Originally Posted by Brian Rush

The Persian civilization should date from the migration of the Persians and Medes into the region around 2000 BCE. It still flourishes. Although Iran today is a Muslim country and therefore could arguably be submerged into the civilization of Islam . . .

Also gestorbenes Zarathustra !

Originally Posted by Arkham '80

I would not link Iranian culture today to the Persian civilization that threatened Greece and Rome. There are vestiges of it, yes, particularly in the impact of Zoraostrian clericalism on Shi'a Islam, but the last distinctly Persian culture was that of the Sassanids.

This is a completely arbitrary statement on your part, in service to your claim that the West is moribund. Can you substantiate it? Iran still has its own language, a separate version of Islam, a state of its own, a recognition of its own history. What more is required to say that a civilization survives? True, the Islamic Republic of Iran is not the Persian Empire of Xerxes, but then, neither is the United Kingdom of Great Britain the England of King Henry II. Yet I don't think you would claim that Britain no longer exists.

One of the things I'm asserting here is that a civilization can often still be recognized across changes in government, religion, economy, and technology. Thus the West can still be called the West even though today it is predominantly industrialized, high-tech, democratic, and multi-faithed rather than, as at its origins, agrarian, backwards, feudal and monarchic, and solidly Catholic. To some extent that's arbitrary on my part, although I think I can make a good case for it.

China has been saved repeatedly by its geography.

This is true, and it is in part geography that gives China its peculiar character. And yet:

Opportunistic barbarians did periodically sweep down upon a crumbling Chinese state, but they did so at a slow enough pace and in small enough numbers for the imperial bureaucracy to assimilate them into the ruling class

That does not describe the invasion of China by the Mongols, who killed almost the whole population of the northern half of the country, in order to turn Chinese farmland into pastureland for their herds!

I'll grant you that China's geography, consisting of very fertile river valleys surrounded by inhospitable terrain, has on the whole given the country an advantage. (Also a disadvantage, in that it has led to insularity.) But that is not a whole explanation. You are making civilizations out to be far more fragile that history attests.

[The West] is collapsing precisely because it has stopped growing.

But the West was not growing for more than half its history. From the coronation of Charlemagne until the Renaissance, Catholic Europe was a backwards, near-barbarous culture that could be called "civilized" only because it did possess the bare essentials of that state (cities and a written language). It only "grew" during the period from the fifteenth century to the present -- and I contend that it's still growing, because the West's cultural influence is huge, and continues to turn more and more foreign cultures into imitations of itself. That's one of the reasons for the hostility of radical Islam, after all.

When Hadrian marked the final borders of the Empire, Roman civilization began immediately to decline because it could no longer draw on the appropriated wealth of newly conquered provinces to finance its armies and infrastructure.

That process effectively stopped with Augustus, it didn't wait for Hadrian. Even Julius Caesar had planned to stabilize and end the period of conquests once he polished off the Kingdom of the Parthians and took their treasure. Augustus abandoned the war against the Parthians and took the Egyptian treasure instead, but otherwise kept with the program. Roman expansion took place almost entirely under the Republic, yet the Republic lasted from 510 to 23 BCE (487 years), while the Empire lasted from 23 BCE until 1453 (1,476 years, or more than three times as long).

It even lasted 1,315 years after the death of Hadrian.

Once again: I'll agree that the West (and indeed the world) face great challenges today. I'll agree that it's possible we'll screw the pooch and enter a new Dark Age (if our species survives at all). I'll agree the danger is dire. But there's no cause that I can see to believe as you believe, that we're doomed.

Originally Posted by Arkham '80

I would not link Iranian culture today to the Persian civilization that threatened Greece and Rome. There are vestiges of it, yes, particularly in the impact of Zoraostrian clericalism on Shi'a Islam, but the last distinctly Persian culture was that of the Sassanids.

This is a completely arbitrary statement on your part, in service to your claim that the West is moribund. Can you substantiate it? Iran still has its own language, a separate version of Islam, a state of its own, a recognition of its own history. What more is required to say that a civilization survives? True, the Islamic Republic of Iran is not the Persian Empire of Xerxes, but then, neither is the United Kingdom of Great Britain the England of King Henry II. Yet I don't think you would claim that Britain no longer exists.

