The way the art has been preserved makes you sorta realize that "ancient times" weren't that long ago.
2000 / 25 = ~80 generations
It's not some uncountable number with a million zeros. Assuming everyone knew one of their grandparents, it's more like 40 interpersonal "links".
I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before in the same way that we feel pretty connected to Copernicus developing Heliocentrism or Columbus arriving in the New World.
I wonder whether civilizations with seemingly more continuous histories like China feel more connection to the rest of their history. India's history was sort of interrupted by Islamic invasions starting from the 1200s. The Middle East, despite its tremendously long history, experienced a significant shift in culture with the rise of Christianity and then Islam.
If Chinese people don't feel that historical connection, on the other hand, it might mean that our disconnect with ancient history might more just be a product of Modernity and the rapid change of the last couple centuries.
A few years ago I was lucky enough to visit the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan. The Jade Cabbage was the headline attraction at the time. The thing that stood out the most to me was a tea cup. The date was ~1800. I was impressed by a 215 year old tea cup. Then I realized the date was 1800 bc. A 3800 year old cup!
I had a similar experience in Japan last year when I learned the same family has ruled for something like 1500 years and trace their history back 2600 years.
Two years ago, my wife and I visited the Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. We were on our way out when I saw a door that branched to a room of "deep antiquities", or words to that effect.
One of the exhibits consisted of three gold bracelets - beautiful, modern designs that would have looked at home in a window at Tiffany's. They had been excavated from strata with charcoal that dated at ~6,000 - 5,000 BC.
That single exhibit imbued in me a feeling of connection to our human past as much as has a lifetime of interest in history.
I'm native American, visiting Sequoia national Park being among the ancient forests I literally start to hear the songs and the war drums of my people. One of the most amazing experiences of my life I always thought Richard fineman was crazy for beating a bongo drum. But he was on to something.
> One of the most amazing experiences of my life I always thought Richard fineman was crazy for beating a bongo drum. But he was on to something.
Not crazy at all. Dancing, singing, music is part of just about every human culture. I'd even say dancing is a sort of fun communal therapy. Which makes total sense why its part of ceremony.
Note, Many people such as myself claim they don't dance. But secretly I "dance" (thrash about incoherently) around the when the music is going and no one is looking.
This is the magic of dark European clubs that ban phones and are designed around hiding the identities of their inhabitants, versus bright American clubs designed to see and be seen.
Thrashing about incoherently is just a sign that you’ve lost yourself in the music, and is exactly what you’re going for.
Berghain is a meme at this point, but fuck, I’ve never experienced anything like the communal trance that happens in there.
I had a similar experience at an Egyptian exhibit at the museum in Victoria. They had statues and stonework dating from the 2000's BC. At the time i was doing stonework, polishing and cutting granite and marble and stuff.
The polish and cuts on the statues were as good if not better than some of the stuff we produced with machines and power tools, and it gave me this sense of awe and made me realize people had been doing the same thing i spent every day doing for thousands and thousands of years.
> I had a similar experience in Japan last year when I learned the same family has ruled for something like 1500 years and trace their history back 2600 years.
Indonedia, Turkey and Egypt are next for you if you want your mind blown; the monolithic structures there are way older and far more intricate than a cup and are going back +10,000 years: Gunung Padang, Gobekli Tepe and possibly some of the older Egyptian Pyramids if you follow modern archeological studies on time periods that depict water erosion from rain in the Nile.
Graham Hancock's work is what confirmed my innate intuition that Agriculture has to be older than the claimed ~10,000 years as it is just to complex of a technology and a Scientific discipline to not be: these monoliths are a testament of Human ingenuity as that complex level of division of labour and highly specialized engineering, infrastructure and planning are only possible because of surpluses of food and water in civilization. Everyone I know that's been there dismisses the propaganda that the pyramids were 'built by slaves' as it falls flat on its face when they see the level of intricacy and precision required to build a symmetrical pyramid with no variation its construction, its baffling to me that for all of our amazing technology we struggle to come close to this day using modern tools and equipment and probably can't make something similar from those materials. And yet there it is a monolith that stood the test of time and is only a dull glimmer of what it was in it's peak when Egypt served as the beacon for Human knowledge but also serves as a reminder of what we're capable of when we collectively apply ourselves to an endeavor that defies all possible expectations of what is/was thought to be possible. And we still haven't excavated most of what is at Gunung Padang as it goes down very deep and is only visualized through radar.
I've never been myself, but I hope to go to all 3.
