> The de facto equation of ‘ancient history’ with ancient Mediterranean history, at least in most of the Anglosphere, has endured for many generations. But we are on the cusp of a dramatic shift in perspective that is producing a much bigger, broader and more exciting view of ‘the ancient world’.
Archeology is more difficult than reading. The civilizations which left a literary corpus (oral or written) will have more to speak about than those who didn't.
Archeology also tells us only of what metals people used, what animals they had and what they ate. Whereas literature speaks much more - of the values of those people, which makes it a more attractive target to study.
Finally, even from an archaeological perspective, trade is less interesting than war. So warlike civilizations generate more interest than trade-dominated ones.
Of course this is excluding the fact that christianity made greco-roman culture relatable to most of the west.
>> christianity made greco-roman culture relatable to most of the west.
I find this statement confusing. Hellenistic culture was the West. All Western culture since, including Rome, has imitated it. Christianity didn't make Greco-Roman culture accessible to the West. It made monotheistic, Hebrew/Judean culture accessible to Rome (primarily by making it less harsh and less monotheistic), and then spread onward to the Germanic tribes, Celts, Slavs, Dacians, and others who came into Rome's former orbit.
Could you expand on why you think Christianity made Hebrew/Judean culture less monotheistic?
Also, surely you would concede that scholars who sought to rediscover ancient greek/roman literature through a Christian lens in the 15th/16th centuries played a big role in making it accessible to the Christian world?
Catholic and Orthodox churches have a large body of saints each of which is associated with domains of life, people make offerings to the saints idols (paintings and statues) as you would in a polytheistic culture, small golden and silver trinkets usually. These practices were originally polytheistic practices that merely switched context with minimal changes.
Of course sacrifices which was both a Judaic and typical polytheistic ritual was dropped from both Hebrew and Christian practice.
Oaths is another one, oaths are a very polytheistic tradition, you swear to do something with the gods as the arbiter and the judge of you actions. I don't believe Hebrew tradition is very big on taking oaths, I think they actually forbid it, I may be wrong.
As another example the Pope is a pontiff, that is a roman religious office predating Christianity.
Point is when Christianity spread in the empire it evolved to include a lot of the religious practice of the people of the empire.
Edit: Although if you think about it holy communion is very sacrifice like in its mechanics.
Typically in a Greek sacrifice a food item I think typically some sort of animal protein was dedicated to the gods cooked on site and then split amongst the attendees, the gods are satisfied with the smoke as far as I understand.
Holy communion has very similar mechanics, food item then a ritual involving god, and then communally consumed.
Christianity is more idolatrous than the ancient Vedic religion, and practically polytheistic due to the veneration of Christ's mother and saints. I find this parallel amusing. Christianity made of Judaism and old testment exactly what Hinduism made of the Vedas.
> Could you expand on why you think Christianity made Hebrew/Judean culture less monotheistic?
Well, the very strong devotion to saints IMO comes from a polytheistic approach rather than a monotheistic one, where you just have an invisible god you are not even permitted to draw or paint.
Other posters' comments about saints slotting into the places of pagan deities are right. But even more fundamentally, from a Jewish (or, in fact, Muslim) perspective, the Trinity is a form of polytheism, and depictions of Jesus amount to idol worship. Both of those things made Christianity far more appealing and familiar to the Romans than the original desert religion it sprang from, with one invisible abstract God represented by an unspeakable word.
I'd say Christianity ended up as a less fundamentalistic take on Old Testament. But one has to take into account the whole development of Christianity at least up to say 10th century. It's not like there was the only and one version of it.
To be honest, though many historians today might disagree, I still think there is something we can call “Western Civilization,” even if it is a vague family of things that cannot be strictly defined. I know they are trying to correct for certain harmful attitudes out there, but articles like these feel to me to put the social message above all.
It is especially when a certain perceived problematic attitude is the focus, without much actual teaching the wider history, that leaves me feeling disappointed. I think teaching the complete history is a far better antidote than emphasizing a bad trend. Like I’ve read many articles accusing the brothers Grimm of being masculinist, but rarely will those same articles attempt to educate the reader of the Baroness D’Aulnoy, who coined the very term fairy tale!
The ancient world was indeed complicated and interconnected, rich in so many cultures and peoples and stories. We should talk more about these other civilizations! The Phoenicians, the Celts, the Chaldeans, Akkadians, Seleucids, Numidians—-those are just a few from “the
West”, around the world offers an even broader view. There is so much more to wonder at, it is a shame that the discourse has the toxic backdrop it does.
I'm biased because I am Irish and the Celts are "our" ancient people (though not only ours, of course), but I wish they got more focus in popular culture. Newgrange predates the Egyptian Pyramids by a few hundred years. I wonder is it just that less remains of their society and so there is less to talk about? AIUI the insular Celts at least mostly built with wood, as opposed to the Romans and Greeks who built with stone. Still, part of me would love to see a Hollywood blockbuster made out of the Táin Bó Cúailnge.
You are right. There has undoubtedly been a large a varied Celtic cultural element. The problem is the medium as you say. If it was not written and if it was not built in stone or metal, it cannot stand the test of time and historians, however willing, wouldn't be able to research fully.
> I still think there is something we can call “Western Civilization"
This is perhaps the least controversial statement in history. It's obviously true. Western Civilization is:
1) Greece
2) Rome, borrowing from the Greeks
3) Christianity taking over Rome
4) Germanic tribes adopting Roman law + the Christian religion
5) Protestantism
6) The Renaissance
7) The Enlightenment
You can read Plato, and it all makes sense to you, but a lot of contemporaneous Asian sources would be quite alien. Its a weird kind of ethnocentrism to deny such a thing exists, because it leads to thinking that western civilization is in fact universal.
