China News Service, Beijing, October 1. Question: How can two ancient civilizations truly understand each other?
China News Service reporter Han Yu
From September 28th to 30th, the "World Dialogue on China Studies·Arab Countries Special" event was held in Cairo, Egypt.
It is the right place to discuss "Chinese studies" and carry out extensive dialogue at the important site of ancient Egyptian civilization, which is conducive to integration and mutual learning.
China and Egypt are often referred to as ancient civilizations. However, civilizations that are "equally ancient" do not directly mean that they must understand each other deeply, let alone truly understand each other naturally.
The current deepening and solidification of China-Egypt civilization exchanges and "reaching higher levels" are due to the accumulation of thousands of years of history and the foundation of long time and space. The depth has experienced continuous advancement, the superposition of layers, and the accumulation of thickness. This laid a solid foundation for a deep and true understanding of each other.
The initial encounter consisted in the circulation of objects and people.
According to history, there was a circulation of artifacts before direct exchanges between China and Egypt in ancient times. In the early 1990s, Austrian scholars discovered silk fiber residues while studying ancient Egyptian mummies in Thebes. China was the only producer of silkworm silk in the world at that time. This shows that before Zhang Qian’s passage to the Western Regions, there may have been trade links spanning thousands of kilometers between China and Egypt.
In 751 AD, during the Battle of Talos, Du Huan, a military official of the Tang Dynasty, was captured. For more than ten years, he received preferential treatment, traveled to Central Asia, West Asia and North Africa, and wrote down his experiences. In his keynote speech at the event, Ge Jianxiong mentioned that Du Huan was the first Chinese to arrive in Egypt with clear historical records.
In the exchange of artifacts and people, cultural exchanges become a two-way creative process. A considerable proportion of the native Egyptian pottery unearthed at the Fustat site in Cairo, Egypt, imitated Chinese ceramics in terms of craftsmanship, glaze color or decoration. The "Black Stone" that sank near Indonesia in the 9th century carried more than 60,000 pieces of Tang Dynasty ceramics, some of which have absorbed patterns and designs from West Asia. After Egyptian spices, gold and silver utensils were introduced to China, they also affected Chinese people's lives and the style of utensils. It is in this long process that mutual recognition and understanding of each other is gradually formed, from initial acquaintance to in-depth understanding.
Deepening mutual understanding lies in direct mutual reading that goes beyond paraphrasing.
In 1931, the first batch of Chinese students were sent to study at Al-Azhar University in Egypt. Among them was Ma Jian, who later became an important scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies in China.
In the 1950s, Ain Shams University in Egypt took the lead in cultivating Chinese talents in classes, which marked the beginning of Chinese higher education in Egypt and even the Arab world.
Today, Egypt has 36 colleges and universities with Chinese departments or Chinese majors, and Chinese has been included in the Egyptian national education system.
The increase in quantity is only one of the symptoms. More importantly, the relationship between knowledge has changed.
Egyptian sinologist Hassenin Fahmi Hussein, a guest at this event, recalled that in the early years when Arab readers came into contact with Chinese literature, many works needed to be translated into English, French, etc., but now more and more are directly translated from Chinese into Arabic. Hasenin Fahmy Hussein, who has translated works such as Mo Yan's "Red Sorghum Family" and Yu Hua's "Xu Sanguan Sells Blood", therefore advocates direct translation of Chinese literature from Chinese to reduce information loss and cultural misunderstandings caused by translation. This is an important step in realizing that two ancient civilizations can truly and accurately understand each other.
Nowadays, more and more researchers can directly read Chinese literature, enter Chinese society personally, and study China using the Arab world's own awareness of issues. It’s a push towards achieving a depth, a true understanding of each other. Hearing a hundred times is not as good as seeing it once, and general research is far inferior to targeted research in order to apply what you have learned, gain insight into you and me, and know yourself and the enemy.
Deeper real understanding lies in the co-production of knowledge.
Ahmed Gandil, deputy director of the Egyptian Center for Political and Strategic Studies at Al-Ahram, proposed in his keynote speech that the "World Dialogue on China Studies" should think about how to "jointly produce knowledge."
Since 2018, the China-Egypt joint archaeological team has excavated approximately 2,300 square meters of the Mentu Temple in Luxor. China has brought digital technologies such as close-range photogrammetry and three-dimensional modeling into site records, and used Chinese archaeological tools to assist underground exploration.
Joint archeology has changed people's existing understanding: the archaeological team discovered a southern sacred lake that had no previous records, and formed a rare "double sacred lake" layout with the previously known northern sacred lake. This is the first sacred lake in the history of Egyptian archeology to be systematically and scientifically excavated starting from an unknown state.
The reason why "co-research" and "co-production" are important is that it can produce methods for mutual verification of knowledge, can advance civilizational exchanges into dialogues on spiritual structures and conceptual worlds, can expand the concept base and question base of world knowledge, and reduce the monopoly of a single knowledge production paradigm. In other words, it is not only a mutual learning of civilizations, but also an advancement of civilizations to a higher level and the sublimation, creation and renewal of knowledge.
As Gandil notes, every society has its history and priorities, and every scholar has his or her own field and perspective. When these perspectives converge in mutual respect and serious dialogue, our understanding is more precise and our abilities are stronger. A true understanding of each other is formed in this process.
The truly profound relationship between civilizations lies not only in the long history of exchanges, but also in the willingness of people in each era to learn each other's language, understand each other's knowledge, and use new materials and new questions to re-understand each other and the world. This is the key to achieving true understanding of each other and the process of continuous deepening of civilizational exchanges.