In the archaeological museum in Chania, Crete, i saw this pull-along toy cow, which wouldn't look all that out of place today, and is four thousand years old:
It's not an artifact exactly, but the Happisburgh footprints, discovered not far from me, gave me a visceral feeling of just how deep human time is. They are a set of fossilized hominid footprints made in the Norfolk mud 800,000 years ago. In the UK, there's old stuff all over the place (I live in a house that was built in the late 17th Century) so you get used to it, but 800,000 years is a length of time I find it hard to conceive of.
Italian here. We do study at school Roman history, a lot, since 6 years old. Obviously, we are very proud and connected to that historical period. Everyone knows Cesar, Augusto, Nerone and all the other important figures of the time. Mant of us, at high school, study latin. I did a science-based high school (public school) and I studied latin literature and grammar for 5 years, 4 hours per week.
It’s weird but I, as a Hispanic-American, also feel really connected to the old Roman Empire, I hear latin every Sunday at Mass (traditional Latin Mass), a lot of idioms we use every day can be traced back to the Romans, our food is a mix of European and native ingredients, even our law is based in Roman roots. It’s awesome to feel connected to Aztecs, Mayas, Spaniards and Romans.
Just curious, as a native Italian speaker, how hard did you find learning Latin and what was the hardest part for you?
My native language isn't a Romance language, but I have also spent five years learning Latin in grammar school and for me, learning both the vocabulary and the grammar was hard, hard work. I always assumed that for a native Italian speaking person it would be probably a lot easier.
Not the parent, but... it's not that difficult. You have to apply yourself, of course, but there is a connection (once you get the gist of the declinations, as italian you can understand a certain amount of words without looking at a dictionary). Difficulty varies a lot based on who writes though: e.g. Caesar is very easy, because he purposefully wrote in a simpler, clear way (less number of terms overall, trying to avoid synonyms, straight to the point).
In Italy if you follow classical studies you learn ancient Greek too (first 2 years of high school), which was definitely harder than latin, but you grock the alphabet in a short time. I seem to recall that more often than not the same word had very different meanings depending on the context, while the grammar was similar to latin (well, of course it's backward...).
Hardest part was memorizing all those declinations and verb forms. Which is not unlike what you have to do in Italian, but we start doing that 10 years earlier than we encounter Latin. And the second-hardest part is that learning a dead language when you’re 14 and your hormones are in full swing, tends to fall down the list of one’s priorities. One of my teachers tried to keep us interested by focusing on erotic poetry...
This said, I agree that for us a bunch of things are probably easier, simply because a lot of terms map directly to modern words, so the vocabulary is fairly easy to build. We also tend to ignore any pronunciation rule - we just pronounce it phonetically using Italian rules. I understand “real” scholars actually follow different rules, and Anglo people have their own conventions. Also, there is a lot of Latin all around us in inscriptions and names etc, so if it “clicks” you can find a lot of inspiration and practice with no effort.
I wish Italian history lessons featured also more lessons on the the protoceltic period in northern Italy and how it lead to the creation of what then became north European runes.
A better approach to Latin studies would also be interesting, I wish I studied Latin with a method like Lingua Latina per se Illustrata
>I wonder whether civilizations with seemingly more continuous histories like China feel more connection to the rest of their history.
This is a really good point actually. I have talked recently to Persian coworkers about their nation's history. They identify with the full length of recorded Persian history. That is, all ~5000 years of it. I have read elsewhere that this is possibly a modern trend, that is, they didn't teach Persian history as the history of their current country at some points in the past.
I suspect their emotional attachment to events 2000 years ago feels a bit different to mine then. They might feel a whole lot closer to the Sassasinds than I do to Boudicca. But maybe that has not always been the case.
Yeah, it could be a modern phenomenon and even now, a very small percentage of people have an understanding of the grand scheme of history. Even without knowing the dates and exact order of events though, it still seems plausible for Persians to have an emotional connection to historical legends that they pretty much grew up with.
That 5000 number is interesting though. Do they feel a connection with the Elamites, Sumerians, and Akkadians? That would be kind of surprising. It would make sense for them to connect with Xerxes and the Achaemenids or Medians though, despite the difference in religion. Sorta related, I've heard that there's a growing Zoroastrian movement among the "rebellious" Persian youth.
I did a course on the history of the Christian Crusades back in college, right when Operation Desert Storm was going on. The professor said that due to an essentially oral history tradition, they talked about the Crusades as something that had happened relatively recently, like to their great-grandparents.
