The One Civilization Theory: It Was Only Ever Rome (The Misnomer of "Western Civilization")

Join us as we delve into a provocative theory that reshapes how we view the history of human civilization. Discover the 'One Civilization Theory,' which posits that the vast majority of civilizational achievements stem from a single cultural lineage. Through an engaging discussion, we explore the advancements and contributions of this 'one civilization,' its potential to transform regions it touches, and the comparative historical advancements of different cultures across the globe. This episode promises to challenge mainstream historical narratives and offer a new perspective on our shared cultural ancestry and the factors driving civilizational success.

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Hello, Simone! This episode is definitely going to go in the best of category for Basecamp, because it is a theory that I came to, which completely transforms how I see the history of humanity, and it is probably the single most offensive theory that we will air on this channel, if it becomes a mainstream theory, It will almost certainly always appear.

Any video that shows it will have a little explanation at the bottom by like the UN or something about how this theory isn't accurate. So historically I had this view that I think most people have is that human civilization. basically emerged in a few different regions, and that you would have these periods of growth where sometimes one region would be ahead.

Other times, another region would be ahead. Totally. Yeah, like, oh, China's the most cutting edge right now. And, and now [00:01:00] it's Japan and now it's, you know, It's, it's Egypt and whatever, yes, totally agree.

This theory posits that that view of history is mostly downstream of what I can only call the deification of the historical narrative. And that. The vast majority of feats of civilization were created by one civilization.

Oh no. And now I'm worried. Yes. Awkward. And it came to me when I was studying ancient Rome and ancient Greece recently, because I've been on a kick watching a number of videos on ancient Rome and Greece, and one thing really hit me as I was studying these periods, whenever Rome would retreat from a region.

And the Roman Empire would fall temporarily in a region that region would fall [00:02:00] back into a period of people essentially fighting over who had the nicest mud hut. Like very little was happening in those regions during that period. And this includes the region that my ancestors were only when we were older.

under Roman colonization during the period of the Roman Empire. Did we really do anything meaningful, civilizationally speaking? Okay. So to be fair, you're not arguing that it's your own ancestors who were somehow superior from a culture. Yes. Not my own ancestors. My ancestors were mud hut people.

For example, I am pretty much British, Irish, Scottish English The British Islands. You might say, well, come on, your ancestors must have produced something. Aren't there any great ruins in ancient British Isles? I was like, well, you know, there's Unga Bunga, like Stonehenge, I wouldn't call that a great ruin.

And they go, come on, there must be some great architecture in the British Isles. And I would say, actually, there is! In the [00:03:00] seventies, eighties, there was this beautiful bath complex built in Bath . And they're like, ah, you've seen the British can do something. I go, well, unfortunately, the Romans built that.

And it was in a, a, a nowhere backwater of the Roman Empire. And Britain didn't build anything comparable for literally thousands of years. This was their equivalent of like a district like sub-district that nobody cared about. But now you might be going through your head. What led me to this thought?

So I was studying the Roman Empire, thinking of all these ruins, and I started thinking, okay, okay, okay. But what about like the other civilizations of Earth during this period, right? Like, I've traveled all over the world. I've been to something, I think it's over a hundred countries. Like done a lot, a lot of travel.

And so I started thinking, okay, what were the other major civilizations? I was like, okay, you have Mesoamerica. Mesoamerica had great ruins, right?

You know, you've got your, your Machu Picchu, for example. Um, and ancient Mayan and Aztec ruins are extremely impressive. Right, [00:04:00] but as anyone broadly knows those ruins are fairly recent like Machu Picchu was built in the 15th century and so but I gave them a i'm like, okay, that doesn't really count.

You know, they got their civilization started later but there's also like india and china In japan, right? Like they're all ancient civilizations and i've i've been to these countries before and I was like, okay, so When I was in japan I must have seen some ruins that had any sort of equivalency to even, like, Roman backwaters in, like, Spain and stuff.

I started thinking about it and I was like, what? Okay. Okay. China. I've, I've seen some hint that there was a civilization there. And then I was like, no. Oh, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I have seen an East Asian ruin impressive at the Roman ruins. There was Angkor Wat and in India there was Hampi. And then I look up the dates of those ruins, the 15th and the 14th century.

Those ruins were built. [00:05:00] Anchor Watt was built when King's College Chapel was being built in Cambridge. In 1446. Like, they were built incredibly recently. And so then I was like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. But egypt. I consider Egypt to be the ancestor of Greek civilization.

So it's one line of civilization. The Greeks considered Egypt to be the ancestor of their civilization. Do they really? In Greek literature, they would say, oh, we got our civilization from Egypt. Yeah, they're always borrowing from Egypt. So, basically the, the single line of civilization that I can track goes Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Greece really takes over the flame from Egypt, and then Rome takes over the flame from Greece, and then Charlemagne takes over the flame from, , Rome, and then Charlemagne's kingdom splits into the various distinct sort of warring kingdoms that take over the flame from that, and then the flame is taken over by the British Empire and then it's sort of seeded around the world.

