Very off-topic, but it's one of the most shameful episodes in Western, British, and Australian history. Almost 200 years of racism, persecution, forced assimilation, kidnapping children and putting them into religious institutions, and a lot more - and it was only in 2008 that the Australian govt cared to apologize. Incredible cultures, incredible wealth of lifestyles, ideas, beliefs - almost destroyed in the name of "making [Aboriginal people] more civilized and industrious".

Yes, the glorious Western civilization did the same pretty much everywhere, but Australian Aboriginal people's culture is unique due to their very long period of isolation - it's a gem and wonder worth studying and learning from. Yet, the Western instinct was to trample on and destroy it, systematically, irreversibly, just for the sake of it. Reading the Wiki page you linked some time back literally left me in tears. How could we. I don't even.

The implication here is that Modern Egypt and Ancient Egypt are the same culture, which isn’t true by any real definition since as you mentioned Egyptian culture was Hellenized centuries before the Romans showed up (and semi-Persianized centuries prior to that.)

This is like claiming the Islamic Republic of Iran is the same culture as ancient Persia.

No, Minoan gets you close to 5000, again depending on where you draw line. 5500 if you go back to its roots, hard to call that a civilization, maybe around 4500 if you're looking for something like precursor to cities in the form of small centers of trade. 4000 for examples of writing. Although with remains like that you never know if they simply used less durable materials before hand, or if none have been found yet.

Either way, on any of those benchmarks Mesopotamia precedes it by at least a few centuries or more, though Minoan does get you back pretty far. I don't know the migration patterns, but I think there was influence from Mesopotamia.

Classical Greece ~2500 years is probably often where the line is drawn because that's where some of the foundational works of culture, philosophy, and math had their start and became founding members of the "Western Canon". For millenia, students were trained in Greek and Latin and read the great works of those time periods. But there was a civilization that gradually evolved into that time period, complete with it's own Dark Ages before things climbed back up to what became Classical.