People often say that "China has been in the past five thousand years", which is not actually the history of civilization in the strict sense. Historians generally will:
Use of metal tools;
The emergence of state institutions;
The invention of writing.
As the three major symbols of the emergence of civilization, the earliest writing found in China is the oracle bone script of the middle and late Shang Dynasty, which is only 3600 years old; if the establishment of the Xia Dynasty is taken as the beginning of Chinese history, it is only about 4000 years ago.
What we call "five thousand years up and down" today is actually calculated from the time of the legendary Yellow Emperor, about 4700 years ago, and the barbarian rounding is almost the same.
If ancient Egypt also used the era of the Yellow Emperor as a historical starting point, its history can be calculated from the Amrat period around 4000 BC, more than 6000 years ago, 1300 years before the Yellow Emperor (terrible!). ）。 According to inferences, the earliest ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs predate the earliest known oracle bones by about 1500, and the first unification of ancient Egypt was around 3100 BC, more than a thousand years before the legendary Xia Dynasty.
Ancient Egypt was not the earliest known civilization in the world, after the Sumerian civilization of the Two Rivers Valley. But sumerian civilization was founded in the 35th century BC and died out in the 25th century BC, lasting only about a thousand years, while the ancient Egyptian civilization lasted from the 32nd century BC until around the 4th century BC, when it began to be gradually replaced by Greek civilization (brought by Alexander the Great), which lasted for nearly three thousand years.
As for Chinese civilization, even from the middle and late Shang Dynasty, there is still a history of about 3600 years - don't say anything like "there is no China after the cliffs", you are still a yellow person today, still speaking Chinese, and still recognizing Chinese characters is absolute Chinese civilization!
However, I still have to admire the ancient Egyptians, WHO played with the history of three thousand years ago and built terrible buildings like pyramids, which is really powerful!