But [00:06:00] to get back to the story here, I was like, okay, but works of literature. Right? I have heard about all of these great works of literature by totally disconnected cultures. Like, for example, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Or the Journey to the West. Did you know when these were written? Romance of the Three Kingdoms was written in the 14th century. Journey to the West was written in the 16th century. I was like, okay, well, what about like, Water Martyr, Martyrs, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh, or Dream of the Red Chamber, right?

I've never heard of these. The 14th and the 18th century, respectively. To give you an idea of how late these were written to works of literature that I can clear, consider just like, As somebody who has read translated works of literature, and I'm just like, this one grabs me, these two don't. Dante's mind comedy was, started writing it in 1308, and he finished writing it in 1320.

Hundreds of years before any of these works. How about the Tales of Genji? The Tales of [00:07:00] Genji. That's Japan, and that was I think even written by a woman

the 11th century, Simone. So that was written only 200 years before Dante's Divine Comedy. Did you read the Tale of Gingy? Have you read the Aeneid? Yeah, and, okay, that's a lot better. Okay, so when was the Aeneid written? Yeah, okay, admittedly, way, way, way before the Tale of Genshi. The Aeneid was written in 29 or 19 B. C. The Tales of Genshi were written literally 1, 000 years later, and were literarily less sophisticated and complex.

That's fair, yeah. It's not like it's ancient. Even close. And this is like, when I started having this, I just started going through, I was like, Oh God, this can't be real. And again, I'm not saying that there was like no Japanese civilization, that they didn't produce any art, that there was no Chinese civilization, that there was no Indian civilization.

But what I'm saying is, and you'll actually see this, is that these civilizations advanced [00:08:00] artistically, literarily, at about the speed of my own ancestors, which were the British, until the British met the Romans. And then after the British were fully colonized the British began, like as civilization spread out from Charlemagne again, they began to do some, you know, more sophisticated things.

But what I'm saying is just it's. Civilizationally, along almost every metric, they were dramatically behind the one civilization. Yeah. So there's basically what you're arguing is there is one civilizational lineage that has ever actually kicked ass. It started with Egypt. went through Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, et cetera, and sort of into Europe broadly.

And there's just kind of nothing that competes with it. And, and, and no one has spontaneously figured it out the way that this has. So everyone who is most competitive now is standing on the shoulders of that one giant. There is only one giant. There is only one giant. And every time it, Touches [00:09:00] another region, right?

Usually first they rebel, it leaves, it spins into savagery again, then they come back they, they try to set something up, And by the time they set up any sort of permanent civilizational infrastructure in the region Then that region undergoes a rapid increase in prosperity in the amount of artistic works they're producing, in the amount of industry they're producing, in the amount of science they're producing.

So it's not that it only works for one people. My people can invent this. Insofar as a culture is willing to adopt it and build upon it, they can thrive. Yes. And they can build their own iterations of it, but that no one has independently captured this civilizational dynamo. I guess you can kind of look at how Japan just started killing it after World War II, when it started embracing elements of Western culture and how they took many elements of Western culture, did it so much better.

And then the sort of unique Japanese way. So yeah, like doing jazz on it, like putting your own spin on it and being additive with it can give you a lot of power, but it is definitely [00:10:00] pulling from that one derivative. Yeah. And the other big change that has happened in my understanding of world history is my opinion of the Mesoamerican civilizations has gone up dramatically because of the one civilization theory.

Which is to say that historically, my take on Mesoamerica is Mesoamerica was largely backwards compared to most of the world, but that was only because they got a late start. Yeah, it took people a long time to get down there. Compare. India, China, and Japan and ignored the one civilization to what was happening in Mesoamerica.

Mesoamerica kind of was schooling them at various parts in its history. Fair point. And that was the other thing that really got me when I was thinking of like great ruins I visited and stuff like that. So to give you an idea of what I mean here, Simone, I want you to compare Two ruins. Now keep in mind Roman ruins, you've seen Roman ruins.

You know, most of the Roman ruins you've seen are either a hundred years pre like they're either like [00:11:00] 50 AD or 50 bc, like the Roman bass, right? Were built in 70 AD in the backwater, and also just everything in Rome itself. It is so impressive. I mean, even just. The building material that everything is made of, because, you know, Rome sort of was torn down to create what now is Rome, you know, is impressive.

Just the very building blocks of the city. Yeah, so I'm going to send you some pictures so when I was looking for ruins in Japan that were from around the period of say, which was from the 4th to the 10th century. So, you see Tikal? That's the first picture of Mesoamerican ruins there.

Gorgeous. So, when Tikal was built, that's when Japan was building what is now the Hizmura Temple ruins from the 11th to 12th century BC. So, first of all, you can see it's pretty trivial compared to what they were doing in Mesoamerica at the same time period. Yeah. Not only that, it's trivial compared to, like, Anything Rome ever did in their [00:12:00] history, it's trivial compared to the bath that were built literally , 000 years before.