American parents will warn their children that if they misbehave, "the boogeyman" will come for them at night. I was told that the Middle Eastern analogue was "Richard will come and get you" — as in Richard the Lion-Hearted. (I have no idea if this is true or not… it sounded like a fun anecdote back in college, now it sounds slightly ridiculous to me, but who knows?)
Firstly, the Middle East is a vast place, so there is really no “Middle Eastern analogue”. A regional version, maybe.
Secondly, the Crusades happened a very long time ago. From experience, I have never met or heard of an Arab who thought it was anything but a historical event. So, I highly doubt that anyone in the Middle East thinks of the Crusades as being relatively recent.
That does not ring true. Crusades were mostly forgotten until the rise of Arab and Turkish nationalisms. They were then appropriated into nationhood folklore.
Primary and middle school especially are part of nation building everywhere in the world. History lessons are purposefully a mix of history and propaganda.
Every nation has a founding myth. Romania's is the struggle against adversity, foreign empires and our resilience over millennia. The American one is freedom (the struggle against tyranny) and the American dream. The British one is resistance against adversity on their island, vanquishing European autocrats. Russia's is liberation from the steppe nomads and then turning the tides in a rough part of the world.
They're half lies, half truth in my experience. You know, myths :-)
Grew up in a middle eastern country and the only way the crusades are referenced is as a total victory for Islam and the Europeans ran away with their tails tucked between their legs (yes dog metaphors in the Islamic Middle East)
If you went to a sufficiently posh school you could still be taught "classics" - Latin, Greek and their history - to give a direct cultural link to that time. Not for nothing did Enoch Powell reference the river Tiber. But that's also the problem; all this referencing of the ancient world culminated in Fascism (named from the Roman fasces, the bundle of sticks with an axe that symbolises judicial power). Since the smashing of Italian and German Fascism in the 1940s, it has become ... unfashionable.
The challenge remains to reconnect with the past without using it to justify atrocities in the present. (For the avoidance of doubt, this is not limited to European history! China does historicist propaganda films too! As do a lot of places, right down to warring caucasian microstates)
(I would reccomend Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time Of Gifts", which is nominally a walking tour but has an incredible connection to the history of Europe and the places he's walking through. Everything from Charlemagne to Esterházy to Roland to Homer)
> all this referencing of the ancient world culminated in Fascism (named from the Roman fasces, the bundle of sticks with an axe that symbolises judicial power).
Ridiculous. People will use anything to justify anything. The fact that some fascists pointed to Ancient Rome is almost certainly just a result of the outsized space Rome and Greece occupies in the western cultural landscape.
The challenge most certainly does not “remain”. Modern classics departments are essentially just history, language, literature, archaeology, and anthropology rolled into one, with a specific focus on the ancient Mediterranean.
It's not at all ridiculous and it's misleading to claim it is.
I was taught Classics at a moderately posh school. And the Roman Empire - which was a very effective nationalist war machine, but utterly barbaric ethically - was very consciously echoed by the British Empire.
It's still consciously echoed in the US. Congress has a couple of giant fasces on the wall behind the Speaker. How much more of a clue does anyone need?
This is no longer obvious in modern Classics departments, and modern Europe draws on more recent history. But it's still a very obvious motivator for imperial Anglophone militarism and commerce. Most obviously in the UK, our recent crop of neo-imperialists not only drop Latin into their speeches but seem to think of themselves as classical heroes.
"And the Roman Empire - which was a very effective nationalist war machine, but utterly barbaric ethically - was very consciously echoed by the British Empire."
Actually, I would say that the closest thing you have to R.E. today is the European Union, sans the military might, of course. For all the glory of the Roman legions, it is often forgotten that the Roman empire was a common market first and foremost. Without the economic ties, the empire would have been much more fragile from within.
And the EU of today resembles that ancient structure quite a bit. A huge amalgamation of a babel of nations with a shared citizenship, unification of various laws, regulations and standards so that Portuguese butter is not that different from Finnish, a lot of internal trade reaching even the most outlying extremes of the continent, a conscious building of a pan-European road network, even the original treaty establishing the European communities was signed in Rome.
Interestingly, having semi-hostile Asia Minor (Erdogan) and having almost no control over North Africa is an obvious kind of security problem for the EU, which any Roman general would immediately point out. A secure southern border would be the almost impassable Sahara, not the Mediterranean Sea.
