A Civilization

[d_dudy]

i won't say a thing.....

[lupusmalus]

Originally posted by Ozymandias
Hmmm... "Real" Civilizations...

By 2250 BCE there were precisely three literate societies: Sumero-Akkadian (effectively Babylon in game terms), Egypt, and the Harappans along the Indus River (which is where the Indians should logically start. (Sorry I don't have a Chinese literacy date at hand

And what about Atlantis??? .

And the first city is usually held to have been Jericho, at about 8000 BC if I remember correctly.

And the Neanderthals were probably just too much adapted to their harsh environment whereas our smart species can live and breed about anywhere, including disco toilets Interestingly the first great flowering of civilization seems to have ocurred during the time of contact between the Neanderthals and "modern" humans. It's all about competition, isn't it?

[Admiral PJ]

Maybe the Neanderthals do still exist..
they may be relatives of the Yeti and Bigfoot which may or may not be pure fiction.
From what I make out Yetis etc are reportedly in remote parts of America and China/Tibet which IS where you'd expect surviving prehistoric humanoid species , without the pressures of the homosapiens greed for land use and able to hide and survive the more hostile environment(high ice altitude and thick forests).

[lupusmalus]

Neanderthals in America? THAT accounts for it!!!

[lupusmalus]

Originally posted by Saddam

REAL civilizations

1) Celts
2)Hebrew
3)Arab
4)Persian
5)Mongol
6)Saxon
7)Aryan
8)Mayan
9)Slav

etc...

Sid seems to like picking Nationalities here, and not Civilizations..Europe would have been lumped in 3 categories. Celts, Saxon, and Aryan (until Mongol invaders came, bringing Slavs)

They obviously ARE picking nations rather than civilisations, but that's

1) no problem because as I see it nations is the way in which civilisations manifest themselves, i.e. in subgroups, and a healthy civilization has a lot of them. In my view there's not an American civilization or a French or German one but a Western civilization, and the same goes for all the other civs.

2) If you accept this defnition picking nations instead of civs is actually the only feasible way to do it because civilisations do not act politically, only their subgroups do, and we DO want a strategy game, don't we??? There were some cases where one nation absorbed all the other subgroups of its civilisation, like the Romans or the Incas did, but these are the exception and for all their imperial splendour indicate that a civilisation is actually already in decline. Competition is essential! So here's my answer to the question whether the US belong in: they aren't a civ but neither are most of the other "civs" in the game, they are subgroups of their respective civilizations and since the US are the leading subgroup of Western civilization they definitely belong in! Period.

And Saddam, you seem to be mixing up civs and "races" and don't really seem to know where they belong, either. I guess with "Aryan" you mean "Germanic", which is what Hitler and his ilk meant just that they didn't have any idea what they were talking about. The Aryans were actually the eastern branch of the Indoeuropean language family from which Persian and Sanskrit derived. And shouldn't the Saxons in your scheme fall under the Aryan heading if what you mean is "Germanic"? At least according to Hitler the Anglo-Saxons were the second most "Aryan" people there was, after the Germans... And don't tell a Pole or a Czech that they belong to a "Slav" civilisation, in their view they're as much part of Western civilisation as anyone else and have been since they were Catholicised. Maybe one could make a case for an Eastern Orthodox civilisation, but this would include non-Slavs and exclude some Orthodox like the Greeks who are definitely Western in my view. The contemporary ones, I mean, not ancient Greece! And I guess even the Russians could be subsumed under Western civilization, a lot of them have argued this for centuries. And the Slavs were in Europe LOOOONG before the Mongols had their special guest appearance. And that's for the more obvious flaws in your scheme.