So wait, what's, what is special about Hiraizumi? It's one of the only old ruins I could find in Japan. It's like one of the oldest buildings or something? Yeah, we'll go over some other buildings in Japan that are older than this, but most of them are just going to look destroyed mud huts or completely reconstructed buildings.

I feel like I visited some really old ones in Kamakura, but maybe We'll go over them. Like, there's a palace complex, but it's fairly small when contrasted with something like Tikal. Yeah, I guess the argument is they're all just very handsome wooden buildings. And your point is that when it comes to monumental architecture or stuff that really shows A level of sophistication.

Yeah. I mean, like these are, these are exquisitely built buildings, but we're still talking Lincoln logs versus like carving stone and achieving Lincoln logs versus like grand huge projects that [00:13:00] require hundreds of thousands of people, cooperation, infrastructure if giant economies so don't get us wrong because we love Japan.

We're, we're, we're, we're big Sinophiles. Okay. Yes. Weebs, as you would say in low culture. But I was disappointed and we'll go over like actual Japanese literature and compare contemporary Japanese literature to, to other literature in different parts of the world. But it's not impressive in comparison.

I'm conceding that. Okay, the next temple series you have here is Chichen Itza in Mexico. This was built in the 6th to 13th century. So again, like, that's actually really impressive for Mesoamerica. That's like Roman level stuff there, where it's like genuinely You unique in, in sort of shocking art. Now we're going to get a hostile environment.

China must've had something in the, in that period. This is the closest major ruin site I could find to like a Roman ruin site in China. [00:14:00] This was built in the 14th century. It's Guan Chang. What about that underground complex with rivers made of mercury? That seemed really impressive. We'll get to that, but that we'll get to that in the art section, because I go over that one in the art section, and it is not as impressive as you'd think.

But when contrasted was what Rome was doing and so, I asked AI this, cause I was like, this cannot be true, all right? So I was like, okay like where are the Roman like ruins in Japan, right? Like, and they're like, well, Japan has some ancient ruins. They're generally not as extensive or monumental.

It's all found in Rome, Angkor or Mesoamerica. However, Japan does have several significant historical sites that offer glimpses into its ancient past. So this is what, what AI came up with. So we had something called Nara, which was built 710. to 784. Nara's beautiful. You want to look up what the Nara ruins look like.

I've been. So consider what you're looking at [00:15:00] here. Like, consider this compared to any Roman ruin site you have ever been to. And we'll do a Yeah, we're still talking Lincoln Logs versus This is 700 years after Rome and it's Lincoln Logs. Yeah, like versus transporting obelisks. It's just This is cute.

Let's take it and move it. Okay,

then you're like, okay, okay, okay. So there's got to be other stuff. Well, this is the

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: 1000 at 300.

year old Buddhist temple, the Gongjing temple. So the Gongjing temple, I'm like, okay, okay, that's cool. This is just a building. This is not like a grand complex or anything like that. And it's like, okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. So here's one. I found one that's 14, 000 to 300 BCE. It's called the Sina Majuri Mayana site. Okay. What about it? What does it look like?

 Oh, this is mud huts. Okay, this is like similar to what I'm talking about, like Norwegian mud huts. Like it, it literally, I wouldn't know if this was in, my ancestors had built this in the UK before they met the [00:16:00] Romans or not. You know, like it is, it is mud hut style. And again, we're not just, people can be like, oh, well maybe the ground here wasn't good enough for building, right?

Like maybe it was too many natural disasters. Maybe they only had trees, right? And I'm like, yeah. Then how come nobody else did it? Okay, I can see that explaining Japan alone. Okay, it can't explain Japan, Korea, China, every, Africa, no, but that's not even an excuse because I, the point I was going to make about Mayans and Aztecs, for example, is that they're dealing in incredibly hostile jungle environments where you are fighting An aggressive environment, and they still managed to build a ton.

So I just don't feel like you have that much of a legitimate excuse when it comes to Well, same with the Romans. It's not like the Romans did big architecture when the weather was nice. Well, and they're right by corrosive oceans and waters and stuff. Yeah, mm mm. Pretty much every part of their empire had giant [00:17:00] works in it, whether it was a backwater like Britain or, you know, the, the Antioch, or in their African colonies.

Like, if you go to Tunisia, you can see giant Things like it's it wasn't like a sometimes they did it. Sometimes they didn't thing. So that excuse doesn't really hold So, okay. Now we're gonna go to China because of course China must China China Yes, and China is all about being like we're the OG civilization.

We did all this first. We invented electricity. We invented Aerial combat, it's we're gonna get to the Chinese claims of inventing a bunch of things as well because they were also less That face, that was a cute face. I, look, I don't like this is true. Like I always try to take the most pluralist understanding.

And the only way I can even say this theory is knowing that I come from a mud hut people. Okay? I am only comfortable disseminating this theory or even having these thoughts because my [00:18:00] ancestors had nothing to do with Rome or Greece and they were flinging poo at each other. Whatever. When, when they were gifted civilization through calling, yeah, your ancestors were literally the barbarians that Romans couldn't even bother to hang on to.

