The Foundations of Western Civilization
Scope:
In this course of forty-eight lectures, we will explore the essential contours of the human experience in what has come to be called “Western civilization,” from its humble beginnings in the ancient Near East to the dawn of the modern world; we will range from about 3000 B.C. to AD. 1600. We will begin by asking just what “Western civilization” actually is, or what it has been thought to be. Throughout the course, we will pause to reflect on where Western civilization finds its primary locus at any given moment. That is, we’ll begin in the ancient Near East and move to Greece, then to Rome; we will explore the shape and impact of large ancient empires, including the Persian, Alexander the Great’s, and Rome’s. When we take our leave of Rome, we’ll move to Western Europe. We’ll watch Europe gradually expand physically and culturally. Finally, we’ll see the globalizations of Western civilization with the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of exploration and discovery.
But Western civilization is much more than human and political geography. We will explore the myriad forms of political and institutional structures by means of which Western peoples have organized themselves and their societies. These include monarchies of several distinct types, as well as participatory republics. Looking at institutions will draw us to inquire about the Western tradition of political discourse. Who should participate in any given society? Why? How have societies resolved the tension between individual self-interest and the common good?
Western civilization has always accorded a prominent place to religion and, by extension, to religious institutions and leaders. We will ask why this should be the case. Although we will pay some attention to the ancient religions of the Mediterranean world, we’ll focus throughout on the three dominant monotheistic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each of these religious traditions produced sacred books and vast commentaries on those books. Christianity also produced art, architecture, and music that have become living parts of the Western tradition.
If Western culture was at its source primarily religious, it was never exclusively so. This insight will invite us to probe the philosophical tradition of the West as it has asked how people should live, how they should conduct themselves, what they should regard as beautiful, and where they should find their pleasure. We will notice that the West has provided many answers to these fundamental questions. What has been common are the rational tools of debate used to seek answers and the ferocious critical tools elaborated to cross-examine every answer that has been offered.
Western civilization, finally, has bequeathed to us a library-full of literary monuments. We will discuss these from the standpoints of their technical
artistry, their esthetic adornment, their political and social messages, their real and imagined audiences, and their long-term impact. We’ll ask why we continue to read some works and forget others. With literature, indeed, as with other objects of our investigations, we’ll continually ask what is more than what was; we will seek to understand why some things remain living elements of a civilization.
Lecture One
“Western,” “Civilization,” and “Foundations”
Scope: This lecture will explore the three seemingly simple words “Western,” “civilization,” and “foundations.” We ask, “Where is the West? Who is Western’? How have our understandings of the West changed over time?” The lecture will then turn to civilization and its civ- root, which is related to a range of Latin words meaning citizen (civis), city (civitas), and polite behavior (civilitas). Cities, therefore, are crucial. To arrive at cities, we will discuss the Neolithic Revolution— essentially the rise of agriculture—and such processes as irrigation and specialization of labor. Third, we will think about what foundations are, how durable they are, how easy or difficult they are to recognize. In a sense, we’ll open a discussion of the difference between celebrity and distinction. To extend this reflection on foundations, we will conclude by stating several themes that will be pursued throughout the course: the roles of geography, climate, and ecology; the structure and ideology of political institutions; religious ideas and institutions; social structures, values, and customs; literary and philosophical achievements; and aesthetic representations in the arts and architecture.
Outline
For Sherlock Holmes, the first principle of detection was to begin with the obvious. Let’s turn the old sleuth on his head and begin with what is not so obvious.
A. What do we mean when we speak of “the West”?
1. We can define this term culturally: free and participatory political institutions, capitalist economies, religious toleration, rational inquiry, an innovative spirit, and so on.
2. We can define the term geographically: a cultural tradition that began around the Mediterranean Sea, spent centuries as a European preserve, then migrated to all the earth.
3. Any definition brings controversy: The West has had freedom and slavery; women have historically enjoyed fewer rights and opportunities than men; some have enjoyed vast wealth while others endured deep poverty.
4. Definitions also bring paradox: Western civilization began in what is now Iraq, but it would be hard to make a case now for Iraq as Western. Today, Japan, in the “Far East,” seems “Western”; in the Cold War years, Turkey was Western while Libya, far to the west of Turkey, was Eastern.
