This course divides into three sections, and while there is much overlap between them,
each era is quite distinctive. In the ancient world, we are dealing with a variety of
civilizations over the course of a few thousand years. That is a lot of
material, so I've chosen to make some cuts.
Where's Egypt? Or Babylonia
or the rest of the Near East? That's where I've chosen to make my cuts.
I choose to skip over the
ancient Near East civilizations for a variety of reasons. For one thing, there'd be no end to them; we would be doing whole civilizations in
a couple of paragraphs, to cover them all. For another, sometimes we don't know much more than a
couple of paragraphs. So, we begin the Ancient section around 600BC, and we end around 500AD. A
thousand years will be plenty!
I acknowledge the inheritance from those Near Eastern cultures, but
I emphasize the greater influence of Greece and Rome. Whereas we can compile a very long list of
the contributions made by the Greeks and the Romans, we can compile only a comparatively short
list of contributions made by Babylon or Egypt, and even less from the Hittites or Assyrians.
These were all important and extremely interesting cultures, but I skip over them so that I can
devote more time to other, later topics. Any proper study of the Ancient world would, however,
need to take full account of them.
A Quick Sketch
The Ancient world in the narrower sense I give it was a world centered on the Mediterranean
Sea. It was a pagan world, with a great many gods and goddesses, not all of whom were Greek or
Roman. Politically it was dominated by city-states and empires rather than by kings or
nation-states. That's an important distinction because we moderns know very
little about city-states or empires, so we naturally try to understand them in terms of our
nation-states. It will be important to understand the past in its own terms.
Commerce, and especially sea-borne commerce, unified the world economically. Socially it was
defined by whether one was a slave or a citizen, and if a citizen, by what family one belonged
to. Culturally, it was bounded by language: by Greek first, then by a combined dominance of
Latin and Greek.
It was a "civilized" world in the pure sense of the word: the Latin word for city
is "civis". People who lived in cities, or who were citizens even if they lived
in the country, were ipso facto civilized. And anyone who lived outside the range
of city-states were by that very fact uncivilized. This is another reason why I start the
story of "Western Civilization" with Greece: because it was the first culture that was
"civilized"; it was the first that was dominated by its cities.
At some point, these characteristics changed fundamentally. The pagan religions gave
way to Christianity. People began to speak of "Christendom" rather than
"Hellas" or the imperium, and "Rome" meant a city rather than a whole world. While commerce continued to focus on the Mediterranean,
it was no longer a unified sea but was deeply divided between Christian lands and Islamic lands.
While Latin was a common language, it was used only by a handful, and "barbaric"
tongues predominated as the focus of the culture shifted away from the Mediterranean. Kings and
counts and dukes came to supplant consuls and imperators.
All this happened very gradually. We will have occasion to talk about this transition in
class, but few historians would place the end of the Ancient world earlier than about 400 A.D.,
and many would place it much later.
Essay by Dr. Ellis L. Knox
Boise State University