Cause they're like, you know what? There's really nothing much. So I'm mostly they literally just like built a wall and keep them out. This was the first wall, build a wall. Build a wall. Yeah. But by the way, by the way, literally

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: About a thousand

years before China builds the Great Wall, but we'll get to that in a second.

Speaker: It was heavily restored in both the 1950s and 1980s.

I didn't know that. Not even old bricks. Am I missing something here? So the old stuff's gone, hasn't it, really? And then it doesn't count. It shouldn't be a wonder then. You can't just build something on it and still, get all the tourists in when it's not what it says on the tin. What I'm looking at is basically a wimpy home. Bears in [00:19:00] here? What's this all about though? It's almost like they know that the wall isn't that good. It's like, what else can we give them? We've charged them like seven quid to get in to see an old wall. Well, it's not an old wall, it's from the 1980s. I've got a mate who's got some bears. Have you heard?

Stick them down at the bottom. This is the original wall, isn't it? Or is it? I don't know. Is it just badly done? This is pretty s**t, isn't it?

 Are you having a laugh?

This isn't the Great Wall, is it? You kidding me? I mean, I like the way there's no tourists and that.

But then why would there be?

Okay. So the Sunning's two ruins, I was going to do pictures of it, but it's from 4, 800 years ago and it's believed to be the remnants of the Shu Kingdom. It's yielded many bronze artifacts. Basically you just see piles of artifacts and otherwise it's a fairly flat area. There's not even anything really to show you.

Then I have the Yingzhou ruins. So this is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Henan Province. Yingzhou was the ancient capital of [00:20:00] the Shang Dynasty, 16th to 11th century BC. So this was the capital of their entire civilization.

Oh, oh, sweeties. Oh, dear. Hmm. Yeah, it's very much a, oh, sweeties, that is not a civilizational capital. Crap. And I feel like, you know, as we go through this, what you're really gonna get is a It was just so convenient from like an everybody getting along standpoint that we pretended and we kept matching, I think, things that were happening thousands of years later in other parts of the world to things that like the ancient Greeks were doing.

And through not, like, putting dates on them, we were able to, in our head, have this idea that, like, different civilizations were developing sort of parallel to each other, when this just wasn't happening. Yeah, fair point. Yeah, there's just sort of the ancient [00:21:00] Japanese, and the ancient Greeks, and the ancient Chinese, and the, yeah, and the, I never thought about comparing time by time, and, I've never seen a history class do that, which is quite interesting.

So, yeah, well, and it also breaks a lot of the things because people be like, well, you should look at like, you know, why the West is winning for now. That like shows that this is all due to like geography and like accidents. And it's like, yeah, well then explain to me why, when Rome fell, the West went back to a bunch of mud hut people until somebody reignited the torch of civilization, specifically why, why is it that every time Rome left a region like Spain?

Like Spain was able to produce great art when Rome was there. They were able to produce great buildings. They had a great economy. Rome leaves. They go back to mud hut people. It's not like, no, sorry, but it's not, it's not like. Europe, it's not like it was anything special with Europe. Mm-Hmm. In fact, it didn't even start in Europe.

It really started with Egypt and Mesopotamia. Yeah. So I don't think that, like when you look at Mesopotamian ruins, which we'll get to in a second, like some of the very oldest civilizational ruins or [00:22:00] Egyptian ruins, and then you compare it to like capital of China from , it's like they're not even in the same league.

And this is now of thousands of years earlier. Yeah. So now we're gonna go to the Lru Architectural Ruins.

And note, this is an AI being exhaustive for its mate, trying to find all of the best ruins it could to impress me. .

So this is One only dating back 5, 300 years. So, you know, this is like, around when like, a little bit before Dante's Inferno was being written, and, and look at it. Well, based on what you've been saying about findings, it seems that these are people who've been more interested in clothing and accessories, and not so much grand architecture.

Well, apparently they also weren't interested in art, which we'll get to in just a second, but you can see here. The, the, the site, it's just like a flat site, like there's nothing there, it's like a few outlines of previous foundations, and that's it. Yeah, no, this looks like the beginning of a housing development that's [00:23:00] weirdly faced.

I don't know how else to describe it, but that's what I'm getting from this. It gives housing development. Yeah, and people can be like, well, you know, it was all wood or they used more wood and stuff like that. But again, like these Roman things are there, even things that used wood. And that's the really interesting thing.

You can go and look at like one civilizational areas. You can walk around. Their old buildings and in the very old churches and everything like that, you'll see wood, you'll see blah, blah, blah, you know, like you'll see stuff that is supposedly why this other stuff isn't there anymore, right? Yeah, but also I think that you should get points as a civilization for demonstrating long termist thoughts and building to last.

So when, when, when you look at ancient Mayan and Aztec I guess not that ancient, but when you look at that and, and you see these stone artifices and you see what people built, even Stonehenge, you got to admire it more because these are people who [00:24:00] are like, this has to last for thousands of years.

