Was There a Civilization Before Ancient Egypt? | Unveiled

Was There a Civilization Before Ancient Egypt?

When we think of ancient civilizations, we might picture Egypt as something of a starting point for all to follow. The Egyptians were so successful and ingenious that it can seem like they kinda wrote the rulebook when it comes to organizing humans into a functioning society. But is that really how it was?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; was there a civilization before Ancient Egypt?

Ancient Egypt is not only one of the oldest civilizations in the world, it’s also one of the most impressive. There are many - usually smaller - organized groups across history, but ultimately Egyptian culture has proven to be so rich and awe-inspiring that it’s created for itself an entirely separate branch of academic study, called Egyptology. There’s just so much to learn about the era and the people.

That’s not to say that we know all they knew, however. Many of the building techniques used in Ancient Egypt, for example, including for the iconic pyramids, remain something of a mystery - as we found out in a previous video! Although, there’s some argument that this mystery may have been intentional, as the Egyptians seemingly left nothing by way of a clear record describing how they achieved many of their most spectacular feats. Which means that today, thousands of years later, we’re still scratching our heads over some of it.

Ancient Egypt first developed as a civilization around the year 3100 BCE, and it stood as one the world’s leading examples of social cohesion for some thirty centuries after that. For more than three thousand years. However, despite Egypt’s general image as an inspiration for all civilization, it’s not usually held to be the first recorded, advanced society that humanity ever created. Broadly, historians and anthropologists list a couple of key features required for a given group to upgrade to the status of civilization. They need to be (to some degree) settled, they need advanced social features (like a government, perhaps), and they need developing technology of some kind - with a system of writing often held to be especially important.

In short, then, there were other civilizations around at the same time and even before Ancient Egypt. One was the Indus Valley Civilization, which formed in Asia, around 3300 BCE, a couple hundred years before the rise of Egypt. And, while there can be some disagreement over precisely when various civilizations established themselves, there’s research to suggest that Indus Valley could be thousands of years older than even that… putting it potentially even further back in time.

It existed across a massive area stretching from modern day Afghanistan, to Pakistan, and India, making it notably larger than most other ancient empires, including Egypt’s. In its prime, Indus Valley had at least one thousand towns and cities, which were home to more than five million people. It’s credited with developing, amongst other things, early water and drainage systems, brick houses, an ever-crucial writing system, and a standardization of weights and measures to ensure that society ran smoothly. As the Egyptians also did with the Nile, the people of the Indus Valley owed much of their success to their strategy of building along a major river, the Indus River.

Even older than the Indus Valley, however, is Mesopotamia - a sprawling civilization made up of multiple major groups, including the Sumerians and Akkadians. Mesopotamia arose on fertile land in the Middle East, across modern day countries including Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey, and Syria, sometime around 3500 BCE. As well as being potentially the oldest ever civilization, ancient Mesopotamia also developed what’s generally thought of as the first ever writing system - by using clay blocks for dedicated record keeping. In addition to its apparent invention of writing, Mesopotamia is also credited with inventing the wheel, the first maps, and the first boats, as well as the first ever means by which to measure time.

The Indus Valley and Mesopotamia civilizations are both thought to have emerged a few hundred years earlier than the ancient Egyptians, then, but were there any confirmed groups before even them that we’ve yet to discover? We certainly know of smaller groups that formed in earlier periods, such as the Jiahu settlement in China, which has been tentatively dated back to the year 7000 BCE… although the numbers of people involved there only reached into the hundreds, rather than the multi-millions as seen in Egypt.

There are other structures and stories that more severely (or more famously) call the mainstream narrative of human civilization into question, too. The legend of Atlantis is perhaps the most well-known example of a tale of a bygone age. If it were true, then the Atlanteans will’ve existed sometime around ten to twelve thousand years ago - around the year 10,000 BCE. But, of course, the Atlantis story is still widely held to be more allegory than a true record of past events. And, in fact, some explanations for the story’s origins trace it back to a myth told in Egypt, which eventually found its way to the ears of the Greek philosopher and chief Atlantis purveyor, Plato.

In terms of physical evidence for a later civilization, however, the mysterious megalith site, Göbekli Tepe, lays down perhaps the strongest challenge to Egypt and Mesopotamia regarding age. Göbekli Tepe is a massive archeological site in modern day Turkey, and it’s home to the oldest known stone megaliths in existence, thought to date back as far as the year 9500 BCE. We’re now thousands of years before even the beginnings of Ancient Egypt, then. The megaliths feature carved images, too, seeming to show things like clothed people, animals roaming the land, and perhaps even religious practices of the time. Researchers are still debating whether Göbekli Tepe can yet be classified as evidence of anotherwhole civilization, though. So much about it remains unknown, and only a small percentage of the site has been excavated. Stone tools have been found, and possible workshops close to the megaliths, but this could still have been just one small and isolated community, rather than one part of a wider civilization. If Göbekli Tepe is ever confirmed to have been part of something bigger, though, that something could emerge as the new “oldest civilization in history”.

We haven’t yet mentioned the far more unconventional theories, out there, however. One such theory - or one such thought experiment, at least - comes from space scientists Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank. They created the Silurian Hypothesis in an effort to stoke the debate on whether other, non-human civilizations could’ve developed on Earth before ours did. The general thinking is that if the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, which it is, and human civilizations of any kind have only been around for just a few thousand years of that time… well, in the grand scheme of things, we’ve barely made an imprint. The Silurian Hypothesis non-committedly asks us, then, to imagine a civilization that might’ve hypothetically lived not thousands of years ago, but hundreds of millions of years ago.

In all likelihood, we would never be able to uncover any evidence of such a group today, in the here and now… with Earth’s tectonic and geological activity burying and recycling it over time. The Silurian Hypothesis leads us to wonder, then; how can we be sure about a past that might’ve been lost to us? It’s a line of thought that’s also inspired ideas like the infamous Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which proposes that a comet struck Earth some 12,800 years ago - supposedly wiping out an advanced civilization at the time, and serving as something of a reset button for life on Earth. The theory isn’t widely supported by conventional scientists or historians, though.

What’s clear is that our picture of the past, while it’s thought of as reasonably reliable, is subject to change. History can’t be rewritten, of course, but our understanding of it can be reshaped. And so, it could yet be that we’re missing something truly substantial. Consider our current understanding of the dinosaurs. It’s improving all the time, but it remains patchy at best. And that’s despite the fact that the dinosaurs - these giant creatures - roamed the Earth only sixty-six million years ago (a blink of an eye compared to the full age of our planet). They were also on Earth for some 165 million years before they died (which is far, far longer than humans have been here for, so far). But we’re still so limited on what we can learn, even about the dinosaurs.

Dissecting the route we’ve taken toward contemporary society and civilisation is, then, an extremely tricky task. Perhaps it’s no wonder that so many eye-catching theories have been thrown into the mix. But, even if we stay within the realms of just the most widely supported science, history, and archeology, we know that Ancient Egypt was never out on its own. Certainly, it’s one of the oldest civilizations we know about, and a forerunner for so much of human progress, but there were others alongside it, and most likely before it. And, research pending, there could yet be even older groups, too.