I cannot remember for the life of me if I've published any of this material - and I'm not going to check! There may be a total repeat of most of this material in another article, and I've just decided not to worry about it. We're going to talk about Classical civilizations, but I want to start from where we originate as a Western culture. Classical civilizations were probably the first time in history in the West when people no longer lived at a subsistence level, as our Appalachians in the last article continue to do. There were superiorities to our civilization in Classical civilizations, some radical parallels, and also - when it comes to engineering - we have changed everything and are far superior.
Let us look back first into the annals of our archaeology in cultural anthropology. Our earliest records in the West are what are called, "Early Hebraic Records," and also the early cuneiform scripts in the Tigris River Valley that is currently in Iran. While the early Hebraic records are pagan, there is already a sense of monotheism developing in these early records. The Hebraides were an apparently very warlike nomadic tribe that lived in the Sinai region, which is one of the worst wastelands on the planet, and apparently always has been.
The cuneiform scripts show both a sense of ancestral worship, and also a pretty interesting cosmology. The Sumer's had one type of deity, whether it was a demi-god, a true deity or an ancestral icon or cultural hero. They simply called all of those a, "spirit." The only differentiation they made between spirits with any regularity was, "clean," and, "unclean." One of the most frequently worshipped spirits of Sumer was the war-spirit Marduk, who - as far as I know - was always referred to as an, "unclean spirit."
The cult of Marduk was one of the worst cults of murder we've ever seen described in history - from what I've read. People hated and feared Marduk in Sumer, and he was only worshipped so much for a reason of geography. Sumer remains one of the most fertile areas of the world, and it was at one time possible to grow incredible agriculture there with no crop rotation for year upon year. This would have made Sumer a place of incredible luxury, except that Sumer has no geographical defenses. So, since the land was so desirable, tribe after tribe waltzed in and destroyed the other tribe utterly for era after era. The conditions of constant war in Sumer were so awful as to be called unlivable in many of the cuneiform scripts.
The place where the Tigris and Euphrates meet is described as the Garden of Eden in the beginning of Genesis, and this is very likely a remnant of some of our oldest Western records. What wound up happening in the West is that the monotheistic bent of the Hebraides records became ascendent. In terms of religion, the three major Western religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three practice some form of monotheism, meaning that the ideal absolute is a unified creator-god, though in all three religions we see a split between types, names, or even forms of this unified creator-god.
Both sets of our earliest records in the West are probably around 7000 years old, or just a few centuries younger. What comes down to us today in Western Scriptures is most certainly derived from these records, particularly these Hebraic records, although there has been a great deal of transformation of those early records and the inherent ideals contained within them. In the West then, our traditions all stem from what is essentially Hebraic thought, although even the old nations of North Israel and Judea were not exactly what the Hebraides were. The concepts of Sumer were never widely disseminated, although we will see in our discussion of classical civilizations that paganism was widespread in the West.
The next major development in the West comes with the establishment of the Western philosophical tradition, which centered in Greece at around perhaps 2300 or even 2400 years ago. This tradition is largely of Platonic Athens, and is the direct motivation for the formation of the fabulous engineering we are capable of today. Science as a method begins in a very crude fashion at this point, and classical civilization is just around the same age. What we would typically call classical civilizations are Athenian Greece and the Latin Empires up until the formation of Christianity.
The method of classifying lacks some clarity and objectivity, but the basic idea stands that we have in the West a religious tradition that adopted the leanings of this minor Hebraides tribe that wandered this desolate wasteland. Then we have a philosophical tradition that begins with a pre-Platonic philosophy that begins in Athenian Greece. We'll get to more in the next article but those are the things to keep in mind.