I'm going to build this to last instead of short term thinking. So the, the one thing that the Chinese built that was actually you know, potentially, like, equivalent in impressiveness is the Emperor Jingzong's Mausoleum, which is where the Terracotta Army is. However, the only thing that really makes it impressive is how many terracottic figurines there were.

Nothing else about the site is particularly impressive. The Rivers of Mercury were not impressive to you?

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: No, the rivers of mercury thing, we don't know if this is real. It's not like archeologists when they were excavating this area of found rivers of mercury. , a guy writing a hundred years after the tomb was constructed, created a mythologized account that there was these giant rivers of mercury sort of set up in the tomb. , but, , and, and we have detected that there is some mercury in the tomb, but it's not like we found it or anything.

So we don't know. It [00:25:00] could be a myth, could be a fairly modest thing.

I don't know. Like, so, so let me explain to you what I mean, like the terracotta army, like logistically speaking. It may be a lot of people, and we're going to go into the artistic merit of it later, to compare it with the equivalent Greek statues or, or other statues that were made around the same time period.

That, one, it artistically wasn't very sophisticated compared to what was going on in the Mediterranean region at that time period. Again, I'm not Mediterranean And it also was architecturally not particularly like it was something like it was a lot more than the later Chinese stuff. I'll give it like, I mean, the, the statues themselves had unique facial features from around 200 BC as well.

So, you know, pretty impressive. But again, and so now we're going to get to the last major architectural ruin site that it was able to find for me in China. And this was the Jihon Ruins and I will send this to you. Oh, that was the ones that we went over, like the well The housing development.

So, these [00:26:00] ruins in China yeah, they were the ones along the Silk Road, we went over them earlier, just not very impressive. Okay, so then people are like, well, what about the Great Wall? Right?

A great wall. I think other than the terracotta army, that's the one thing in East Asia I may give some credit to, but it was from the 7th century AD.

Well, and also No, sorry, 7th century Compare the To 17th century AD, I'm sorry I didn't make that clear. No, if you compare the Great Wall, which is a wall, I've walked the Great Wall, it is, it's a wall. It's, and it's not that big.

Speaker: This is pretty s**t, isn't it?

 Are you having a laugh?

To the Roman aqueducts, they, they built walls that were water. Significantly before the Great Wall.

We'll be looking at it when we go over the Roman stuff. They had heated floors! They had heated floors in bathhouses! I mean, like, there's [00:27:00] It's just, there's no comparison. There's no comparison.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: And I remind you that the, , great wall was started 700 years after the Roman aqueducts were built and it wasn't finished until 1700 years after the Roman aqueducts were built. It's just not a comparable thing. Then you have been always talking with a friend about this and they're like, give this, this can't be true.

What about.

The Sui dynasties, grand canal. That was a huge things. And since. It's from a 581 to 618 a. The problem is , it was big. It was big. It wasn't one of the things that AI primary was, and it probably should have been because it's actually fairly impressive. , in terms of, , just this. The sheer size of it. The problem is, is that the sheer size of it? , or the complexity of it, it's pretty, not big compared with the Roman road network.

, again, 500 years before this. And, uh, you know, what they're doing with the canals is they're digging pits. , [00:28:00] and then they are, , lining them and putting various buffers on them so that water can flow through them. , the problem is that the Roman roads, which were much, much, much more extensive, , did the same thing you needed to dig about, , three to five feet down and then put multiple different types of layers of rock and stone down. To create these ultra durable roads, which still exist today.

, so again, civilizationally, we're just talking about a different scale here.

Okay. So. And the people are like, but what about Africa? You can't forget Africa. Africa did some things. What about Great Zimbabwe?

Okay, okay, okay. Let's look at Great Zimbabwe. I'm not familiar with Great Zimbabwe. I'm excited for this. Okay. Ooh, I like the rounded, the rounded towers. It's interesting architecturally but it's not like particularly impressive.

It looks like a No, it looks like a fortification. Yeah, it looks like a fortification, really. But it doesn't Not a particularly large [00:29:00] fortification, I'd say it's about the size of like a starfort. Yeah, if that. It looks pretty small. Yeah, it looks pretty small. And that that's like, that's called Great Zimbabwe.

That's the one thing they got there. It is not particularly impressive. Now, again, people are like, are you saying that there was no great monumental architecture or art produced in Africa? Oh, this is a medieval city. So this is not, this is,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: The city began to construction in the 11th century and it was abandoned in the 15th century. So yeah, she's right. Medieval. , a thousand years after Rome was doing it stuff and it's. Nothing.

Compared to a Roman thing.

I'm like, no, I'm not saying that at all. I can go to Tunisia and see amazing architecture.

The problem is it was built while they were Roman colony. I can, I can, I can go and read great writings from Alexandria. The problem is that that's a descendant of Egypt and a lot of things for Britain during Greek or [00:30:00] Roman colonization. And people are like, What do you mean Greek or Roman colonization?

