It's not until the 3rd century BCE, after the unification of Qin, that we have evidence of the Greek world — now Rome's world, really — being fully aware of the existence of a civilization in what is now China.
Greek philosophy and art left an impression on India in the conqueror's wake. Previously, there was no evidence of interaction between ancient Greece and China. We have known of some contact between the Roman Empire and the Middle Kingdom in the second and third centuries, CE.
Ancient. Ancient Chinese people had contact with the Indo-Greeks. Dayuan (meaning "Great Ionians"), was described in the Chinese historical works of Records of the Grand Historian and the Book of Han.
According to records, the Greek scholar Ctesias [who lived in the 5th century BCE] was the first to call China “Seres,” meaning “the country of silk.” Apparently, the Greeks used the Chinese silk they saw to refer to ancient China.
Ancient Greece and the later Roman Empire had a vague understanding of China, but lacked cultural and geographical awareness. Their cognition of China basically stayed at a level commensurate with material exchange, and even this material exchange was mainly conducted via Persian and Indian intermediaries.
But the oldest written language that is still in actual use would probably be Chinese, which first appeared around 1500BC… although ancient Greek also appeared in a specific written form around the same time.
Travelers and explorers. The Greek explorer Scylax, in about 515 BC, was sent by King Darius I of Persia to follow the course of the Indus River and discover where it led. Nearchus, described India and the people living there.
The first contact between the Chinese and the Greeks of Central Asia took place during the time of the independent Greco-Bactrian kingdom. That contact was made through Xinjiang, also known as Dogu (East) Turkestan and Gansu.
Marco Polo, the famous explorer who familiarized China to Europe in the 13th century CE, referred to the land as 'Cathay. In Mandarin Chinese, the country is known as 'Zhongguo' meaning "central state" or "middle empire".
The existence of China was known to Roman cartographers, but their understanding of it was less certain. Ptolemy's 2nd-century AD Geography separates the Land of Silk (Serica) at the end of the overland Silk Road from the land of the Qin (Sinae) reached by sea.
Europeans in China. Marco Polo (1254–1324) was one of the earliest Europeans to visit China—though he was not the first (Friars John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck both reached China in the middle of the thirteenth century).
It is estimated that at present the total number of Asians in Greece amounts to no less than 130,000. In their large majority, Asian migrants are low-qualified and low-cost workers in various sectors of the Greek economy: agriculture, construction, industry, trade and services.
Polo's 13th Century journey to China was the first to be well-documented. However, Chinese historians recorded much earlier visits by people thought by some to have been emissaries from the Roman Empire during the Second and Third Centuries AD.
The possibility that the Chinese copied the invention from the Egyptians has been ruled out as these two ancient civilizations had no contact with each other at this stage. Back then, traveling merchants and couriers were capable of bridging enormous distances of up to 3,000 kilometers.
So the answer to if the Chinese and Romans knew of each other is yes, but what they knew was really vague second-hand information. The Chinese knew the Romans wanted their silk, and the Romans knew they produced silk, but there was almost no direct contact between the two empires.
There are two civilizations that were established in “Before Christ” (B.C.) out of many, they were Greece and China. Greece was established around 2000 B.C. by the Mycenaean and China was established around the 21st century B.C. which was the Xia Dynasty.
The empire was sometimes referred to as Great Qing but increasingly as Zhongguo (see the discussion below). Dulimbai Gurun is the Manchu name for China, with "Dulimbai" meaning "central" or "middle," and "Gurun" meaning "nation" or "state."
With more than four thousand years of recorded history, China is the world's oldest continuous civilization. The largest country in Asia, China stretches from the continent's eastern seaboard to the borders of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakstan in the west.
The evidence point to Homo erectus as the first. In fact, the relatively longer legs of this species than in earlier hominins may also signal this is species was the first human ancestor capable of ranging over a wide geographic area.
Now, ancient DNA suggests that living Greeks are indeed the descendants of Mycenaeans, with only a small proportion of DNA from later migrations to Greece.
They all were born, not in what is now modern Greece, but rather in Asia Minor. The ancient Greeks of Asia Minor were crucial to the development of Western poetry, prose, history, medicine, philosophy, and science. Indeed, they were the first great thinkers of antiquity.
Mediterranean Encounters: Greeks, Carians, and Egyptians in the First Millennium BC. The Late Bronze Age was a time of vibrant contact and exchange between Egypt and the world of Mycenaean Greece.
There are many other countries out there that are older than Indian, even though it is one of the oldest countries out there in the world. What are the 10 oldest countries? Egypt, Iran, Armenia, China, Japan, Ethiopia, Greece, Portugal, San Marino, and France are the top 10 oldest countries in the world.
Roman cultural built itself upon the remnants of the much older Greek civilization. Classical Greece began with the Persian Wars in the 5th Century BCE.
Article. The name of India is a corruption of the word Sindhu. Neighbouring Arabs, Iranians uttered's' as 'h' and called this land Hindu. Greeks pronounced this name as Indus.