I'm partially sympathetic to bashmelek's point of view. So much of the history and culture of Western civilization is actually rooted in the eastern Mediterranean. In the old world all writing can be traced back to Mesopotamia/Egypt and China. A surprising number of areas still use "ABCs" to refer to their alphabet. Much more than half of the old world by geography has a deeply connected written scholarly history. During Antiquity Greek culture itself extended much further east than west. Iconic Hindu and Buddhist art, particularly statuary, is Greek in origin. The center of Christianity was still east of Europe, or at least much further east than Rome, into the Middle Ages. There's a fascinating account by a circa 12th century papal emissary sent to the capital of the Khan Empire in Mongolia on a diplomatic and proselytizing mission. When reaching the Khan's court he found an entire native Christian contingent, and rather than listen to the emissary's preaching (Christianity wasn't new to him, and he wasn't inclined to take it up, though a sizable fraction of others had), Güyük Khan had him debate Christian theology with the existing Christian council in his court, partly for his own entertainment. The existence of these Christians caught the emissary by surprise, because the history of Christianity in the East had been forgotten by the Europeans. A few decades later, the Mongol Christian wife of Hulagu Khan was instrumental in securing the safety of Christians during the Sack of Baghdad (and IIRC she even had commissioned, or tried to have commissioned, the construction of a new Christian cathedral in Baghdad. But I might be thinking of another, much later Mongol Christian empress in China.)
All of which is to say, a huge portion of the old world can claim "western civilization" as an inheritance, unless we narrowly define "western civilization" as being rooted sometime in the past millennia (and then ignore the the effect of European colonialism in bringing many other areas into the fold, some for the second time). And that's before delving into pre-history and the influence of Central Asian steppe culture, from which we get Western civilization's shared Indo-European linguistic and, arguably, even religious history (see, e.g., links between Judeo-Christian and Dharmic religions via Zoroastrianism).
Which isn't to say modern European culture has the same relationship as everywhere else touched by Mediterranean culture, or that Renaissance and Enlightenment ideals aren't important, pivotal contributions to modern "western" culture. History has attenuated, obscured, and partially erased the historical interconnectedness. But relative to, e.g., East Asian or Mesomerican culture, there's a strong argument that everybody from the Hindu Kush to Portugal, from Ethiopia to Moscow, have a deeply shared cultural history and inheritance and are rightly called "Western" in a meaningful sense.
I don't object to the existence of a western civilization, I just object to Europeans claiming it as a unique, or even uniquely formative, inheritance. When I read about Hindu nationalist claims to a third emergence of writing in the Old World, it seems they're so passionate only because there's the tacit belief that they don't have the same stake in western civilization as Europeans; that they're not otherwise equal heirs to a rich western culture. But they are, IMO.
You're describing connections with regions which were on the borders of the western empires during antiquity. While there's abundant examples of cross pollination, there's also no doubt that Romans and Greeks identified themselves by their differences rather than similarities to those cultures.
Modern Mongolians share far more cultural similarities with the Hunnic and Turkic 'barbarians' that 'western civilizations' warred with. Many Mongolians still live nomadically! By contrast, modern Europeans long since abandoned their own traditional lifestyles which were practiced at the time - largely due to their colonization by and integration into the Roman empire. Russian identity has many western origins but their connection with Rome/Greece during antiquity are far thinner. Islam did not exist during that time either - so despite shared ancestor cultures, the Islamic empire emerged outside of the collapsing Roman empire and in direct competition to it.
Besides, Medieval era is a thousand years after 'antiquity' and was hugely influenced by the accelerating clash of east/west (spurred by the Mongol Empire) rather than pre-existing similarities.
What's the importance of Islam arising outside the Roman empire? It seems to me that to consider Islam outside the history of western civilization you must first define western civilization with that result in mind. It's tautological. For the first couple of centuries the spread of Christianity was also largely outside the Roman empire. Both Ethiopia and Armenia officially became Christian nations before Rome did (and both had become majority Christians earlier, meaning even earlier than the Roman empire itself.) Some Islamic practices, such as praying 5 times a day, were likely adopted from Christian practices (Protestants, and these days many Catholics, have largely forgotten the Liturgy of the Hours, but it was a widespread practice among Christians, and in Arabia in particular among lay Christians, not just clergy, who would lay down a rug, even in public, to perform their prayers). Do these facts somehow suggest a broken connection between Christianity and western civilization prior to it becoming widespread in Europe?
At least until the 11th century, Muslim empires considered themselves inheritors of Greek intellectual culture. This at a time when Europeans had lost Greek literature and even the Greek language (Rome literally started to have trouble conversing with Constantinople centuries earlier). Europeans seem to consider Islamic civilization as a mere temporary steward of Greek culture, conveniently keeping its literature extant until it could be rightly restored to Europeans.
Yes, the shared western cultural heritage in Mongolia itself is now extremely attenuated. But that's much less true in Persia or other areas closer to the epicenter of western civilization--i.e. the Levant--some of which are closer, geographically and otherwise, than most of continental Europe, especially Western Europe.
Europeans have a bias when it comes to their inheritance--they only see the historical paths that lead to themselves. (This is a universal truism that applies to every culture.) But there were many other branches from the same origins, and other cultures only see the paths that led to their selves. Until recently North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia had their own memories of a Greek cultural heritage, albeit intermixed with other influences (as is the case with Europeans). But unfortunately the predominance of modern European culture and historical narratives, and tacit internationalization of a unique European claim, seems to have erased that memory. But the heritage exists nonetheless and can be reclaimed, the same way Europeans reclaimed their Greek cultural heritage in the late Middle Ages.