One of the things I'm asserting here is that a civilization can often still be recognized across changes in government, religion, economy, and technology. Thus the West can still be called the West even though today it is predominantly industrialized, high-tech, democratic, and multi-faithed rather than, as at its origins, agrarian, backwards, feudal and monarchic, and solidly Catholic. To some extent that's arbitrary on my part, although I think I can make a good case for it.

China has been saved repeatedly by its geography.

This is true, and it is in part geography that gives China its peculiar character. And yet:

Opportunistic barbarians did periodically sweep down upon a crumbling Chinese state, but they did so at a slow enough pace and in small enough numbers for the imperial bureaucracy to assimilate them into the ruling class

That does not describe the invasion of China by the Mongols, who killed almost the whole population of the northern half of the country, in order to turn Chinese farmland into pastureland for their herds!

I'll grant you that China's geography, consisting of very fertile river valleys surrounded by inhospitable terrain, has on the whole given the country an advantage. (Also a disadvantage, in that it has led to insularity.) But that is not a whole explanation. You are making civilizations out to be far more fragile that history attests.

[The West] is collapsing precisely because it has stopped growing.

But the West was not growing for more than half its history. From the coronation of Charlemagne until the Renaissance, Catholic Europe was a backwards, near-barbarous culture that could be called "civilized" only because it did possess the bare essentials of that state (cities and a written language). It only "grew" during the period from the fifteenth century to the present -- and I contend that it's still growing, because the West's cultural influence is huge, and continues to turn more and more foreign cultures into imitations of itself. That's one of the reasons for the hostility of radical Islam, after all.

When Hadrian marked the final borders of the Empire, Roman civilization began immediately to decline because it could no longer draw on the appropriated wealth of newly conquered provinces to finance its armies and infrastructure.

That process effectively stopped with Augustus, it didn't wait for Hadrian. Even Julius Caesar had planned to stabilize and end the period of conquests once he polished off the Kingdom of the Parthians and took their treasure. Augustus abandoned the war against the Parthians and took the Egyptian treasure instead, but otherwise kept with the program. Roman expansion took place almost entirely under the Republic, yet the Republic lasted from 510 to 23 BCE (487 years), while the Empire lasted from 23 BCE until 1453 (1,476 years, or more than three times as long).

It even lasted 1,315 years after the death of Hadrian.

Once again: I'll agree that the West (and indeed the world) face great challenges today. I'll agree that it's possible we'll screw the pooch and enter a new Dark Age (if our species survives at all). I'll agree the danger is dire. But there's no cause that I can see to believe as you believe, that we're doomed.

*BUNP*

I never liked Spengler's theory of history; it's too deterministic, simplistic, and mired in Spengler's own ideological and philisophical biases. Toynbee's model is much more flexible and it's concepts (challenge and response, withdrawl and return, the suicideness of millitarism, idolization of institutions, social schism, spiritual schism, universal religions as chrystalises, etc.) are empirically grounded at least decent sociology and cultural anthropology. Spenger's model, on the other hand, stinks of a form of 19th century German-style Idealism.

Yeah, and as I recall that Jesus guy showed up to speak Truth to Power.

But the next One will have plenty of kind words for the American Empire, or no?

Do you suppose he'll enjoy death by lethal injection, or will we have brought back stoning by then? Maybe one of our Legions will finish the job before he's declared an "enemy combatant". As you know "it's fun to kill some people."

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Even the master scholar of the 'declinist' view, Oswald Spengler, argued that the West has 5 to 7 centuries left, if it follows the pattern of Classical Mediterranean and Classical Chinese culture. Even the 'world empire' phase is not totally dead, and it's during this period that the seeds for the future are often laid, even in the declinist view.

I'm of the opinion that the universal empire phase will begin at the end of the next saeculum in 2100. This universal empire will evolve from a global federation into a multi-planetary federation as the solar system is colonized, and will break up around 2600, with people who colonized the Oort Cloud and other star systems playing the role of the "barbarians."

