What's the world's oldest civilization?

Over the last thousand years, many civilizations have fallen. Which is the oldest?

The question seemed to have a simple answer. The oldest civilization in the Mesopotamia region was around 4,000 B.C. and is now mostly Iraq. The ancient city of Sumer was located a few miles south of the modern city of Kut. The earliest phase of the Sumerians is called the Uruk period, after the city of Uruk, where many of the oldest artifacts were found.

Evidence uncovered in the past few decades shows that the Sumerians have a few competitors for the title of oldest civilization.

What is the oldest known archaeological site?

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The definition of what makes a civilization is vague, but generally a culture has to achieve several hallmarks, including urbanism, irrigation and writing. After about 2000 B.C., the Sumerian civilization led to the Babylonian civilization in Mesopotamia, which is credited with discovering mathematical truths such as prime, square and cube numbers.

According to an American historian, the Sumerians may have invented religion by building towering temples called ziggurats in their cities and establishing priestly castes dedicated to the ritual worship of specific deities. The god of the sky was popular in early Uruk, while the god of the storm was worshiped in SUMER. Her worship spread to other Mesopotamian cities, where she was known as Ishtar, and may have influenced the goddesses of the Hittites.

The story of Noah, who built an ark filled with animals to protect his family during a great flood, is related to the story of the epic of Gilgamesh. The Hebrew version was written centuries before the Sumerian one, according to archaeologists.

Some scholars think that other civilization may be older than the Sumerians. Philip Jones is the associate curator and keeper of collections at the Babylonian section of the Penn Museum.

Archaeologists haven't been able to access many Mesopotamian sites because of the war and unrest in Iraq, but Egyptologists have kept digging, Jones said. The oldest phase of the ancient Egyptian civilization emerged roughly the same time as the earliest phase of the Sumerian civilization, which is about 4,000 B.C.

The earliest artifacts found in Afghanistan, Pakistan and northwestern India show that the civilization known as the Indus Valley existed from 3300 B.C. Jones said that they may find early stuff in the valley. I wouldn't be surprised if we found something just as early.

He thinks there was some trade networking going on in the Indian Ocean.

It was originally published on Live Science