This week we get to think creatively about history, imagining individual lives during the period we’re studying.
Your assignment is to write a first-person account of your life in one of the second-wave Eurasian empires described in chapters 3 and 4 of our textbook. Consider your age, gender, socioeconomic status, religion, interests, life experiences, etc. Who are you? Where do you live? Who do you associate with? What are your hopes and disappointments? What is your daily life like?
You can base the character you adopt for this assignment on your own life, taking into account factors such as age, gender, and socioeconomic status, or you can create a new character entirely. The important part is that you create a detailed, specific, vivid portrait of what your character’s life would be like.
To help create a detailed, specific, vivid portrait, think first about the year your character is living in and the city or region your character is living in. With that in mind, flesh out your portrait by combining specific terms, people, movements, events, etc. from our textbook with social interactions, emotional reactions, etc. from your own imagination.
Answering this question fully will likely require 4-6 paragraphs (remember, roughly 6-8 sentences each), so don’t be afraid to dig deep. I’m excited to see who you come up with!
I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, and pray in your church. You and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.
~Khalil Gibran
Readings
Please read the following chapter(s) in your course textbook and view any other listed resources:
Chapters 3 & 4, Ways of the World: A Brief Global History with Sources
These optional PowerPoint slides are a handy way to see the main points as you read.
Ancient Rome in 20 minutes, YouTube (21 minutes)
Abstract: Caesar, The Colosseum, Republic, Nero, geese, plebeians, legions—everything that you once knew but forgot, in a crash course video by Arzamas.
Video Link 1:
History Of Ancient China | Dynasties, Confucius, And The First Emperor, YouTube (0:15 minutes)
This is China. It’s big. Most of your stuff probably comes from there, and they have a solar farm shaped like a panda. But most interestingly, China is old. China has been a historical reference since the beginning. So how did China become the world’s oldest continuous civilization? What’s a dynasty, who’s Confucius, and is it ever okay to bury people alive? Well. Let’s find out.
Video Link 2:
Video Link 3:
Virtual Field Trip (Optional)
Do you have time to visit a museum? The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is legendary. Feel free to visit its online collection of Greek and Roman art. You might find something you can use in your discussions this week.
This virtual field trip is optional. Feel free to browse as your time permits.
Web Link:
Chapter Overview
Chapters 3 & 4 Overview
The Athenian historian Thucydides asserted that in later years, people would never believe, based on the physical remains, that Sparta was as important as it was; instead, they would believe that Athens was twice as great. Why did democracies indulge in monumental art? Consider the problem of survival (the Parthenon itself only survived because it became a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but then it was nearly destroyed when gunpowder stored in it exploded). Clearly, buildings alone are not enough to explain greatness, but they are an expression of Athens’s cultural pride in the fifth century B.C.E.
The end of Athenian political greatness was its defeat in the Peloponnesian War and again by Philip II of Macedon in 338 B.C.E. Yet the physical remains of Athens after that time suggest a different story. Foreign rulers patronized Athens heavily for centuries. People continued to regard Athens as a center of culture. Also, when Greece won its independence from Turkey in the nineteenth century, Athens was the natural capital of the new state.
Macedonians admired Athenian learning (even hiring the Athenian-trained Aristotle to tutor Alexander the Great) and carried it with them via a process of cultural transmission. Hellenistic education and libraries preserved Athenian works. In the sixth century C.E., Boethius translated some of Aristotle’s works, and the Middle Ages rediscovered the rest of the Aristotelian corpus.
Many students have an interest in military history and have already heard of Alexander the Great. Alexander is a convenient hook to draw interest to the exploration of Greek military history, Persian political organization, and both Greek and Persian culture.
There is no denying the frequent resentment towards imperial governance. How did each empire fail its subject population? Could the same sort of revolt have occurred in one of the other empires? Consider whether a nationalist sentiment was an important factor in these subjects’ relations with their conquerors.
One purpose of Chapter 4 is to give deeper consideration to the ways in which governments in the ancient world could use religion—and how religion could use government—to further their own ends. Your readings will consider religion as a tool of state control. We also will examine the symbiotic relationship between religions and states and the reasons why that symbiosis sometimes fails to take place.
An intriguing exercise is to rate the religious and cultural systems covered in this chapter on a line that ranges from “most closely integrated with the state” to “least closely integrated with the state.” You may discover cases of change over time as well as cases where a religion did not win state support in one region but did in another. Also, you might come up with cases in which you think the religion or cultural system “took advantage of ” a state. Give some attention to traditions that lack a clear hierarchy or “mastermind” to direct policy, such as Confucianism, Greek rationalism, or Buddhism.
You will see some of the advantages of a symbiotic relationship between a religion and a state. What are some possible reasons why some states support a particular religion/cultural tradition? What are some cases of state persecution of a religion/cultural tradition?
A second purpose is to delve into the historical roots of the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We will underscore the notion that only a handful of ideas in global civilization emerge fully formed from nothing, scrutinize and enhance previous information about the First Civilizations and second-wave empires, and investigate how individual brilliance (or enlightenment) from various sources can mold religious tradition.
This is a topic that, when approached carefully and with sensitivity, can help teach us the ways of historical analysis without insulting anyone’s faith. The most convenient place to start is with the Hebrews and their wanderings. Abraham is described in Genesis as coming from “Ur of the Chaldeans” — in other words, ancient Mesopotamia. Consider how Mesopotamian states would have impressed Hebrew pastoralists. It’s important to note that this was a selective process; the Hebrews adopted elements of belief and social organization that resonated with their own beliefs in a highly selective process. Perhaps we should consider Mesopotamian ziggurats as the inspiration behind the “Tower of Babel”? The similarity of the Genesis flood story to that told in the Epic of Gilgamesh? Old Testament law and Mesopotamian law codes, such as the Code of Hammurabi, share numerous similarities.
We then discuss how Jews would have learned about Zoroastrianism. What were the main points at which Zoroastrianism influenced Judaism? Finally, consider the large number of cultural influences that were present in Palestine at the beginning of the Common Era. Points to consider include the strong influence of Greek rationalism on Judaism, the Pharisees’ reaction against Greek rationalism within Judaism, Greco-Roman polytheism, a multitude of Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism, possibly some Buddhism, and, of course, the teachings of Jesus.
The rise of Christianity is a beneficial topic for introducing issues of social dislocation in cities, hybridization of traditions (in this case, Judaism with Greek rationalism), and the power of emperors (most notably Constantine, Julian the Apostate, and Theodosius the Great). Our aims are to examine how Christianity became a major religion in the period between the apostles and around 400 C.E., to consider the cultural and social conditions of the Roman Empire, and to engage in a frank discussion of historical method vs. belief.
Please keep in mind that historians cannot take a stand in their professional work on issues of religious truth. The divine is rather beyond scholarship, but religion, by contrast, is the way human societies have tried to understand the divine and is thus subject to historical analysis.