You're attacking a geographical interpretation of 'western' which I don't think is the usual meaning.
Rome and its successor states colonised western Europe over the course of ~2000 years. Hence the culture unique to the 'West' is in part that which was unique to the Romans. 'Western' doesn't so much describe culture which was indigenous to western European countries (much of which is lost) nor is it a catch all term for cultures which were influenced by the Romans to a lesser degree. It describes the cultures most heavily influenced by the colonisation of the Western Roman Empire and its successors over the longest period of time.
If Western Europe had been colonised by the Islamic Empire (in the way that the Eastern Roman empire was) then 'Western' would indeed include Islamic culture.
Britons and Danes were not Roman, their culture in antiquity was very different, yet they were gradually influence/coerced into adopting many of its cultural practices. Modern Britain and Denmark are therefore 'Western', even though e.g Persia had far more in common with the Romans/Greeks at the time. The culture of Turkish people is heavily influenced by ancient Greek and Roman colonisation, and hence they are 'more western' than other areas in the near east. Yet later conquests by Arabs and Mongols bought a much more diverse set of religious and cultural practices. Similarly, regions like Greece itself and Southern Spain have been colonised by eastern empires, and are somewhat 'less western', though they were later reintegrated into the 'West'.
Medieval Europe absorbed a great deal of philosophy, mathematics, medicine and science through the Islamic world. Including from Arabic translations of and comments on Ancient Greek texts. Meaning even some of that Greek lineage was mediated and influenced by the Islamic world. And all of which had a significant influence on the Renaissance.
Similarly, the Greeks are thought to have borrowed more than a little from Ancient Egypt and other neighboring civilizations.
I think “great deal” is an overstatement. The US has borrowed a lot of work done by Chinese mathematicians and scientists. But would you say we have “absorbed a great deal” of Chinese culture? Japanese video games and anime are immensely popular in the US. But would you say we have “absorbed a great deal” of Japanese culture?
Agree with your general points. It is hard to know the boundaries of your culture if you've never been intimate with another, as in really getting to know the memes and patterns of thought that make up cultures outside of your own.
And yet, Rome borrowed from far more than the Greeks. Norse deities are popular, and seemingly more recognizable than classical Greek myth to those in North America with whom I've spoke about such things. Rome was taken over by a particular flavor of Christianity, which was changed by the Empire at least as much as it changed the Empire, and changed more by those who claimed it. (Christmas and Easter are not originally Christian holidays.) "Protestant" now, means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The Renaissance was significantly tied to the Muslim world's own traditions of Civilization, and a major thrust of contemporary politics is that the Enlightenment was not a positive thing. And hardly anyone is a farmer anymore, even though that's what 90% of Western Civilization was until the last century or so. So yes, all of those influence any definition of Western Civilization, but they're neither some direct line of succession, nor a list of the most massive influences - they're a selection of popular nodes in a vast web of connections.
"The conservatives who want to undo the Enlightenment"[1]
And from Wikipedia[2],
"The Dark Enlightenment, also called the Neo-Reactionary movement (abbreviated to NRx), is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and reactionary philosophical and political movement. It can be understood as a reaction against values and ideologies associated with Enlightenment, advocating for a return to traditional societal constructs and forms of government, such as absolute monarchism and cameralism."
United States Vice-President J.D. Vance reached political prominence largely via the support of prominent anti-Enlightenment conservative Rod Dreher. [3]
Today I learned that some historians include the French Revolution in the Enlightenment. Here is the intro to the Wikipedia article:
>European historians traditionally dated its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Many historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804.
That's just a convenient technicality for historians. From wikipedia: "Most scholars use the last years of the century, often choosing the French Revolution or the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment."
The French Revolution is deeply grounded in Enlightenment principles.
For admirers of the Enlightenment, it's more than just a convenient technicality to want to avoid including in the Enlightenment a period a political chaos during which about a million people were arrested and about 30-50,000 were killed -- most with very little in the way of due-process rights.
Relatedly, here's a very recent video explaining a Buddha statue that was found in a temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis, installed by the local Buddhist and Hindu communities, carved by a Roman artisan, and dedicated in a message in both Greek and Sanskrit.
Our perception about the ancient times, is moulded by sayings that have other goals other than recording of facts and events. Those "swords-and-sandals" movies focus on sensationalism, gory, shock that will sell. Even the historians of ancient times have goals of pleasing the rulers or maintaining the social layers and secrecy. Ancient times were far more slower and peaceful than present times. The stories pick only those spicy parts and fast forward everything else.
The only fact-recording machine is the structures built by people, fossils, geological features etc. All written stuff is decorated and colored.
Artifacts themselves can be just as misleading as written history, there's an enormous selection bias. The idea that archeology is more trustworthy than history is really mistaken, the two work best in tandem.
The main reason for our "Western" societies to focus to a greater degree specifically in these two civilizations is collective rule.
These two civilizations produced democracy and republic, the foundations of our current political system, additionally more than half of Europes legal systems are founded on roman law. Their histories are very relevant to our modern experience.
We should of course study other civilizations, but the truth of the matter is if you look into Chinese history you will find 3 millennia of imperial rule and absolute, divine mandate monarchy, fascinating but less relevant for citizens living in modern republics than say the 50 or so years before Romes transformation into a monarchy.
Greece and Rome give us facsimiles of our current political systems, there are things to be learned from studying them.
PS: Even Imperial Rome is very relevant, because as I said, it has to a great degree shaped our current rights and legal environment and as monarchies go it is unique in that the only legitimacy or any ruler was the peoples approval of their rule. i.e. it was the most democratic of the monarchies in history.