I am not British, but instead American. I can tell you that approximately nobody cares about a symbol hanging in the House of Representatives. There are plenty of problems and controversies in US politics, but this is not one of them. Further, Latin has no political cachet in America. None of our politicians have studied Latin in ages, and you never see it used in political speeches. Nor do you see classical references made by politicians: none of them are referencing classical myths. I think you're projecting these aspects of British education and culture onto America.
Also, it's very obviously not the case that studying classics makes you imperialist. I don't doubt that some right-wingers may like to add classics into their educational program, to create a link to the past, as you say, but that is not inherent in classical studies.
I studied classics (mostly Latin and Greek) at the university level, and not only was the phenomenon to which you refer not obviously part of the teaching, it wasn't there in the first place.
In any case, the problem isn't the substance of studying Latin, or studying history of any kind for that matter. It's about people who already have right-wing views liking to use classical aesthetics.
I think it's more accurate to say that some forms of classicism, and 19th century German Romanticism, were broadly part of an anti-modernist sentiment which was definitely part of a fertile ground in which fascism was able to take hold. That isn't to say that all 19th century and early 20th century romanticists or fellow travelers were authoritarian or fascist, but that material was often used by people who were.
And it doesn't help that at that time universities and the study of classics was basically the preserve of the upper classes, who naturally had elitist ideological biases.
There was definitely a sense among many that modernity, democracy, multiculturalism, liberalism were tied up with and responsible for the chaos in Europe at the time. And fingers were pointed at communists, socialists, Jews, liberals, secularists, etc, and in that period nationalists and ultimately fascists or other ultranationalist authoritarians were able to take root. And they often did so by appealing to their imagination of the past.
A Time Of Gifts is a marvelous book, I have a copy by my desk, but I'm not sure how one could read it and come away with a notion that fascination with the ancient world culminates in Fascism. The author is hugely engrossed with classic literature even as a teenager on walkabout -- the passage where he frightens a passerby because he's solo-reenacting scenes from epic poetry rather too enthusiastically, to keep himself entertained while on the trudge, is very memorable -- and it wasn't long after that journey concluded that he volunteered to go fight Fascism in the most literal sense possible.
No, they would have loved it because at the time people in England were hunting in forests. Working class food vendors aren't problematic in the context of the fascist worldview.
That having been said, the study of classics being unfashionable due to fascism isn't at all true.
In the fascist world view a womans place is in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. A fast food vendor 2000 years ago means that the supposed golden age of the volk never was.
You should probably read what an ideology actually believes before making sweeping pronouncements for them. This is how we end up with American rednecks being called nazis and american college students communists when the first are slightly right of center market liberals and the second are slightly left of center market liberals.
American or not, I suggest you check the bunch of propaganda videos showing Mussolini himself harvesting crops and his calls to the rural, natural lifestyle of the forefathers (his milk only breakfast being a good example accessible to non Italian speakers)
Judging from your comment I can assume you're not American, therefore you might be familiar with Coletti's study on the rural roots of fascism.
Have an excerpt that you might find interesting:
'''
One can not say based on these figures that Fascism has become strictly rural; one can only say that a good half of the Fascist militias come from the rural areas. Not only are we not ashamed of this, but we would like to proclaim — as a badge of honour — that Fascism in the Po Valley is today largely "rural".
'''
Lastly, one of the "good things that Mussolini did" (as his supporters love to repeat) is precisely the creation of agricultural land after the 1929 crisis. The n.3134 law on land quenching (legge sulla bonifica integrale) turned ONE THIRD of the land into agricultural soil (more here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Land).
You shouldn't assume other people suffer from delusions. Best regards.
This is true but I'd argue that it was mostly tactical (given the amount of farmers in Italy at the time it would have been unwise to spurn them); I'm Italian and I'm familiar, yes. The publicity images of Mussolini harvesting crops were made in the context of the effort ("battaglia del grano", edit: I see that you mentioned this) to reach autarky of the food supply.
Regarding delusions, I was referring to the "volkish" beliefs in German fascism.
The sinequanon of American consumer culture is style over substance.
Want to be a Nazi? Buy this flag.
Want to be a Communist? Buy this beret.
Never mind seeing what the ideology actually stood for. That would require an uncomfortable, and possibly dangerous, amount of thinking.
>And there are plenty of college students who genuinely believe in communism.
No there aren't. There are plenty of college students who like social democracy, there are very few who want to empower the working class American - fat, white and 40.
> That would require an uncomfortable, and possibly dangerous, amount of thinking.
About, what? Slaughtering everyone not part of the master race? Yeah, tons of thought there, all of it stuck in the stone age.