There's so many great Egyptian figures that aren't from the period of Greek colonization like Cleopatra The Ptolemaic Greek princess. Oh, yeah. Greek lady. That's the other thing about the way that the civilizational system works is it appears to sort of pass the torch on To sort of the next iterator on it.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah I mean you have argued to me many times and i'm obsessed with aegypt in various periods, right? I go through that great courses lecture and i'm like, oh, this is amazing. But You point out quite fairly that they do stagnate. They kind of just, they get really good at just keeping things the same.

And that's why I think your point about passing the torch and the collective iteration upon this one line is meaningful.

I know I'm going to show you the one exception to the one civilization theory. [00:31:00] And this is a few things in extra ancient India, specifically right now for architecture. And we're also going to go into literature because extra ancient India did compete with the one civilization in literature. Okay. It's almost like it almost had a civilizational explosion and then didn't.

So this is the Anjati and Elor caves. Those look amazing. BC. 10th century, second to 10th century BC. Okay, really old. We got it. We got a contender here. Absolutely. It may not compete with most Roman things, but it definitely competes with the Greeks who they were contemporaries of. If you've been to ancient Athens that is impressive.

And we'll keep seeing this in India. The most impressive monuments are often the oldest which is a little weird and we'll go over what might have happened there. It's the same with their literature. If you go to their like BCE literature, and this is sort of going to be a giveaway, you will find a flourishing of literature that definitely competes with the Greek literature of the time [00:32:00] period.

But if you then go 500 years, 10, 000 years in the future and you compare it with what's coming out of the one civilization it's just Like Popol Vuh stuff sorry, I don't mean to be, it's like, this animal did this, and this animal did this, and then there was the, you know, this, and it's like, oh, come on, you guys can do better than this, you guys wrote so many great works 10, 000 years ago, like, what is this?

Yeah, there seems to be absolutely nothing that will prevent a great culture from entering a dark age. If the selective pressures necessary to keep the torch bright aren't there.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-6: I will note though, that the differences between India's great works. , when contrasted with a time gait aid, great works in Europe. In the one civilization or even time lag. Great works in the, when civilization do not fall as far behind as those of China or Japan. So here, , I have on screen here, two temples, , each built [00:33:00] in.

, 12,000 CE. , and while they aren't the sorts of large complexes that were being built in Meso-America at the time or the giant giant cities and ruined structures of Rome that were built. Uh, well, 1,200 years before this, they are at least. Interesting and impressive to a degree.​

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-7: Generally speaking this one, civilization theory, new perspective I have has dramatically risen my view of ancient Indian civilization and ancient Mesopotamian civilization. And dramatically lowered my view of ancient east Asian civilization. Particularly China, which just sunk to almost nothing, in my opinion. , specifically. Because I used to think of them as like an equivalent to what was going on in Rome and stuff like that. And they just like factually weren't and people will be like, well, what about their economy?

What about their economy? Like whether their economy so big it's like, this is when [00:34:00] people act like Masa, Mussa represented some giant civilization happening in Africa at the time. , and yeah, I mean, there was a people and a culture there, but they weren't producing things equivalent to like what the ancient Greeks or Romans were producing.

Just having a lot of wealth doesn't translate into cultural production. And I think that this is in a way more damning that a culture with all this wealth, wasn't able to turn it into the types of things like, you know, the aqueducts or the Rome road network or the ruins. Everywhere you go, or the art or the literature.

This is a Mesopotamian ruin site that I'm sending you here. Okay. To give you an idea, to just contrast everything that we've been looking at right now this is the Mohenjar Dara. This is from 2, 500 BCE. Well, what we're looking at seems to be some kind of city complex. A [00:35:00] massive city complex. Yeah. Why doesn't China have a single one of these?

Why doesn't Japan have a single one of these? When we have one from an inhospitable region made with mud from 2500 BCE from the one culture. Well, it's not just mud, it's proper bricks, but yeah. Yeah. But what I mean is you can't just say we didn't have stones. Yeah. Yes. Right. To carve, et cetera. Yeah. This is an incredibly impressive site, but okay.

Let's also look at some other things just so you can remember for people who might've forgotten what Rome was doing and when were they doing it? The Colosseum of Rome. Consider that many of these that we've been looking at, were around the 10th century, right? Was made in 72 AD the Colosseum of Rome.

Like nothing that we have looked at to me comes at like one 10th, even close the Colosseum. Well, and, and most people are accustomed to seeing the Colosseum ruins and not thinking about how it was with [00:36:00] mechanical floors. You know, this, this big, underground complex, like the Colosseum literally had naval battles in the center of it, right?

Yeah, we don't presently have even stadiums that do the same level of crazy s**t that the Coliseum did. So there may be cruise ships are pretty impressive. I, I, I know they're, they're seen as so trashy, but I'm just so impressed by cruise ships. There's like these amazing spaceships. So now what I'm sending you here, this is from 80 to 212.

Okay. This is the Baths of Karkala. Okay, yeah, we've got towers, we've got complex buildings, this is an archways, yeah. Unique architectural elements, this is a buried building, yeah, alright.