There is this anguish to define the "West" as a real entity, while it's not. There are lots of histories, and they don't taste well when mixed into a salad. Saying that there is a "global history" is like saying that time exists, and it s more of an ideological narrative than anything useful.
Like it or not, the "west" has a cultural common ground (Indo-European derived, chiefly greco-roman, gaulic and germanic cultures which were not isolated from each other as you would imply), and more importantly a religious common ground in judeo-christian religion and morality. Poland helped Austria against the Ottoman invasions because of this common ground, and predominantly anglo-saxon Americans read Homer's poetry because of this common ground.
From the viewpoint of a person outside "the west" under both grounds, it's a clearly recognized entity. There may be blurred contours. That doesn't invalidate the existence of such an entity.
> There is this anguish to define the "West" as a real entity, while it's not.
The West is the Latin Church. From the Latin Church came the Protestants. From that West meant and means anything influenced by or in protest of the Latin Church in Europe and its colonies. Very easy to understand, makes less of a difference today than it might have 100 years ago but to pretend it's hard to define or not a real thing isn't serious.
that defines "west" as the american protestantism values, but catholic southern europe is not as west as Japan has become after decades of american influence. Even china is more western nowadays in its mindset than whatever would be called "east" nowadays (muslim world + russia and india? what is latinamerica?).
"West" is mainly used in US propaganda in order to keep its allies behind them. I feel that europe doesn't want to be defined by the "west" anymore.
There's also an incredibly powerful urge to take our worldview and overlay it on the past - for example, assuming that Westphalian states are how the world has always operated.
I'm not widely read in history (though I've been improving of late), but for what it's worth, my favorite book on history "beyond Greece and Rome" so far has been Charles C. Mann's 1491. In fact, it's one of the best and most illuminating books I've read, period.
It has about the information/idea density of a Neal Stephenson novel (a good one), and is about equally a pageturner.
I've also adored all of Jimmy Maher's (better known as The Digital Antiquarian) amateur history books, his Wonders of the World series - I think the one on Chinese history was especially ambitious and nice.
I enjoyed Toby Wilkinson's The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, but it's a bit one-note; still looking for the Egyptian history book I'll fall in love with, though as as a general map it's quite good.
There tends to be a knee-jerk reaction from the Western world anytime South Asians even try to say that they had grand civilisations. I see an onslaught of comments about their current economic conditions and how a call centre agent having a "bad" accent means that South Asians deserve to be criticised for every little thing.
as a ~~south asian~~ (stupid label) Indian, some knee-jerk reaction is justified because people tend to believe in exaggerated time scales (for instance, based on projected dates of astronomical events in the Hindu Epics, which predates the bronze age and the war chariot), whereas the westerners don't have a religious attachment and speak a realistic timeline for Homeric epics.
If we are speaking of the classical times: yes, India was on-par with the greco-roman and chinese world; left a cultural imprint on east and south-east asia and traded with the western world too. But the rise of pacifist religions, being in a nice position to be attacked from central asia, and internal strifes basically rendered it useless in the last millenium. Huge population, uncontrolled urbanization and a corrupt education system is the bane of this century. If we don't solve that, no amount of classical civilization is going to help. Germanic people were considered primitive by the greeks and romans, now look where they are!
It avoids having to include Pakistan in India which if you did causes a large number of people to complain especially if talking about modern things. It is less usual when talking about ancient history.
It also differentiates Indian sub continent for East Asian which covers Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Asian usually covers too much when talking about history.
Oh we have some westerners who believe that the world is 6000 years old due to a particular combination of interpretations of circumstances in the Bible.
I can understand some push-back from other countries, especially when the right-wing tends to embarrassingly parade past achievements as a way to suppress criticism of current conditions, but at the moment the sheer hatred and poison have blown way past what is understandable.
I can say as an American I've never really had that impression. My impression of all ancient societies including Greeks and Romans but of course Egyptians, Chinese, Persians, Indian cultures, etc there have been periods of rise and periods of fall.
Americans are most acquainted with the Romans and our system of government was designed to take the best aspects of their republic and to prevent the conditions that led to Roman imperialism. The fall of Rome is ingrained in our culture as something to be wary of, that all great civilizations fall prey to.
But it is generally understood that other parts of the world were more advanced at different times or advanced in certain technology beyond their peers at the time.
Marco Polo trade routes to China and through the silk road were popular because of the goods and products europeans couldn't make or cultivate. Even Christopher Columbus was attempting to sail to India as a more efficient trade route and that is why the natives were called Indians.
The ancient temples in India are impressive and certainly many grand civilizations rose and fell on the subcontinent. We are just less familiar with those stories as their origins didn't shape our own as directly.
You might be overgeneralising just a little bit here as outside the US and the UK, I think few people in the Western world care about the accent of Indians when they speak English, and are not exposed to their call centers anyway.
I think most people are somewhat aware of the civilisations that occurred there.
> The de facto equation of ‘ancient history’ with ancient Mediterranean history, at least in most of the Anglosphere, has endured for many generations. But we are on the cusp of a dramatic shift in perspective that is producing a much bigger, broader and more exciting view of ‘the ancient world’.
Archeology is more difficult than reading. The civilizations which left a literary corpus (oral or written) will have more to speak about than those who didn't.
Archeology also tells us only of what metals people used, what animals they had and what they ate. Whereas literature speaks much more - of the values of those people, which makes it a more attractive target to study.
Finally, even from an archaeological perspective, trade is less interesting than war. So warlike civilizations generate more interest than trade-dominated ones.
