take whole lot more than 8 pages to discuss. So today I will only focus on the mythology and stories from one of the oldest ancient civilization—ancient China, and perhaps lightly compare them with similar myth of other societies. I believe after anyone who read this, they will be amazed on the similarities old civilizations share on their beliefs.

Quite different from other ancient civilizations, China didn’t really have its own religion beliefs. This you can specifically compare to the Indians who have more than one thousand religions. The Indians have major religions such as Hinduism, or as I heard before that in India, Buddhism was only one of the minor religions among thousands. China is also unlike the Mayans who cherish the sun. From what I know about Chinese history, the only systematic religion that came directly from Chinese people is Daoism. And from my point of view, this is not even a real religion, it is more like a philosophy theory, for that the whole concept of Daoism never involved about any ‘God’ or any specific figure to praise


References: 1. http://baike.baidu.com/view/13547.htm 2. http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/chinese-mythology.php?deity=NU-GUA 3. Department of Asian Art. "Neolithic Period in China". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cneo/hd_cneo.htm (October 2004) 4. China 's ancient Zoological Museum Peking Man collection information #1 5. (2002) Chinese civilization in a new light. Commercial press publishing. ISBN 962-07-5314-3, p. 142.
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