Revisiting the Myth of Western Civilization's Origins
Via Literary Hub
The Story
The idea of Western civilization as an unbroken tradition running from ancient Greece to modern Europe is more myth than history, argues classical archaeologist Naoise Mac Sweeney, who insists there is no golden thread unfurling unbroken through time from Plato to NATO.
She points out that the ancient Greeks and Romans were far more diverse than usually depicted, neither predominantly white nor European, and did not conceive of race and geography the way modern societies do.
Classical learning was carried and expanded well beyond Europe, from the sciences studied in the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad to Sudanese merchants who traded in Greek and Buddhist sculptors in northern India who drew on Greek artistic traditions.
The concept of a distinct West took shape only later, as Renaissance thinkers engaged intensively with antiquity and seventeenth century European empires sought to justify colonization.
By the eighteenth century, American revolutionaries invoked Western civilization to reconcile the contradiction of championing freedom while permitting slavery, treating it as a privileged inheritance that rationalized unequal treatment.
The real history of the West, Mac Sweeney concludes, is far richer and more complex, shaped by centuries of intercultural exchange rather than any innate superiority.
She points out that the ancient Greeks and Romans were far more diverse than usually depicted, neither predominantly white nor European, and did not conceive of race and geography the way modern societies do.
Classical learning was carried and expanded well beyond Europe, from the sciences studied in the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad to Sudanese merchants who traded in Greek and Buddhist sculptors in northern India who drew on Greek artistic traditions.
The concept of a distinct West took shape only later, as Renaissance thinkers engaged intensively with antiquity and seventeenth century European empires sought to justify colonization.
By the eighteenth century, American revolutionaries invoked Western civilization to reconcile the contradiction of championing freedom while permitting slavery, treating it as a privileged inheritance that rationalized unequal treatment.
The real history of the West, Mac Sweeney concludes, is far richer and more complex, shaped by centuries of intercultural exchange rather than any innate superiority.
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