B. “Civilization” is no easier to define.
1. The word itself is built from a Latin root civ—. We see this in such Latin words as civis (citizen), civitas (city), civilis (civil, polite, citizen-like). Thus, cities appear crucial to our sense of what civilization is.
2. The Greek vocabulary is similarly revealing. Polls (city) gives us our words for politics and political.
3. Cities emerged as a result of what is called the Neolithic Revolution, which occurred about 9,000 to 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Essentially, this process involved the rise of agriculture and the domestication of animals. The process was revolutionary, but it took a long time to produce cities and, then, civilization.
4. Extracting food from arid regions surrounding great rivers demanded social cohesion and cooperation. Irrigation was a key motor process. Concentrated populations grew as more people could be fed more predictably. This led to the specialization of labor, which in turn, resulted in social and political differentiation. Gradually, arts and crafts emerged and, finally, writing. With writing, we cross into the historical period.
5. These key elements seem to mark all civilizations, but one may also speak of Western civilization or African civilization, or somewhat more narrowly, of Maya or Aztec civilization. The West is unique, but it is not uniquely civilized.
6. Civilization arose about 5,000 years ago. That is a long time. But the earth is about 4 billion years old. People like us—homo sapiens sapiens—have been around for some 40,000 years and their ancestors, for about 100,000 years. Human ancestors go back to Africa a million or so years ago. These time spans are humbling!
C. Finally, then, what do we mean by “foundations”?
1. We mean origins, of course, but not just origins because all things grow and change.
2. Durability is important but paradoxical: The oldest institution in the world today is the papacy, but Catholics are just under twenty percent of the world’s population. The Athenian polis lasted in its highest manifestation less than a century, but its ideals have fired imaginations for 2,500 years. Few places today live by Roman law, yet Rome’s law was the most influential ever conceived.
3. Foundations seem somehow related to revivals: Think of Greek or classical revival architecture. Think of one of the West’s great movements: the Renaissance (allegedly a revival of classical antiquity). The Protestant Reformers thought they were reviving primitive Christianity, not creating something new.
4. Foundations seem to be related to traditions, but these can be both invented and discarded. Those famous and “ancient” Scottish tartans were mostly invented in the eighteenth century; I passed arestaurant the other day with a sign that read, “A Tradition Since
1979.”
TI. In the following forty-seven lectures, we’ll proceed through some 4,500 years. We’ll begin in the ancient Near East and end with a Western European world beginning to globalize. What themes will we follow?
A. Without being clumsy determinists, we’ll talk of ecology, geography, and climate.
B. Both the visible structures and invisible ideologies supporting them will draw continuous and comparative attention.
C. Although pagan religious beliefs and practices will engage us from time to time, we shall concentrate on the three “Abrahamic” faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
D. We’ll ask how people lived, how they earned their livings, what their manners and customs were like, how their families were organized, and how they spent whatever leisure time they had.
E. We will explore key philosophical ideas, always with a view to understanding them in specific historical contexts: Why did those people think those things in those times?
F. We will discuss great works of literature, the ideas they expressed, and the forms in which they were presented. We’ll look into their backgrounds, their intended audiences, and their actual audiences right down to today.
G. We’ll talk about art and architecture as the most public and visible manifestations of the Western tradition.
H. But alongside these concrete issues, we’ll repeatedly tease out perspectives on celebrity versus distinction; values versus virtues; changing understandings of the “good, the true, and the beautiful”; the respective roles of faith and reason; the competing claims of the individual and the community.
III. We will end around AD. 1600, when many of the major features of modernity have come into view and the essential traditions of Western civilization have attained maturity.
A. Two great backward-looking movements—the Renaissance and the Reformation—anchored tradition firmly into the Western worldview.
B. “Christendom” was durably divided into Catholic and Protestant communities and cultures.
C. Interlocking relationships of great-power diplomacy foreshadowed the modern state system.
D. The Scientific Revolution altered the old balance of “science” and “wisdom.”
Essential Reading:
Braudel, History of Civilizations.
Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Lecture Two
History Begins at Sumer
Fagan, Journey from Eden. Mellaart, Neolithic of the Near East.
Questions to Consider:
1. If we were playing a free-association game, what would come most readily to your mind when you heard the words “Western” and “civilization”? (Keep this in mind. I will repeat the question at the end of the course!)