Of course this is excluding the fact that christianity made greco-roman culture relatable to most of the west.
>> christianity made greco-roman culture relatable to most of the west.
I find this statement confusing. Hellenistic culture was the West. All Western culture since, including Rome, has imitated it. Christianity didn't make Greco-Roman culture accessible to the West. It made monotheistic, Hebrew/Judean culture accessible to Rome (primarily by making it less harsh and less monotheistic), and then spread onward to the Germanic tribes, Celts, Slavs, Dacians, and others who came into Rome's former orbit.
Could you expand on why you think Christianity made Hebrew/Judean culture less monotheistic?
Also, surely you would concede that scholars who sought to rediscover ancient greek/roman literature through a Christian lens in the 15th/16th centuries played a big role in making it accessible to the Christian world?
Catholic and Orthodox churches have a large body of saints each of which is associated with domains of life, people make offerings to the saints idols (paintings and statues) as you would in a polytheistic culture, small golden and silver trinkets usually. These practices were originally polytheistic practices that merely switched context with minimal changes.
Of course sacrifices which was both a Judaic and typical polytheistic ritual was dropped from both Hebrew and Christian practice.
Oaths is another one, oaths are a very polytheistic tradition, you swear to do something with the gods as the arbiter and the judge of you actions. I don't believe Hebrew tradition is very big on taking oaths, I think they actually forbid it, I may be wrong.
As another example the Pope is a pontiff, that is a roman religious office predating Christianity.
Point is when Christianity spread in the empire it evolved to include a lot of the religious practice of the people of the empire.
Edit: Although if you think about it holy communion is very sacrifice like in its mechanics.
Typically in a Greek sacrifice a food item I think typically some sort of animal protein was dedicated to the gods cooked on site and then split amongst the attendees, the gods are satisfied with the smoke as far as I understand.
Holy communion has very similar mechanics, food item then a ritual involving god, and then communally consumed.
Christianity is more idolatrous than the ancient Vedic religion, and practically polytheistic due to the veneration of Christ's mother and saints. I find this parallel amusing. Christianity made of Judaism and old testment exactly what Hinduism made of the Vedas.
> Could you expand on why you think Christianity made Hebrew/Judean culture less monotheistic?
Well, the very strong devotion to saints IMO comes from a polytheistic approach rather than a monotheistic one, where you just have an invisible god you are not even permitted to draw or paint.
Other posters' comments about saints slotting into the places of pagan deities are right. But even more fundamentally, from a Jewish (or, in fact, Muslim) perspective, the Trinity is a form of polytheism, and depictions of Jesus amount to idol worship. Both of those things made Christianity far more appealing and familiar to the Romans than the original desert religion it sprang from, with one invisible abstract God represented by an unspeakable word.
I'd say Christianity ended up as a less fundamentalistic take on Old Testament. But one has to take into account the whole development of Christianity at least up to say 10th century. It's not like there was the only and one version of it.
There were also empires like Persia who had most of their written history deliberately destroyed by conquerors, like the Arabs or Mongols.
To be honest, though many historians today might disagree, I still think there is something we can call “Western Civilization,” even if it is a vague family of things that cannot be strictly defined. I know they are trying to correct for certain harmful attitudes out there, but articles like these feel to me to put the social message above all.
It is especially when a certain perceived problematic attitude is the focus, without much actual teaching the wider history, that leaves me feeling disappointed. I think teaching the complete history is a far better antidote than emphasizing a bad trend. Like I’ve read many articles accusing the brothers Grimm of being masculinist, but rarely will those same articles attempt to educate the reader of the Baroness D’Aulnoy, who coined the very term fairy tale!
The ancient world was indeed complicated and interconnected, rich in so many cultures and peoples and stories. We should talk more about these other civilizations! The Phoenicians, the Celts, the Chaldeans, Akkadians, Seleucids, Numidians—-those are just a few from “the West”, around the world offers an even broader view. There is so much more to wonder at, it is a shame that the discourse has the toxic backdrop it does.
> the Celts
I'm biased because I am Irish and the Celts are "our" ancient people (though not only ours, of course), but I wish they got more focus in popular culture. Newgrange predates the Egyptian Pyramids by a few hundred years. I wonder is it just that less remains of their society and so there is less to talk about? AIUI the insular Celts at least mostly built with wood, as opposed to the Romans and Greeks who built with stone. Still, part of me would love to see a Hollywood blockbuster made out of the Táin Bó Cúailnge.
You are right. There has undoubtedly been a large a varied Celtic cultural element. The problem is the medium as you say. If it was not written and if it was not built in stone or metal, it cannot stand the test of time and historians, however willing, wouldn't be able to research fully.
> I still think there is something we can call “Western Civilization"
This is perhaps the least controversial statement in history. It's obviously true. Western Civilization is:
1) Greece
2) Rome, borrowing from the Greeks
3) Christianity taking over Rome
4) Germanic tribes adopting Roman law + the Christian religion
5) Protestantism
6) The Renaissance
7) The Enlightenment
You can read Plato, and it all makes sense to you, but a lot of contemporaneous Asian sources would be quite alien. Its a weird kind of ethnocentrism to deny such a thing exists, because it leads to thinking that western civilization is in fact universal.