So this is an aqueduct from 1 AD in an outer territory in France, okay? Point de Garde, France. This is dramatically [00:37:00] more impressive than, like, The Great Wall, for example. Yeah, huh, yes. And it's literally hundreds of years earlier, many hundreds of years earlier.

Speaker: This is the original wall, isn't it? Or is it? I don't know. Is it just badly done? This is pretty s**t, isn't it?

 Are you having a laugh?

This isn't the Great Wall, is it? You kidding me?

So, now we're gonna look at Pola Arena, and this is in Croatia, 27 BC. , but it basically looks like the Colosseum. And, okay, we're like, what about distant? Because people kept hearing me talk about Tunisia, right? Like, what was Tunisia like, okay?

This is Tunisia in 238 AD. So, like, distant colony, right? This is what Rome was putting up in Africa. Backwater. Whoa, what? It's just another, whoa! Okay, sorry, this is, it's very, it's a very impressive [00:38:00] coliseum building. Yeah, it is an impressive Coliseum building. That is so wild. And it was 238, which is way before any of the other sites that we're looking at.

Now, we haven't gotten to the art or, or, or, or literature yet, okay? But so far, because when I first brought this theory up to you, you were like, that cannot possibly be true. Yes. Are you beginning to be like, oh, this is a bit bigger than I thought it was, in terms of the scale of differences? I'm, I'm kind of already sold.

I, I'm concerned about this now, because it's going to make me. Look really bad at parties if I bring this up. Thank goodness. I don't go to parties anymore

 Those were all built later in the one civilization, let's go to the Athenian temple ruins. Okay, so these were built in 432 BC

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I always hear. It's literally better than a single set of ruins I was able to find anywhere in Japan or China. Yeah, massive columns still standing after [00:39:00] so many years. No, actually, I think the columns fell down at one point and it was rebuilt. Oh, okay. Okay. But that was recently that they fell down.

I think it was due to like bombing and like the Napoleonic campaign.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-8: It was 1687 and it was an explosion caused by Venetian bombardment that severely damaged the temple causing many of the columns to fall. So they stayed up till 1687.

I don't know. I'll have to find it. But yeah, they stood for a very, very, very, very long time. The same was Egypt. Like nothing in any of these other places comes close to Egypt. Really the only place you get close again is super ancient India and then nothing from up into modern times.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. Okay, and I'll put on screen here some pictures of, like, Roman settlements in Turkey and Spain. So you can see this isn't like an isolated thing. It's like, literally, I can't find a single thing from these other civilizations, and yet everywhere the Romans go, they're building something. So if I'm anticipating what listeners are thinking, it's, okay, fine.

Your point is made about [00:40:00] architecture. I'll believe in the one great culture or civilization theory of architecture, maybe literature, which you brought up. But, I don't know, like, the art, who cares, like, I've, I've been to so many, I don't know, like, you know, Asian art museums to, refute this, and Yes, and the reason why that refutation works in your head is because you haven't compared cross time when the Asian art you're looking at was made versus when the Greek art was made.

Okay, I'll go straight to art instead of literature. I was gonna read a bunch of literature texts, but no. We'll go straight to art, alright? So I just decided to do

so, a random search for Greek art, and this was the first picture that came up. You know, there's lots of beautiful Greek statues, ancient Greek statues. Oh, yeah. This picture came up, and this is 440 BC. Okay. 440 BC. Okay. Wow. You're looking at the statue, right? So it's so [00:41:00] realistic. For those who are only listening, we're looking at a classic Greek statue, but it's a very highly polished polished marble of a nude male with, you know, extremely realistic detail.

This could just be. A human who is painted and is naked, but you know, very small penis for whatever reason. And yeah, that's the only part of it that doesn't seem realistic. Yeah. And I had this moment where I asked Google, I go, okay, give me examples of Japanese art from 440 BC. Like, first I said statues because I wanted to compare like was like, yeah, there are no Japanese statues from 440 BC and I was like, wait, this can't be real.

So I managed to find some piece of Japanese art from this time period. Oh, dear. Oh I don't know what this is, but stylistically, but this could just be that we're biased, you know? We're looking at very dis No! No human in history, if you showed, I guarantee you, if you showed that Greek [00:42:00] statue to somebody from most of Japanese history and you prefer this or this Japanese art, they'd be that effing statue.

I know, I know. Yeah, you show that to like a Japanese person, like, and you know, I guess if you delivered that Greek statue. To someone in that same period of Japan, they would be extremely, they would prefer to have the Greek statue for sure. Yes. You want to know what my ancestors were doing during this period?

Yeah, I'm sure nothing that impressive, right? You're gonna get a kill it with fire moment here oh, what? No! That is literally the best my ancestors were able to do when the Greek were, were putting on this like Perfect physique of humanity and then the, the, the my ancestors are like

Speaker 2: Welcome [00:43:00] to Jurassic Park.

yeah, I'm getting that meme where like they begin to play John Williams, Jurassic park theme.

