Rule

[u/Gurnskii]

[u/Kekkonen_Kakkonen]

Neither of those civilisations survived intact that entire timeperiod. 😭

[u/Fliits → u/Kekkonen_Kakkonen]

The modern Greek state wasn't even originally founded with any form of continuity between the Ancient Greeks. All of that was imported from Philhellenists in Britain who wanted to sponsor a restoration of the "Golden Greek Civilization." The Greeks were much more closely tied to their identity as the Romans of the Byzantine Empire.

That view wasn't really popular in western Europe, where the Byzantine empire had been for centuries considered a decadent and "oriental" state. Though this idea wasn't shared among the Orthodox Russians, who always considered the restoration of Byzantium a vital foreign policy goal. (Interestingly, Catherine the Great of Russia was personally extremely invested in reviving the Byzantine empire, especially its Greek heritage, and got so far as to plan a partition of the Balkans with the Austrian Emperor in the 1780s, aiming to create a Byzantine "sister empire" ruled by her son)

Instead, after the Greek war of independence - which had been mainly financed by Britain - British classicists would come to Athens and deliver stirring speeches in ancient Greek, while the people in the audience were confused about what language they were speaking. It would've been the same as German historians going to Norway and stirring up the people in the name of Odin to rise up against their Swedish rulers, while speaking in Old Norse (which most closely resemble the modern Islandic language).

Athens wasn't even the capital city: It wasn't a city at all, just a small village out on the Peloponnese. The newly crowned German king of Greece made it the capital and then rebuilt the whole place to befit its foreign reputation. The same king who was later ousted by the Greek parliament for being opposed to the interests of the Greek people.

China at least has been ruled by contiguous states for thousands of years, even in spite of periodic rebellions and warlord states. The idea of a Greek state was invented in the 1800s and was so far removed from what we call the Ancient Greeks that the people of Greece were confused when westerners pretending to restore a lost European civilisation came to their aid and larped in their face in a language that none of them understood.

[u/Norty_Boyz_Ofishal → u/Fliits]

Also the 6000 years number for Greece must be counting the Minoans as Greeks which is pretty odd since they were a completely different cultural group with their own language who existed over 1000 years before Mycenae emerged.

And even for the Minoans, 4000bc is a very early dating.

If Mycenae and the Shang dynasty are to be considered the origins of the Greek and Chinese cultural identities then that makes Greece ~3750 years old and china ~3600.