You are viewing "American consumerism" through a very narrow lens, and an incorrect one at that. The people that buy nazi stuff here generally drink the koolaid. I don't know what you're reading but naziism is still taboo here.
I find the people who think there is such a thing as an American Nazi movement are the ones whose idea of what a Nazi is comes from Marvel comics' Hydra.
A simple question: have you actually read Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto?
I think that there are way more than 500 Nazis in the US.
I also think that they have as much power as witches did in Salem, for largely the same reasons.
That said don't expect the moral panic to calm down any time soon. It's odd seeing the side of politics I identified with until recently become a larger danger to democracy than the side I was sure would implement a theocracy.
Fascism is an authoritarian nationalist death cult which glorifies in violence and war, believes in strict competitive social hierarchies where some people are born inherently and disposably inferior to others, and is deeply threatened by non-conformity.
Fascism is also pro-corporate and anti-localist. And it's fundamentally Romantic and emotional, and deliberately anti-rational.
Nazis were a subset of fascism. The US and Russia both show many signs of same in embryo but without the goose stepping and the silly helmets.
1. There's a clear continuity of goose-stepping in Russia from a time that long predates Putin.
2. We have goose-stepping in the United States, too, that long predates Trump, and will almost certainly outlast him. It doesn't look like weird one-handed salutes, it looks like a daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
>But that's also the problem; all this referencing of the ancient world culminated in Fascism (named from the Roman fasces, the bundle of sticks with an axe that symbolises judicial power).
That's a non sequitur.
"All this referencing of the ancient world" gave us the Renaissance and the Englitenment. And in tandem with the influence of christian morals, ended up giving us human rights, the respect (instead of contempt) for the powerless and the victim, and so on.
"Fascism", on the other hand, was an isolated ideology, it only really took off to a signficiant degree in Italy and Germany [1], and had nothing to do with the ancient world (although in the german version it had a fondness for paganism).
[1] While Japan was an Axis ally, theirs was just a plain-old nationalism, it had nothing to do with the ancient Greco-roman world, and also nothing to do with the economic etc. politics of Italian fascism (whereas German national-socialism had a lot in common with it). As for the rest, modern historians don't even consider Franco's Spain as fascist.
>I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before
Well, that's true for the western Roman Empire. The eastern side (which included southernmost Italy, Greece, most of the mediterrenean, middle east - Syria, Lebanon, and balkans, and eastern (modern) turkey) persisted, kept and advanced the Roman civic structure, organization, legal system, etc and didn't collapse during the middle ages.
That's why you find e.g. levantine people like Taleb that feel and express the whole connection of their area back to the ancient times...
Didn’t the Ottomans interrupt that continuity rather significantly? For example, we don’t call it “Constantinople” any more and the inhabitants of the region don’t seem to consider themselves descendants of Romans as much as Ottomans (or perhaps Islamic identity more generally), at least as I understand it.
While people in modern Turkey may not consider themselves or their state successors or the Roman Empire, the Ottoman authorities did to some extent. Notably, ‘Kayser-i Rum‘ was part of the Sultan’s title after the conquest of Constantinople.
Of course, the Ottomans weren’t the only ones playing this game; the Holy Roman Empire and to some extent Russia were also examples.
> For example, we don’t call it “Constantinople” any more
Not to detract from the rest of your point, but "Istanbul" actually comes from a Greek nickname meaning "to the city", and didn't even become the official name until 1930.
(It disputes the details of the traditional 'to the city' etymology, but in the end proposes deriving from something else with very similar meaning, "στην Πόλι" (something maybe like 'sten Poli' but there are details of historical pronunciation in the article I didn't read closely) rather than "εἰς τὴν Πόλιν" [is timˈbolin].)
Without reading the article, if it is between "στην Πόλι" and "εἰς τὴν Πόλιν", I can tell you, as a Greek, it is exactly the same phrase. Poli/Polin (Πόλη/Πόλιν) are interchangeable, the same word with a different suffix but with both the same purpose, and "στην" is just "εις την" stiched together.
>Didn’t the Ottomans interrupt that continuity rather significantly?
They did, but after half to a full millenium after the fall of the Roman Empire - so for those there it was a much more "recent" (for ancient peoples sense of historical time) affair.
>For example, we don’t call it “Constantinople” any more and the inhabitants of the region don’t seem to consider themselves descendants of Romans as much as Ottomans
Funnily enough, the Mehmed II (the conquestor of Constantinople) did call himself (among other things) "king of the romans" after that.
