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- Hacker News
- 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.by WelkinFolk
- > 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.
by seszett - 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.
by chrisco255 - 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!
by _yy01 - 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.
by sho_hn - 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.by seydor
- 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.by bombcar
- > 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.
by quitspamming - 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.
by wannabe44 - 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.
- This idea is correct, but I am very puzzled it is presented as something knew. In 1964 William H. Mcneill won the National Book Award for The Rise of the West, and the first 2/3's of the book was about how for thousands of years there was an interconnected set of civilizations that spanned from the Pacific through Central Asia and the Middle East to the Mediterranean.
- 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.
by zkmon - 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.
- 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.by danans
- > 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.
by wannabe44 - There were also empires like Persia who had most of their written history deliberately destroyed by conquerors, like the Arabs or Mongols.by frollogaston
- >> 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.
by noduerme - 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.
by bashmelek - > 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.
by rayiner - > 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.
by NoboruWataya