On April 29th, an event themed “Development and Inheritance: Dialogue Among Greek and Chinese Languages and Civilizations” to celebrate the UN Chinese Language Day was successfully held in Athens.
The event was jointly held by the Embassy of the People’s Repubic of China in the Hellenic Republic together with the Center of Greek and Chinese Ancient Civilizations, to provide a platform to scholars from the two countries to share their wisdom and knowledge on topics of Ancient and Modern language studies, the Origin of the Civilizations, the Sustainable Development global civilization initiative,etc.
Through speeches and mini lectures, scholars of the two countries held dialogues on various topics.
Prof. Ioannis Liritzis presented the topic of “Parallel Cradles of Civilization: The example between the Lower Yangtze River and Aegean Sea in the third millennium BC”.
Prof. Liritzis emphasized the cultural and archaeological comparison which is a small but vital step towards providing Sino- Hellenic studies much-needed material and environmental contexts and approaches.
In this short talk he presenting an exemplary case study between two cultural cradles of our countries: The Liangzhu, dating to the third millennium BC, is firmly a society of the Late Neolithic Age in China (3000 – 2000 BC) and is contemporaneous with the Early Bronze Age Mycenaean or Helladic civilizations on the Greek mainland (3200/3100–2050/2001 BC), the Cycladic on the islands (2700–2160 BC), and the Minoan Civilization in Crete (3300–2000 BC).
In the current trend of Sino-Hellenic and archaeological comparisons, academic interest remains low while public interest has consistently grown. Beyond needing to mend this discrepancy between scientific output and preoccupations and public interests, most Sino-Hellenic comparisons focus on classical-era texts and arts of Imperial Dynastic China and Antiquity.
As far as archaeological comparisons between the body of work involving prehistoric societies of China and Greece, there are virtually no substantial published works available beyond the general methods and approaches. Thus, while Sino-Hellenic comparisons enjoy a degree of interest through studies of philosophical and scientific τρίτεσεσ-treatises, archaeological interest in comparison has remained narrowly focused on pan-humanist attempts to find normative laws of human behaviour.
Prof. Liritzis ended this speech saying that both the Liangzhu and Cycladic cultures bequeathed us with marvels of human achievements. As a human heritage, then, our recommendation is that with the use of new digital technologies, we can support the research, interpretation, dissemination, reconstruction of this heritage.
Property, cultural tourism and ecological protection, ought to be integrated appropriately, to create a sustainable relationship between archaeological site development, protection and display with the economic development of a region.
The example of the Yuhang District, Hangzhou City and the Cyclades, are both, cases where development and sustainability in the interface between energy, tourism and cultural management must be developed.
The Liangzhu and Cycladic cultures are each milestone in world cultural heritage, and the further analysis of their material culture as well as environmental data mining, are both knowledge-based methodologies for new discoveries. The obtained data of such applications to current material culture or in the revealing and documentation of new buried antiquities, with proper cultural heritage management are inextricably linked to sustainability.