And the name Instabul itself comes from Constantinople (also known as "Pole" (The City, it being the big Apple of the area, where Instabul meant "in-sten-Pole" (to-the-City).
But yes, the current inhabitants of modern Turkey region don’t consider themselves descendants of Romans. But you can find some connection to other parts of the mediterranean and the levant.
>Well, that's true for the western Roman Empire. The eastern side (which included southernmost Italy, Greece, most of the mediterrenean, middle east - Syria, Lebanon, and balkans, and eastern (modern) turkey) persisted, kept and advanced the Roman civic structure, organization, legal system, etc and didn't collapse during the middle ages.
So did the West. We went from a Late Imperial system in which the military had the power (so-called « barbarians ») to an Early Medieval system in which the military had the power and stopped paying lip service to the Emperor. That's it. Collapse happened in very localized area (like England), but it certainly doesn't apply to Gaul, Iberia and Italy.
The big hole in the « Dark Ages » is due to the Islamic invasion of North Africa cutting off the supply of papyrus. But the papyrus left from the 6th and 7th centuries makes it extremely clear that those were literate societies keeping and iterating upon the Late Roman forms of administrations.
The low point is around the 8th c., somewhere between the Islamic invasion of Spain and Charlemagne.
Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. The whole continent was a basket case and hadn't advanced at all, and often regressed from the complexity/organization of civilization of the Roman empire. Even some of the major battles of the time, had only few thousand combatant, not more than a couple of Roman legions. Kings couldn't field armies, even larger to ancient greece, or persian empire (we are talking about 400-500 B.C.). The regress in overall state structure and organization was astonishing.
It took the renaissance to change things up and for innovation and cultural progress to pick up. So, it was more than a 1000 years lost to petty warfare, destruction and general ignorance.
If the Roman Empire had endured, who knows how things would have evolved. We would have been a different civilization by now. We probably would have had colonized mars by now :)
Ps. The byzantine empire, the eastern side of the Roman empire, after the late 600s - 700s, was just a shade of its original, and kept losing territory and influence until it was just a city state conquered by the Ottomans in 1453.
>Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization.
That's old but very sticky Early Modern propaganda, mostly due to anti-Catholicism. No serious historian today would make that claim, and frankly it's complete nonsense.
> Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization.
Uhm, I'd say more like 378 (battle of Hadrianopolis) - 800 (Charlemagne is crowned Emperor). The idea that the whole medieval period is a "dark age" [1] is currently discredited among historians: from 800 until the Black Death of the mid-1300s, European culture and economy grew almost nonstop.
I was raised as a pretty conservative American protestant and went to religious school where a lot of our study covered history (as recorded in the Bible) of Israel and surrounding areas. As a result I felt some connection to it; I suspect this phenomenon is a driver behind the American religious right's unwavering political support of the modern State of Israel.
I was also raised in this manner, but in the 80s and it seems in a time before the state of Israel itself seemed to be considered a 'friend' of the evangelical movement. I understand this shifted significantly later, or maybe it just took longer to come to Canada. It was far more ambiguous, and tinged with a lot of anti-Semitism; like Jews now were something apart from and different from the Hebrews in the old testament -- and that Jews themselves were tainted with the rejection of Christ.
But yes, we got a lot of middle eastern history; big fascinating archaeological sections in the appendix of my Bible. But of course it all ended in around 100 AD, with no mention of anything after, really. And it of course put a lot of emphasis on the land of Israel, which in the real world of the ancient near east was really a minor player surrounded by Egypt, the Hittites, Assyria, etc.
The major component of Evangelical obsession with Israel is seeing it as fulfilment condition for the coming Rapture. Nothing to do with liking Jews much.
I grew up in an evangelical church, I still attend evangelical churches, and yet oddly the only time I hear that I and my fellow Evangelicals support Israel is due to a death cult wish for the rapture is when people outside the faith are explaining the beliefs of my fellow parishioners to me. Odd that.
A 2017 LifeWay poll conducted in United States found that 80% of evangelical Christians believed that the creation of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy that would bring about Christ's return and more than 50% of Evangelical Christians believed that they support Israel because it is important for fulfilling the prophecy.
This also suggests that 50% would disagree with that, but 1 in 2 is plenty.
I found this book very interesting - it's about "outsiders", mainly American citizens, working in Israel to put the jigsaw puzzles in place to bring about the Apocalypse. For example, by recreating the ceremonial horns used in the Temple, and by breeding a perfect red heifer.