I'm partially sympathetic to bashmelek's point of view. So much of the history and culture of Western civilization is actually rooted in the eastern Mediterranean. In the old world all writing can be traced back to Mesopotamia/Egypt and China. A surprising number of areas still use "ABCs" to refer to their alphabet. Much more than half of the old world by geography has a deeply connected written scholarly history. During Antiquity Greek culture itself extended much further east than west. Iconic Hindu and Buddhist art, particularly statuary, is Greek in origin. The center of Christianity was still east of Europe, or at least much further east than Rome, into the Middle Ages. There's a fascinating account by a circa 12th century papal emissary sent to the capital of the Khan Empire in Mongolia on a diplomatic and proselytizing mission. When reaching the Khan's court he found an entire native Christian contingent, and rather than listen to the emissary's preaching (Christianity wasn't new to him, and he wasn't inclined to take it up, though a sizable fraction of others had), Güyük Khan had him debate Christian theology with the existing Christian council in his court, partly for his own entertainment. The existence of these Christians caught the emissary by surprise, because the history of Christianity in the East had been forgotten by the Europeans. A few decades later, the Mongol Christian wife of Hulagu Khan was instrumental in securing the safety of Christians during the Sack of Baghdad (and IIRC she even had commissioned, or tried to have commissioned, the construction of a new Christian cathedral in Baghdad. But I might be thinking of another, much later Mongol Christian empress in China.)
All of which is to say, a huge portion of the old world can claim "western civilization" as an inheritance, unless we narrowly define "western civilization" as being rooted sometime in the past millennia (and then ignore the the effect of European colonialism in bringing many other areas into the fold, some for the second time). And that's before delving into pre-history and the influence of Central Asian steppe culture, from which we get Western civilization's shared Indo-European linguistic and, arguably, even religious history (see, e.g., links between Judeo-Christian and Dharmic religions via Zoroastrianism).
Which isn't to say modern European culture has the same relationship as everywhere else touched by Mediterranean culture, or that Renaissance and Enlightenment ideals aren't important, pivotal contributions to modern "western" culture. History has attenuated, obscured, and partially erased the historical interconnectedness. But relative to, e.g., East Asian or Mesomerican culture, there's a strong argument that everybody from the Hindu Kush to Portugal, from Ethiopia to Moscow, have a deeply shared cultural history and inheritance and are rightly called "Western" in a meaningful sense.
I don't object to the existence of a western civilization, I just object to Europeans claiming it as a unique, or even uniquely formative, inheritance. When I read about Hindu nationalist claims to a third emergence of writing in the Old World, it seems they're so passionate only because there's the tacit belief that they don't have the same stake in western civilization as Europeans; that they're not otherwise equal heirs to a rich western culture. But they are, IMO.
You're describing connections with regions which were on the borders of the western empires during antiquity. While there's abundant examples of cross pollination, there's also no doubt that Romans and Greeks identified themselves by their differences rather than similarities to those cultures.
Modern Mongolians share far more cultural similarities with the Hunnic and Turkic 'barbarians' that 'western civilizations' warred with. Many Mongolians still live nomadically! By contrast, modern Europeans long since abandoned their own traditional lifestyles which were practiced at the time - largely due to their colonization by and integration into the Roman empire. Russian identity has many western origins but their connection with Rome/Greece during antiquity are far thinner. Islam did not exist during that time either - so despite shared ancestor cultures, the Islamic empire emerged outside of the collapsing Roman empire and in direct competition to it.
Besides, Medieval era is a thousand years after 'antiquity' and was hugely influenced by the accelerating clash of east/west (spurred by the Mongol Empire) rather than pre-existing similarities.
What's the importance of Islam arising outside the Roman empire? It seems to me that to consider Islam outside the history of western civilization you must first define western civilization with that result in mind. It's tautological. For the first couple of centuries the spread of Christianity was also largely outside the Roman empire. Both Ethiopia and Armenia officially became Christian nations before Rome did (and both had become majority Christians earlier, meaning even earlier than the Roman empire itself.) Some Islamic practices, such as praying 5 times a day, were likely adopted from Christian practices (Protestants, and these days many Catholics, have largely forgotten the Liturgy of the Hours, but it was a widespread practice among Christians, and in Arabia in particular among lay Christians, not just clergy, who would lay down a rug, even in public, to perform their prayers). Do these facts somehow suggest a broken connection between Christianity and western civilization prior to it becoming widespread in Europe?
At least until the 11th century, Muslim empires considered themselves inheritors of Greek intellectual culture. This at a time when Europeans had lost Greek literature and even the Greek language (Rome literally started to have trouble conversing with Constantinople centuries earlier). Europeans seem to consider Islamic civilization as a mere temporary steward of Greek culture, conveniently keeping its literature extant until it could be rightly restored to Europeans.
Yes, the shared western cultural heritage in Mongolia itself is now extremely attenuated. But that's much less true in Persia or other areas closer to the epicenter of western civilization--i.e. the Levant--some of which are closer, geographically and otherwise, than most of continental Europe, especially Western Europe.
Europeans have a bias when it comes to their inheritance--they only see the historical paths that lead to themselves. (This is a universal truism that applies to every culture.) But there were many other branches from the same origins, and other cultures only see the paths that led to their selves. Until recently North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia had their own memories of a Greek cultural heritage, albeit intermixed with other influences (as is the case with Europeans). But unfortunately the predominance of modern European culture and historical narratives, and tacit internationalization of a unique European claim, seems to have erased that memory. But the heritage exists nonetheless and can be reclaimed, the same way Europeans reclaimed their Greek cultural heritage in the late Middle Ages.
You're attacking a geographical interpretation of 'western' which I don't think is the usual meaning.
Rome and its successor states colonised western Europe over the course of ~2000 years. Hence the culture unique to the 'West' is in part that which was unique to the Romans. 'Western' doesn't so much describe culture which was indigenous to western European countries (much of which is lost) nor is it a catch all term for cultures which were influenced by the Romans to a lesser degree. It describes the cultures most heavily influenced by the colonisation of the Western Roman Empire and its successors over the longest period of time.
