Ancient Greece literally created what became western civilization. Why are you acting like it’s separate?
"The West" as we know it, and as is wielded against the various peoples of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, started to be formed in the Middle Ages with the idea of Christendom and attempts to rebuild the Western Roman Empire (see: Charlemagne) and "Western culture" only really came into existence as a result of the European Enlightenment into the 19th century.
West Asia and North Africa had massive influence on what would become "the West," both indirectly via their influence on Greece and Rome and directly (Babylonian religious astrology was the foundation for the entire field of astronomy in the Renaissance and later). & Greece also had a massive influence over them, as Muslim caliphates studied and further developed the works of the Greeks in medicine, mathematics, philosophy, all kinds of scientific pursuits, and it was through Arab philosophers like Ibn Rushd that these works came back into European thought at all and allowed for intellectual renaissances. Egypt was the breadbasket of the Roman empire, housed the Library of Alexandria, had a massive influence over Greek and Roman religion through syncretism. Yet the WANA region & it's cultures are not considered part of "the West." We draw a big line down the Mediterranean that never existed historically. Why do the British, on the edge of the Roman empire, get to claim to be the cultural inheritors of the ancient Greeks through "Western civilization" but the Egyptians don't?
Ancient Greece is certainly a part of the mythos of "the West," and Greece is obviously part of European history, but just because people in Western Europe decided to construct this idea of a historical relay race of civilization where no one matters except for whichever European power is currently in control, does not make it true.
Not to mention that it doesn't even really benefit Greece. This idea of ancient Greece as "creating Western civilization" has been used by the British and other Western Europeans to distance modern Greeks from their ancestors, in some really fucking gross ways, and the same has happened to southern Italy. Because the people actually living in those areas don't live up to the whitewashed anti-Oriental fantasy.
TL;DR Ancient Greece did not create Western civilization, they created ancient Greece. That the people who created Western civilization were influenced by and obsessed with ancient Greece does not make ancient Greeks, people from a very different cultural context (and also a term which covers so much time and places), "Western." Especially when talking about how modern Americans and Western Europeans see things like gender, sexuality, and religion in comparison to an ancient Athenian's perception of those things.
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
origamiaround
baratheonpilled
blakekathryn
titsay
stormborns
snowghoul
kianamaiart
kaledo-art