This dovetails with something else I regularly say; everyone defines "normal" as "whatever the state of affairs was before my birth". Human time horizons are really short, and a lot of things that feel unbelievably ancient are actually only a small number of generations in the past. Heck, the Civil War was only ~6-7 generations ago.
In many ways Chinese (and perhaps those in Japan, Korea and Vietnam) are still prisoners of Confucianism, the (deeply misogynist and authoritarian) philosophy of a man who lived 551–479 BCE.
Confucianism is a fantastic belief system with amazing humanistic values and a track record of not fomenting any conflict. Not everything is going to fit progressive mindsets and believe it or not large segments of the population like the stability that comes with the mild authoritarianism.
Unsure how to get on board with the "fantastic belief system" part (what exactly is 'fantastic'?), or the anti-conflict part as I believe most scholars of ancient history would say it has been the driver of the Chinese state which has 'integrated' numerous adjacent cultures over the last 2500 years. Present era stability is nice, however this was not always the norm, so I am umsure how much can be ascribed to Confucianism...
It is fantastic because it doesn’t make up a supernatural being or god. It stresses strong family values, compassion, creativity, self-help, reverence and kindness.
That is a pretty weak response. I believe we should judge the impact of cultural traditions by their practice not by their supposed theoretical scorecard. Your statements could be equally applied to all the major monotheistic traditions and look how much war and suffering they have produced.
I think that's a neat concept. I feel it can also be destructive. It seems like a lot of modern problems will never be solved until decide to move on. Whole wars have been fought for what happened hundreds of years ago because people won't move on to a new world where people are people rather than this culture or that culture and they're "so different". History is great and all but you have to put it into perspective or old wounds will never heal.
My grandparents are from China, and they've always been very proud of the culture/heritage. However, I think the Cultural Revolution destroyed a lot of it because of the book burning, mass exodus and killing of intellectuals. For reasons....the culture in Taiwan may have a stronger connection to historical China.
We actually know more about our ancient history than ancient people knew about few generations before them.
I am from Rome and live near the Colosseum, the connection with our past is very strong, especially now that we are uncovering more and more ancient relics thanks to modern archeology.
A friend of mine is a guide and we go visit the archeological sites at least once a month.
Ancient romans used to make fun of each other, regardless of the cetus
When the Roman army won some important battle the Emperor himself could be mocked for a day, to express the human nature of every Roman in contrast to the divine nature of many ruling classes of their times.
As an anecdote: Julius Caesar was bald and suffered about his condition, after a very important battle won by the Roman army he was made fun all day by his soldiers for being bald, despite being their general and one of the most important men in Rome.
They had a very peculiar relation with death, the funerary inscriptions are particularly interesting
It's a tradition in Rome to joke about death, even today.
Saying to a friend "ti ammazzo" (I'm gonna kill you) it's considered normal, in Rome if you hear "mortacci tua" (to your lousy bad ancestors!) you can be sure it's two friends that met after a long time and are saluting each other.
Romans built their cemeteries outside the city walls to not pollute the urban space, except for the Monumental Cemetery of Campo Verano (simply Verano in Rome) and the Protestant Cemetery, both built in 19th century, there are no other burial sites in Rome and the city's cemetery is located 30 Kms away from the city centre.
A lot of the Roman culture has survived through the centuries, it's the base of our society after all. We still use Roman roads and aqueducts, our cities are built on Roman settlements and follow the same structure, Roman law is a course and matter of examination at law university.
My "real Roman" friends can trace back their family roots to Roman people and have Roman family names (Fabi, Crescenzi, Emiliano, Lattanzi etc.)
Also we should not forget that Christians took a lot from the Hebrew tradition (angels in the old testament were inspired to mythological Egyptian or Mesopotamian creatures) and you can find testimony of their original form here, for example this Tetramorphous as Ezekiel described it, can be found at Anagni, a small city outside Rome. AFAIK there aren't many other places in the west where you can find them.
No we don't! How dare... um... ok yes we do struggle. Unless you're an ancient Greek teacher, it's very hard to make sense of it. But you can certainly pick up numerous -unchanged- words or roots(common parts) since modern Greek is derrived from them.
He means the fall of Rome and organized state, and the regression due to barbaric attacks during the middle ages.
It took several centuries for the germanic, etc. tribes that defeated Rome to become civilized enough to Roman standards, and build equal structures and quality of life.
(As a point of comparison, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc. had centuries of written history, whereas e.g. the British written history starts with the Roman invasion of the island, and starts by Romans).