If Western Europe had been colonised by the Islamic Empire (in the way that the Eastern Roman empire was) then 'Western' would indeed include Islamic culture.
Britons and Danes were not Roman, their culture in antiquity was very different, yet they were gradually influence/coerced into adopting many of its cultural practices. Modern Britain and Denmark are therefore 'Western', even though e.g Persia had far more in common with the Romans/Greeks at the time. The culture of Turkish people is heavily influenced by ancient Greek and Roman colonisation, and hence they are 'more western' than other areas in the near east. Yet later conquests by Arabs and Mongols bought a much more diverse set of religious and cultural practices. Similarly, regions like Greece itself and Southern Spain have been colonised by eastern empires, and are somewhat 'less western', though they were later reintegrated into the 'West'.
Medieval Europe absorbed a great deal of philosophy, mathematics, medicine and science through the Islamic world. Including from Arabic translations of and comments on Ancient Greek texts. Meaning even some of that Greek lineage was mediated and influenced by the Islamic world. And all of which had a significant influence on the Renaissance.
Similarly, the Greeks are thought to have borrowed more than a little from Ancient Egypt and other neighboring civilizations.
I think “great deal” is an overstatement. The US has borrowed a lot of work done by Chinese mathematicians and scientists. But would you say we have “absorbed a great deal” of Chinese culture? Japanese video games and anime are immensely popular in the US. But would you say we have “absorbed a great deal” of Japanese culture?
Sun Tzu is quite popular even in the west today.
Agree with your general points. It is hard to know the boundaries of your culture if you've never been intimate with another, as in really getting to know the memes and patterns of thought that make up cultures outside of your own.
And yet, Rome borrowed from far more than the Greeks. Norse deities are popular, and seemingly more recognizable than classical Greek myth to those in North America with whom I've spoke about such things. Rome was taken over by a particular flavor of Christianity, which was changed by the Empire at least as much as it changed the Empire, and changed more by those who claimed it. (Christmas and Easter are not originally Christian holidays.) "Protestant" now, means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The Renaissance was significantly tied to the Muslim world's own traditions of Civilization, and a major thrust of contemporary politics is that the Enlightenment was not a positive thing. And hardly anyone is a farmer anymore, even though that's what 90% of Western Civilization was until the last century or so. So yes, all of those influence any definition of Western Civilization, but they're neither some direct line of succession, nor a list of the most massive influences - they're a selection of popular nodes in a vast web of connections.
> and a major thrust of contemporary politics is that the Enlightenment was not a positive thing.
whoa, that's news to me. can you elaborate?
"The conservatives who want to undo the Enlightenment"[1]
And from Wikipedia[2], "The Dark Enlightenment, also called the Neo-Reactionary movement (abbreviated to NRx), is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and reactionary philosophical and political movement. It can be understood as a reaction against values and ideologies associated with Enlightenment, advocating for a return to traditional societal constructs and forms of government, such as absolute monarchism and cameralism."
United States Vice-President J.D. Vance reached political prominence largely via the support of prominent anti-Enlightenment conservative Rod Dreher. [3]
1. https://archive.is/9AFzR#selection-439.0-439.52
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment#Influence_i...
3. https://archive.is/8KyJF
In a neo-oligarchic world, beheading rich aristocrats is a big no-no.
Also, glorifying reason has become very unpopular in a cultural context increasingly built around fairy tales (from Lord of the Rings to superheroes).
And of course, the neo-racist movements see egalité as a terrible, terrible thing.
Today I learned that some historians include the French Revolution in the Enlightenment. Here is the intro to the Wikipedia article:
>European historians traditionally dated its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Many historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804.
That's just a convenient technicality for historians. From wikipedia: "Most scholars use the last years of the century, often choosing the French Revolution or the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment."
The French Revolution is deeply grounded in Enlightenment principles.
For admirers of the Enlightenment, it's more than just a convenient technicality to want to avoid including in the Enlightenment a period a political chaos during which about a million people were arrested and about 30-50,000 were killed -- most with very little in the way of due-process rights.
To quote an Italian meme, "yes, but they also did a few bad things".
Relatedly, here's a very recent video explaining a Buddha statue that was found in a temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis, installed by the local Buddhist and Hindu communities, carved by a Roman artisan, and dedicated in a message in both Greek and Sanskrit.
https://youtu.be/Sa_LhZrDjhk?is=cCmiQfXZG7HZpByT
Our perception about the ancient times, is moulded by sayings that have other goals other than recording of facts and events. Those "swords-and-sandals" movies focus on sensationalism, gory, shock that will sell. Even the historians of ancient times have goals of pleasing the rulers or maintaining the social layers and secrecy. Ancient times were far more slower and peaceful than present times. The stories pick only those spicy parts and fast forward everything else.
The only fact-recording machine is the structures built by people, fossils, geological features etc. All written stuff is decorated and colored.
Artifacts themselves can be just as misleading as written history, there's an enormous selection bias. The idea that archeology is more trustworthy than history is really mistaken, the two work best in tandem.
The main reason for our "Western" societies to focus to a greater degree specifically in these two civilizations is collective rule.
These two civilizations produced democracy and republic, the foundations of our current political system, additionally more than half of Europes legal systems are founded on roman law. Their histories are very relevant to our modern experience.
We should of course study other civilizations, but the truth of the matter is if you look into Chinese history you will find 3 millennia of imperial rule and absolute, divine mandate monarchy, fascinating but less relevant for citizens living in modern republics than say the 50 or so years before Romes transformation into a monarchy.