And then it goes to like a recorder playing it terribly. Oh yeah. The recorder playing one. Oh no, it's terrible. Oh, I need to not look at that. I need to look at the statue again, the papylic cleanser, even though it has a micro penis. Okay, okay. What about the Chinese? What did they have? Well, again, with the Chinese, I ran into one of these problems.

I was like, give me statues that the Chinese made around 440 BC. And they were like, Chinese didn't make any statues around 440 BC. And I was like, okay, so what were they making? [00:44:00] It goes, well, they were very skilled bronze crafters. So I will show you a bronze bell, and they also carved jade well. I like bells.

And a green pendant from China during this period. And you've got to click on it to open it. Pendants? Okay. Okay. I mean, yeah. It looks like it was made by a kindergartner. Yeah, it's not very impressive. The bell's fairly impressive. I mean, that requires metal forging. That requires technology. And so I admire that.

The bronze is not a difficult metal to forge, Simone. We're in the Bronze Age here. The, the, the Okay, anyway. But, but Again, like, just nothing really there, and so you can be like, Okay, the Terracotta Army, alright? Yes. It must compete with that Greek statue we looked at. No. There's two little problems here.

One, the Terracotta Army is literally 200 years after that. And two, you might not have looked at the Terracotta Army up close. No, I, yeah, no, it doesn't come, it doesn't come close. The, the, the Terracotta Army is impressive [00:45:00] in its mass customization and its scale. It is not impressive because the statues themselves are really You might forget just how unimpressive it is compared to that Greek statue.

I just sent it to you so you can compare it. No, I, I, I have a pretty good, let's see if, if memory is accurate here yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what I pictured. But okay now we're gonna get to and you always find ancient ancient india that's where you get things that come pretty close. This is india a few hundred years after those greek statues Okay. Okay. It's, it's nowhere close, but it is like in the realm of contention. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and they're, they're going for fan service here in a way I would argue kind of matches the fan serviceness of the Greek statue.

So, yeah, we've got polished stone, you know, very, very, very skilled stone work. So, yeah, this is, this is good. [00:46:00] Yeah. And you could argue Malcolm that the lack of. We'll say photorealistic accuracy is a stylistic choice here. So yeah, I'm gonna give this credit. Yeah, I'll give it credit. But again, this falls into my thing is something seemed to be happening in India, but it seemed to have died out.

And this will be more clear when we talk about literature and stuff like that. But yeah Now people will go like, ah, but China, they had so many great inventions. And so I was like, yeah, I had remembered this. I was like gunpowder. And then as I started going back to it, I was like gunpowder's doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in my brain right here.

When I'm trying to think of Chinese invention. I'm thinking flaming lanterns that have explosives. Am I getting this wrong? Gunpowder again. Gunpowder is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. So when you look at the things that China invented that the West did not invent, you do have some impressive things.

You have papermaking, second century A. D. [00:47:00] Awesome. I will point out, though, that 3000 B. C. E. papyrus was invented. Now, paper is cheaper to make, lasts longer and, and easier to, to, like, store. So just, like, strictly better. Yeah. So you got papermaking. Okay. Definitely gonna give them that. Yes. You got woodblock printing.

This is in the 6th and 7th century. And that's good. That's great. Gunpowder the 9th century. That's a good one. Okay. Then you got the compass in the 11th to 12th century That's a good one. That's awesome. Yes. Yeah. But here's the problem. When I started trying to, to, to investigate this, it's not really an invention.

That's a by product of an insect, but yeah, no, come on. Okay. So we'll count silk. So we have paper making. Printing, gunpowder, the compass, and silk, and the one civilization, you know what they invented? Literally everything else. That's the problem. Okay, whoops, [00:48:00] yeah, that's Gunpowder, and all of the things you see here are not things that require civilizational infrastructure to invent.

They're not actually particularly complex inventions, they're more like discoveries of like chemical phenomenon. Right? That's the problem with this, okay? Or, or a unique process for making something, right? I'm not saying that these regions never had, like, great individuals who would come up with these interesting ideas.

I'm just saying that whatever this civilizational infrastructure that seems to have spread through the one in civilization did, is it gave these people the ability To crank out tons, tons, tons more stuff Then you would get an equivalent great mind in one of these other civilizations And so we need to figure out why but I need to continue to go with proving my point because i'm not done with proving My point yet specifically what I mean is like if a [00:49:00] leonardo da vinci had been born in japan For whatever reason he wouldn't have had the infrastructure To be as voluminous and diverse in the things he was producing You But, sorry, I need to go to literature because you, yeah, you got me off the ball when we got to literature.

Okay,

literature. Well, as you remember, a lot of the literature that we think of as being like the definitive works of China are actually pretty late, like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Journey to the West, 14th and 16th century respectively, well after something like The Divine Comedy. You do which was written in the 13th century.

You do get some, and I don't think of, the reason I'm using the Divine Comedy here is because I think of the Divine Comedy as being a fairly modern work within the tradition of the once signatory. You know, I'm not going back to something like the Aeneid or the Odyssey for great works here. Yeah, the Divine Comedy honestly