lpetrich

There's a curious apologetic argument that I've occasionally seen, that the Jews are the oldest ethnicity that is continuous to the present day, and that therefore the Bible is divinely inspired.

This is rather bad reasoning, and Judaism and the Jewish community have changed significantly over the centuries. The present-day State of Israel, often cited as a prophecy fulfillment, is not ruled by a king who is a successor of King David, as it is "supposed" to be, but instead has a completely different form of government.

The next question is when Judaism and Israel began. Though some of the Bible's history is well-corrobrated, notably the Dual-Monarchy period, the earlier parts are not, and the big argument is when the Bible starts becoming reliable history as opposed to nationalistic mythmaking. The Creation, the Patriarchs, the Exodus, and the Conquest are now well established to be pure mythology, and the main argument nowadays is how historical the likes of Kings David and Solomon had been.

Outside the Bible, the first known reference is in Pharaoh Merneptah's Victory Stele, in which "the Majesty of Horus: Mighty Bull, Rejoicing in Maat; the King of Upper and Lower Egypt: Banere-meramun; the Son of Re: Merneptah, Content with Maat, magnified by the power, exalted by the strength of Horus; strong bull who smites the Nine Bows, whose name is given to eternity forever" brags of his victories and other accomplishments, including

The princes are prostrate saying: "Shalom!"
Not one of the Nine Bows lifts his head:
Tjehenu is vanquished, Khatti at peace,
Canaan is captive with all woe.
Ashkelon is conquered, Gezer seized,
Yanoam made nonexistent;
Israel is wasted, bare of seed,
Khor is become a widow for Egypt.
All who roamed have been subdued.
By the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Banere-meramun,
Son of Re, Merneptah, Content with Maat,
Given life like Re every day.

All these conquests but one is marked as a region; the exception, Israel (i-si-ra-ar), is marked as a people, suggesting some nomadic group.

Pharaoh Merneptah had reigned 1213-1203 BCE; after that tiny reference is a big gap until the 8th-7th cys., when we start seeing outside references to the "House of Omri" (the northern kingdom), as Celsus pointed out here.

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But do the Jews have competition? YES! The Greeks and the Chinese.

The Greeks first. While Merneptah's scribes were carving his victory stele, scribes in the Mycenaean Greek palaces of Knossos and Pylos and other places were painstakingly counting up sheep and chariots and cooking pots and so forth. Using the Linear B script, they recorded their counts on clay tablets, of which well over four thousand have survived to the present day, preserved by the burning of the structures that contained them.

Their accounting was comprehensive enough to include offerings to various deities, which include several of the familiar Olympians: Zeus, Athena, Ares, Apollo, Poseidon, Artemis, Hermes, and Dionysus.

Linear B was lost with the Mycenaean palaces, but Mycenaean society was remembered in rather garbled form in Greek mythology. The Iliad mentioned Mycenaean-era technology like bronze armor and boar's-tusk helmets, which had gone out of style, and it mentioned chariots, though only for getting to the front. The composers of this epic had next to no awareness of writing; their only mention of it is in 6:160, in which a certain Prince Bellerophon is given a tablet with "magic signs" that contain a death warrant for him.

The Greeks acquired writing a second time around 800 BCE, borrowing and modifying the Phoenician alphabet; they have had that writing system ever since. Greece was a set of independent city-states until Philip of Macedon conquered it in the 300's BCE; the Macedonian kingdoms were conquered by Rome in the 100's BCE. But despite these conquests, they continued to speak Greek and otherwise maintain their Greek heritage. This continued even after the split of the Roman Empire and the fall of the western half, where they continued to call themselves Romans all the way to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1543. Greek ethnic identity stayed submerged under Ottoman rule, until Greece became an independent nation in the 19th century.

But how far backwards can we probe? The Mycenaeans are continuous back to about 1900 BCE (beginning of "Middle Helladic"), when there were disruptions that were likely due to the invasion of the first Greek-speakers from the north. So is Greek ethnicity 4000 years old?