2. How do you think about such large-scale notions as change, continuity, revolution, evolution, and tradition?
Scope: This lecture borrows its title from a famous book by Samuel Noah Kramer. Sumer was a small region in the south of what is now Iraq, and scholars agree that Western civilization arose almost simultaneously there and in Egypt (to which we turn in the next lecture). The small, and initially fiercely independent, city-states of Sumer—such as Ur, Uruk, Eridu, and Lagash—developed similar institutions, including monarchies, aristocratic assemblies, military forces, and temple priesthoods. Mesopotamia (the land “between the rivers” Tigris and Euphrates) had no natural frontiers or barriers, and the area was conquered several times: by the Akkadians (c. 2350 B.C.) and the Babylonians (c. 1775 B.C.). As these conquerors built larger and larger imperial states, they actually absorbed and disseminated Sumerian culture, creating in the process a relatively common cultural foundation for a wide region.
I. The rise of civilization in Mesopotamia.
Although Mesopotamia is all the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, the earliest traces of civilization appeared in Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq, and possibly, at Tell Hamoukar, in what is now northeastern Syria.
1. The Uruk period (3800—3200 B.C.) was tremendously creative, with the invention of the wheel and plow; the planting of the first orchards (of dates, figs, and olives); and the development of metal casting.
2. Perhaps most significant was writing: cuneiform.
3. People built cities with walls—circuits up to five miles—and buildings of mud brick.
4. The most impressive early buildings were temples: Zig gurats. Temple priesthoods dominated society.
5. In the “Dynastic period” (2800—2350 B.C.), fierce competition between cities, and perhaps inside them, too, led to the emergence of local strongmen—lugals’---—who evolved into kings.
6. Kings claimed to be the representatives of the gods and to rule by the favor of the gods. This process introduced theocratic kingship.
7. As warfare became more important, large landowners formed a military aristocracy.
B. Mesopotamia is a broad, open plain surrounded by deserts and, beyond the deserts, by mountains.
1. The region has no natural frontiers to ward off migrants or conquerors.
2. Areas beyond Mesopotarnia were inhabited by people of lower cultural development who coveted the comparative riches and security of Mesopotamia.
C. After about 2350 B.C., Sumer was several times overrun by outsiders.
1. Sargon (237 1—2316) conquered Sumer from Akkad to the north, then expanded his holdings, as did his son after him, to the east and west.
2. This first imperial state demanded little of its subjects and, ironically, was itself conquered by Sumerian culture.
3. After Akkadian rule eventually weakened, there was a period of relative independence for Sumerian cities, followed by Babylonian conquest.
4. Hammurabi (1792—1750) was the most famous and powerful of the Babylonians (or Amorites). His law code was influential for centuries. Like the Akkadians before them, the Babylonians adopted and spread Sumerian culture.
II. Essential features of SumerianlMesopotamian culture.
A. Religion: people were polytheists and syncretistic.
1. Sky gods were generally thought of as male and related to power; earth gods were thought of as female and related to fertility.
2. Individual forces of nature were also invested with divine power:
Animism is a habit of mind that sees nothing as wholly lifeless.
3. Gods and goddesses differed from humans in supernatural powers and immortality. They were capricious. Religion sought to propitiate them.
4. Religion was pessimistic and fatalistic; it had no ethical dimension at all. This outlook was perhaps related to the geography and politics of the region.
5. Religion served as an impressive attempt to begin to systematize knowledge about the natural world.
B. Law: issued by councils of notables in conjunction with priests and
kings.
1.
2.
Law was not abstract and philosophical. Publishing laws in public places established the important principles that all are subject to the law; that the law belongs to all; that law rules, not men.
C. Literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh was a remarkable achievement.
1. The Epic is a Sumerian work dating to around 2500 B.C. that survives in later versions dating to around 800 B.C. (A tribute to its dissemination!)
2. An “epic” is a work on a grand scale dealing with gods and heroes; it is serious in tone, elevated in language, and universalizing in outlook.
3. Gilgamesh is a tale of the adventures and friendship of King Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu. It contains a mythical account of the civilizing process and a poignant reflection on mortality as the irreducible element in the human condition.
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