>it might mean that our disconnect with ancient history might more just be a product of Modernity and the rapid change of the last couple centuries.
Has it occurred to you that "our disconnect with ancient history" isn't as widespread as you may think?
In fact, I was rather taken aback by your assertion:
>I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before in the same way that we feel pretty connected to Copernicus developing Heliocentrism or Columbus arriving in the New World.
A connection to anything requires the effort of making that connection.
And history is no exception. If someone feels disconnected from history, it's incumbent upon them to engage and connect with it.
I'd point out that for pretty much all of recorded history, it's only been those with power and wealth that have had the leisure or need to become literate, let alone to study history.
That's changed to a certain extent but most folks, even in modern times, give little thought to history, and have little interest in it.
As for "Western" culture, there's a great deal that's known and a huge amount of scholarship has and continues to be done around it and its history. If you put even a tiny bit of effort[0][1][2], you can gain great deal of knowledge about history.
Should you wish to expend more effort, there are literally thousands of books, academic papers and treatises which provide enormous insight into our history.
And if you're really interested, you can make a whole career out of the study and exposition of history.
As such, I'd say that any "disconnect" from history is rooted in a lack of interest or even a modicum of energy expended in "connecting" with it.
Our current culture and educational systems seem to deprecate and devalue history, even recent (the last 50 years or so) history. That's a shame IMHO.
Please don't take my comment as a personal attack, it's not. The sentiment you express isn't unusual or surprising.
The solution to such a "disconnect" is to access historical information and cultural narratives. Such access is, I'd argue, more available to the lay person than ever before.
I'd also note that the "disconnect" you mention, while seemingly related to mass communications and its focus on trivia and current events, isn't anything new or profound. Rather, it's related to a lack of interest among most people.
Whether that lack of interest is based on a lack of leisure time, a discouragement of such endeavors by our media and educational systems and/or other factors, it's that lack of interest that causes such a disconnect -- and that's easily remedied.
>The central point of your comment is obfuscated by unnecessary condescension.
How so?
Is it your view that pointing out that effort is required to obtain knowledge is "condescension?"
Who, exactly, was I condescending to? I'd be really interested to know, since that wasn't even a consideration to me.
In fact, I even make reference to this:
>A such, please don't take my comment as a personal attack, it's not. The sentiment you express isn't unusual or surprising.
Perhaps your confusion lies in my repeated use of the pronoun "you," which in this context refers to general humanity rather than any particular person (and most certainly not OP).
It's unfortunate that you (in this case, I specifically mean the poster to whom I'm responding) chose to ignore my argument because of some invented negativity.
Thank you for sharing your point of view. I appreciate your feedback.
First, thanks for the links. I have bookmarked the YouTube series. I too enjoy reading history and, as you rightly observe, most people don't go out of their way to read history. I am currently going through the Fall of Civilizations series [0] which I highly recommend.
The central point of your original comment was that there is extensive historical information available connecting us to our past but one has to put in the effort to discover it. You provided links to support your point.
This point could have been made succinctly. Many of the sentences with italics come across as preachy even though you probably didn't intend to. They were also unnecessary to get your point across.
>I am currently going through the Fall of Civilizations series [0] which I highly recommend.
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out.
>The central point of your original comment was that there is extensive historical information available connecting us to our past but one has to put in the effort to discover it. You provided links to support your point.
That was one point I was attempting to make. I further wanted to make it clear that such resources are more available to more people than they ever have been.
However, the central point I was attempting (apparently unsuccessfully, in your case) to make was that history is not, and never has been, all that important to most people, that our media and culture actively discourage any interest in history; and that feeling a "disconnect" from history is neither unusual nor a recent development.
Again, I appreciate your feedback, as I already know what I think and want to say, but (obviously) don't know how others will interpret what I do say.
2000 / 25 = ~80 generations
It's not some uncountable number with a million zeros. Assuming everyone knew one of their grandparents, it's more like 40 interpersonal "links".
I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before in the same way that we feel pretty connected to Copernicus developing Heliocentrism or Columbus arriving in the New World.
I wonder whether civilizations with seemingly more continuous histories like China feel more connection to the rest of their history. India's history was sort of interrupted by Islamic invasions starting from the 1200s. The Middle East, despite its tremendously long history, experienced a significant shift in culture with the rise of Christianity and then Islam.
If Chinese people don't feel that historical connection, on the other hand, it might mean that our disconnect with ancient history might more just be a product of Modernity and the rapid change of the last couple centuries.