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Now to Chinese. Its writing system is continuous to 1500 BCE, and it is first found in "oracle bones" used for divination. This is in the Shang Dynasty (1600 - 1000 BCE), and some of the oracle bones' text supports a later account of it, Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian.

Looking back further, Sima Qian describes a Xia dynasty that started at about 2000 BCE, but archeological evidence is scanty.

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So the Greek and Chinese ethnic identities are older than the Jewish one.

And to return to the original theological argument, does that mean that we ought to worship the Olympians? Or the legendary Yellow Emperor (Huang Di)?

Anat

The Basques are descendants of a pre-Indo-European invasion group, and some think they are direct offspring of the original H sapiens settlers of Europe, some 30,000 years ago.

The Ainu have probably split off from the ancestors of most east-Asians prior to the emergence of the physical characteristics shared by these groups.

mopc

The "hebrews" or "israelis" of the Bible were probably (if not fictional) just a "sect" with no specific ethicity, and which adopted Hebrew probably only after the supposed escape from Egypt. There wasnt even a Hebrew language, the Israelis just went into an area which spoke a west Semitic language called Canaanite and their subsequent dialect of it was called Hebrew. That was by 1100 bC. By 600 bC they once again moved to another area, Mesopotamia, then adopting Aramaic all the way until the diaspora era beginning in 70 aC.

premjan

khoi san?

Diogenes the Cynic

The oldest continuous culture/ethnicity in the world is probably Australian Aboriginal Culture which is at least 40,000 years old and may be as old as 60,000.

Apikorus

Sure, but they still can't make a decent latke.

premjan

but what about didgeridoos and boomerangs?

RED DAVE

From Apikorus:
Wrong. Australian Aborigines make some of the finest latkes in the world. It is rumored that they actually originated the use of sour cream (from kangaroo milk).

RED DAVE

Apikorus

Oy! Everyone knows you put applesauce on latkes.

lpetrich

All that aside, I wish to give some examples of the opposite; regions with long written histories that have nevertheless had great changes in ethnic identity. Egypt and Iraq are the two most obvious examples.

Egypt's first 2500 years of written history, its Pharaonic era, had a good degree of cultural contiuity -- religion, government style, writing system, you name it.

But most of its next 2500 years were spent under a series of foreign regimes, and the cultural legacy of the Pharaonic era was gradually forgotten. After Alexander the Great's conquests, Greek became widely used, though enough of Egyptian history was remembered for Manetho to write about it in gory detail. But the hieroglyphics gradually became used only for religious purposes only, and they became forgotten after Xian Byzantine Emperors forcibly suppressed non-Xian religions. The Egyptian language became written in a modification of the Greek alphabet, and after the Arab conquests, it survived only as the Coptic Church's liturgical language -- Egyptians ended up speaking Arabic and mostly converting to Islam.

And Iraq has had a similarly long history, with its earlier ethnicities, like Suermian and Akkadian and Assyrian and Babylonian, being long gone.

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As to possible archeological evidence of Jewish ethnicity, there is the curious circumstance of the rarity of pig bones in the northern-kingdom highlands area in Iron I times (1000 BCE and after) as opposed to earlier times. So a long-time Jewish tradition, the wickedness of eating pork, may be 3000 years old.

The early Middle East had some periods of extended drought that caused migrations and the collapses of several empires, notably one around 2100 BCE and one around 1200-1000 BCE. These events depopulated the highlands areas of Israel; they were resettled when the climate improved. And it was the resettlement of 1000 BCE where the pig-bone abundance drops, and not earlier ones.

Some details of those events.

The 2100-BCE event caused the downfall of Egypt's Old Kingdom and Iraq's Kingdom of Sumer and Akkad; Iraq was conquered by Guti invaders from the nearby Zagros Mountains.

The 1200-1000-BCE event caused the migrations of "Sea Peoples" whom the Egyptians defeated, though the Egyptians lost their New-Kingdom Israel-Lebanon empire. However, the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittites were less fortunate; the Mycenaean palace society was destroyed, as was the Hittite Empire. The Mycenaeans were half-remembered in Greek mythology, but the Hittites were forgotten until they were unearthed over the last century.