For people whose age is too short, the issues of life and death of the civilization in which they were destined to be born and live are not very relevant. Hence the common phrase - "after us, even a flood!"
We do not think about what will become of the world and the culture of which we were a part of 70–80 years, say, in five hundred or a thousand years. This, by and large, does not concern us.
But the question of how long individual civilizations live is still very interesting. Scientists, philosophers and even astrologers call different numbers, but they agree on one thing - sooner or later any civilization completes its life cycle and dies.
They're all dead
“Until now, no less than sixteen of twenty-six cultures have already died and were buried,” - this is how the English culturologist Arnold Toynbee described the past of mankind so simply and categorically in his work “Comprehension of History”.
Among these "dead" can be called the most famous: Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Hellenic, Ancient Iranian, Etruscan, Ancient Roman, Hittite, Babylonian, Ancient Indian, civilizations of the Aztecs, Maya and Incas …
Almost all of them went through the same path of development: they emerged from nothing, developed rapidly and reached an unprecedented prosperity, and then experienced decline and perished, or "rotted alive" after the conquest by other peoples.
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However, thanks to archaeological excavations and other material sources, these dead cultures after millennia exist at least "virtually". A kind of living dead - "zombie civilization". But how many cultures of distant antiquity were buried without a trace? We hardly ever know about them at all.
All this, of course, is sad, but inevitable: any civilization is born, develops, flourishes, goes through a period of decline and dies. Sometimes death occurs before a period of decline, for example, as a result of a natural disaster (the myth of Atlantis and the real death of the Minoan civilization in Crete is a vivid proof of this) or the invasion of conquerors destroying everything and everyone in its path - the invasion of the Dorians at the end of the Bronze Age destroyed the developed Mycenaean civilization on the same Crete and doomed Greece to the "dark ages".
Death or Transformation?
It also happens that the territory of a civilization remains the same, its monuments, cultural objects and cities are preserved, but the civilization itself is replaced: the old one dies, and a completely new one grows in its “culturally fertilized” place.
The history of Byzantium is an excellent illustration of this: the pagan Eastern part of the Roman Empire - Orthodox Byzantium - Muslim Ottoman Empire of the Seljuk Turks. If you look even further in search of an example, then the history of Ancient Egypt will be the most revealing: Ancient Egyptian civilization - Hellenistic Egypt - Arab Egypt today. The Spanish conquistadors destroyed and destroyed the Inca civilization in South America, and a Christian civilization arose on the territory of the sunken Inca Empire.
If civilization happily escaped the violent destruction and invasion of other peoples, then its death most often resembles a transformation - it simply outlives itself, is reborn, becomes completely different. This is how the civilization of the harsh Middle Ages in Western Europe was transformed, smoothly and without shocks passing into the Renaissance.
The same can be said about Ancient Rus. The reforms of Peter I, of course, greatly shook medieval Muscovy, but they also served as the reason for the transformation of ancient Russian civilization. Russia remained in place, the Russians as a nation did not disappear, but at the same time it was already Russia, where the “new Russians” lived …
The language, by the way, perfectly reflects such a gentle transformation of civilization. How many of us, today's Russians, are now capable of speaking in Old Russian?
Life cycle
Can civilization avoid death and even transformation? "Not!" - culturologists, historians and futurologists unanimously assert. The reason is simple: any civilization is a living organism, and a living one is not immortal and is doomed to death. Death is inherent in birth, and civilization is no exception. It's just that in comparison with the human age, they live much longer.
But how much exactly? There are many hypotheses. For example, the same Arnold Toynbee and with him Arthur Spengler argued that approximately 1000 years pass from the moment of civilization to its death.
Lev Gumilev, who created the theory of passionarity and ethnogenesis, believed that civilizations live for about 1200-1500 years. After this period, civilization ceases to exist or degenerates, and a great and powerful ethnos drags out a miserable existence already within another civilization and, as a rule, on the outskirts of history.
For example, let's remember what the greatest civilization of Ancient Greece was thousands of years ago and what Greece is now. Or the same Rome: it still stands, but this is not at all the Rome where Caesar, Octavian Augustus or Nero ruled. And this is no longer a state in general, but just the capital of Italy …
A unique phenomenon is the civilization of Ancient Egypt, whose history spans 40 centuries, that is, four thousand years. Ancient Egypt is perceived by most of us as a single civilization. But it is not for nothing that historians divide it into the Early, Ancient, Middle and New kingdoms.
Each of them existed for about a thousand and a half years, and the fact that the Egyptians from the Middle Kingdom had absolutely no idea what was in the Ancient Kingdom, and made trips to the pyramids as a tourist excursion, suggests that they already lived in a completely another ancient Egyptian civilization. And the Egyptians of the New Kingdom generally had difficulty imagining what their early history was, and in this respect they were not much different from us.
That is, we can say that approximate figures of 1000-1500 years are quite suitable for calculating the age of life of any civilization, no matter how developed it is.
Maryana Vovk