Greece and Rome give us facsimiles of our current political systems, there are things to be learned from studying them.
PS: Even Imperial Rome is very relevant, because as I said, it has to a great degree shaped our current rights and legal environment and as monarchies go it is unique in that the only legitimacy or any ruler was the peoples approval of their rule. i.e. it was the most democratic of the monarchies in history.
There is this anguish to define the "West" as a real entity, while it's not. There are lots of histories, and they don't taste well when mixed into a salad. Saying that there is a "global history" is like saying that time exists, and it s more of an ideological narrative than anything useful.
Like it or not, the "west" has a cultural common ground (Indo-European derived, chiefly greco-roman, gaulic and germanic cultures which were not isolated from each other as you would imply), and more importantly a religious common ground in judeo-christian religion and morality. Poland helped Austria against the Ottoman invasions because of this common ground, and predominantly anglo-saxon Americans read Homer's poetry because of this common ground.
From the viewpoint of a person outside "the west" under both grounds, it's a clearly recognized entity. There may be blurred contours. That doesn't invalidate the existence of such an entity.
> There is this anguish to define the "West" as a real entity, while it's not.
The West is the Latin Church. From the Latin Church came the Protestants. From that West meant and means anything influenced by or in protest of the Latin Church in Europe and its colonies. Very easy to understand, makes less of a difference today than it might have 100 years ago but to pretend it's hard to define or not a real thing isn't serious.
that defines "west" as the american protestantism values, but catholic southern europe is not as west as Japan has become after decades of american influence. Even china is more western nowadays in its mindset than whatever would be called "east" nowadays (muslim world + russia and india? what is latinamerica?).
"West" is mainly used in US propaganda in order to keep its allies behind them. I feel that europe doesn't want to be defined by the "west" anymore.
There's also an incredibly powerful urge to take our worldview and overlay it on the past - for example, assuming that Westphalian states are how the world has always operated.
I'm not widely read in history (though I've been improving of late), but for what it's worth, my favorite book on history "beyond Greece and Rome" so far has been Charles C. Mann's 1491. In fact, it's one of the best and most illuminating books I've read, period.
It has about the information/idea density of a Neal Stephenson novel (a good one), and is about equally a pageturner.
I've also adored all of Jimmy Maher's (better known as The Digital Antiquarian) amateur history books, his Wonders of the World series - I think the one on Chinese history was especially ambitious and nice.
I enjoyed Toby Wilkinson's The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, but it's a bit one-note; still looking for the Egyptian history book I'll fall in love with, though as as a general map it's quite good.
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There tends to be a knee-jerk reaction from the Western world anytime South Asians even try to say that they had grand civilisations. I see an onslaught of comments about their current economic conditions and how a call centre agent having a "bad" accent means that South Asians deserve to be criticised for every little thing.
as a ~~south asian~~ (stupid label) Indian, some knee-jerk reaction is justified because people tend to believe in exaggerated time scales (for instance, based on projected dates of astronomical events in the Hindu Epics, which predates the bronze age and the war chariot), whereas the westerners don't have a religious attachment and speak a realistic timeline for Homeric epics.
If we are speaking of the classical times: yes, India was on-par with the greco-roman and chinese world; left a cultural imprint on east and south-east asia and traded with the western world too. But the rise of pacifist religions, being in a nice position to be attacked from central asia, and internal strifes basically rendered it useless in the last millenium. Huge population, uncontrolled urbanization and a corrupt education system is the bane of this century. If we don't solve that, no amount of classical civilization is going to help. Germanic people were considered primitive by the greeks and romans, now look where they are!
No comment on the rest, just wanted to say I was thrown off by the "South Asian" thing too. Not tip-toeing around calling Greece "Southwest Europe."
South Asian is reasonably common in UK.
It avoids having to include Pakistan in India which if you did causes a large number of people to complain especially if talking about modern things. It is less usual when talking about ancient history.
It also differentiates Indian sub continent for East Asian which covers Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Asian usually covers too much when talking about history.
Oh we have some westerners who believe that the world is 6000 years old due to a particular combination of interpretations of circumstances in the Bible.
A bit more than "some" I would say given the quality and attitude towards teaching creationism ie in bible belt public schools
Don't disagree with any of your points.
I can understand some push-back from other countries, especially when the right-wing tends to embarrassingly parade past achievements as a way to suppress criticism of current conditions, but at the moment the sheer hatred and poison have blown way past what is understandable.
I can say as an American I've never really had that impression. My impression of all ancient societies including Greeks and Romans but of course Egyptians, Chinese, Persians, Indian cultures, etc there have been periods of rise and periods of fall.
Americans are most acquainted with the Romans and our system of government was designed to take the best aspects of their republic and to prevent the conditions that led to Roman imperialism. The fall of Rome is ingrained in our culture as something to be wary of, that all great civilizations fall prey to.
But it is generally understood that other parts of the world were more advanced at different times or advanced in certain technology beyond their peers at the time.
Marco Polo trade routes to China and through the silk road were popular because of the goods and products europeans couldn't make or cultivate. Even Christopher Columbus was attempting to sail to India as a more efficient trade route and that is why the natives were called Indians.
The ancient temples in India are impressive and certainly many grand civilizations rose and fell on the subcontinent. We are just less familiar with those stories as their origins didn't shape our own as directly.
> from the Western world
You might be overgeneralising just a little bit here as outside the US and the UK, I think few people in the Western world care about the accent of Indians when they speak English, and are not exposed to their call centers anyway.
I think most people are somewhat aware of the civilisations that occurred there.
I agree that I have over-generalised, although in my mind the UK and the US have the most cultural imprint from amongst the Western nations.