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

If we consider Sumer and Akkad to have been separate civilizations, then Sumer lasted from (somewhat arbitrarily) the founding of Uruk in about 3750 BCE until the rise of Sargon's empire in 2334, or about 1400 years. If we consider them to be a single civilzation, then extend that lifespan until invading Semitic peoples founded the Babylonian culture about 2000 BCE, which extends the Sumer-Akkad duration another 300 years or thereabouts.

Sumer and Akkad were both part of the Sumeric Civilization according to Toynbee

The Babylonian-Chaldean culture rose and fell a number of times, but fell for the final time when conquered by Cyrus of Persia in 530 BCE, giving it a duration of 1470 years by the most generous estimate.

The Old Babylonian Empire of Hammurabi was the terminal phase of the Sumeric universal empire. After the collapse of the empire Indo-European peoples came in and scavanged it's carcass the way the Germans scavanged on Rome. The Kassites, Assyrians, and Chaldeans were part of the sucessor of the Sumeric, what Toynbee called the Babylonic civilization. The Assyrians caused the premature death of the Babylonic Civilization by their polcy of forced resettling of conquered peoples, many of these peoples were from a neighboring civilization, the Syriac Civilization of the Levant.

The Persian civilization should date from the migration of the Persians and Medes into the region around 2000 BCE. It still flourishes. Although Iran today is a Muslim country and therefore could arguably be submerged into the civilization of Islam, it is sufficiently conscious of its own long history, and sufficiently distinct from the Arab-dominated Islamic mainline culture, having its own language and collective identity, that it should be considered separate. So -- this civilization has already lasted some 4000 years and is still going.

Iran only had a seperate civilization in the minds of nationalistic Iranians.According to Toynbee Ancent Persia was part of the Syriac Civilization, which absorbed the Babylonic Civilization after the Achamaenids consolidated thier power over the Middle East. The Hellenic instrusion started under Alexander the Great and continued by the Romans put the Syriac Civilization in a state of suspended animation (with the Parthians and Sassinids acting as a quasi-universal empire) untill the Arabs fully restored the Syriac universal empire, allowing that civilization's life cycle to complete itself when the Caliphate collapsed. The Islamic Civilization rose outr of the ashes of the Syriac.

The Egyptian civilization was founded about the same time as Sumer or a little later -- say 3000 BCE. It endured until the conquest of Egypt by Rome in 31 BCE, so that means Egypt endured for about 3,000 years, or close enough.

According to Toynbee the Middle Kingdonm was the normal universal empire phase of the Egyptiac Civilization and the New Kingdom period and afterward was a kind of "necromanced" universal empire produced that was the result of an extremely volitile reaction to the Hyksos invaders. I disagree with Toynbee here, I think that during the New Empire and the period afterward Egypt was part of the Syriac Civilization

The Greco-Roman civilization began with the Mycenaean period in ancient Greece (roughly 1600 BCE) and ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE, a period of about 3,000 years.

The Mycenean Greeks were part of the Minoan-Mycenean civilization which collpased around 1200BC, ushering in the Greek Dark Ages. Hellenic Civilization arose out of the Greek Dark Ages around 800BC. Hellenic Civilization collpased in the West in 410, in the east it evolved into the Byzantine Orthodox Christan Civilization, which was absorbed by the West and Islam upon the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The Chinese civilization was founded somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 BCE and endures to this date, so like Persia, it is 4,000 years old and still going.

China is 2 sucessive sivilizations, a pre-buddhist (Shamg, Zhou, Chin, and Han dynasties) and a Buddhist one (all later dynasties and the PRC). Thier next 4T should mark the end of China as a seperate civilization.

The West should properly be dated, in my judgment, from one of two events: the fall of the last western Roman emperor, or the coronation of Charlemagne. I'm going to choose the latter, which would date the West from 800 CE. It still exists, and therefore has endured for 1,204 years.

I mark the start of Western Civilization with the alliance between the Papacy and the Franks in 754.