ONE:  TIMELINES AND OVERVIEW

You may have heard nasty rumors that we'll expect you to learn something about chronology and geography in the World Thought and Culture courses. The rumors are true. But you generally won't need to memorize exact dates and detailed maps. Instead, we want you to develop a sense of the sequence of major civilizations and the succession of some of the individual creative shapers of those civilizations. In addition, you should be able to place the geographic areas we are discussing correctly on the globe.  Parenthetically, in the World Thought and Culture courses we tend to use the abbreviations B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) instead of the more familiar B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini--Latin for: "in the Year of the Lord"). We are not doing this to confuse you (and ourselves) but to get all of us accustomed to a less provincial perspective on world history.  Positing the life of Christ as axis of history is appropriate in the Christian and even generally Western context but illegitimate when applied to members of other traditions.

Back to chronology. If I were to throw at you the names Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, who, would you say, lived first? Socrates, right? Plato comes next and finally there is Aristotle. Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle. Ideas moved from teacher to student. If you invert their chronological order, then you won't be able to understand the way ideas were (or at least could be) passed on by three essential philosophers in ancient Greece. But this course is about the Middle Ages, you protest. By A.D. 500 (500 C.E.) Socrates has been dead for almost a thousand years. Why do we need to know something about the classical Greeks? Because in this course we are going to be talking about certain philosophic systems in the medieval world which can be traced directly to the ideas of Plato and Aristotle (remember that the proper spelling of the period is "medieval" NOT "midevil"!). It is also important to realize that Plato and Aristotle lived during ancient times while Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, for example, lived during the early and high Middle Ages, respectively. This is the kind of sequencing we are concerned with.  As far as geography is concerned, you should become familiar with major political units, cities, rivers and mountain ranges in the regions we are going to discuss. This course deals with primarily with Europe, though we'll take a few quick excursions into India, China, Japan and the Americas. We will focus on the Mediterranean and Atlantic portions of Europe and the areas in between.

Before we go on, we need to orient ourselves chronologically. If we go back around 5,000 years to roughly 3,000 B.C.E., what cultures come to mind? Who was around three millennia years before Christ? The Mesopotamians (particularly the Sumerians) and the Egyptians are beginning to arrive on the scene. In India the so called Indus Civilization flourishes. Civilization is also emerging on the banks of the ferocious Yellow River in China. In the Western context, however, we are talking about Mesopotamia and Egypt. The maps on our television screens as a result of various Gulf crises are the maps of the Fertile Crescent which we tend to call, with a rather provincially European bias, the cradle of civilization. Obviously this is only one of several cradles of global civilization.

Do you understand how closely contemporary politics and even wars are tied to history? Let's hop forward across the millennia until we get to around 700 C.E. (A.D. 700).  Actually we need to stop in the six hundreds. What happens at that point? Islam comes into existence in Arabia. The word Islam means submission unto the will of Allah, the Muslim name for the Hebrew Yahweh (mistakenly anglicized as Jehovah). The same Islam which was founded approximately thirteen hundred years ago still profoundly affects the Arabic world of today--not only the Arabic world proper, but wherever the faith has spread. We in the West no longer consider our form of government linked to our religious faith. In the U.S. we are proud to have separation of church and state. This indeed is the only appropriate way of life for us because we are such a pluralistic society. We have people from so many different backgrounds that we would tear ourselves to shreds if we were to connect religion and politics. But, in the countries "over there" this is not the case. For them, the Middle Ages have not yet fully passed.

So, let's go back to 3,000 B.C.E. and think of the cradle of Western civilization. This is exactly in that area where we have Africa and Europe in close conjunction. The Mesopotamians and Egyptians come first. As we proceed from there we find more bits and pieces which directly impact our lives. By about one thousand the Indo-European tribes pour into what we now call the Greek peninsula. Shortly thereafter the Etruscans and other Indo-Europeans begin to settle in the region we now know as Italy. Shortly after 500 B.C.E. Greece flowers in the Golden Age.

This is a fascinating era. For some unknown reason, or by sheer coincidence, around 500 B.C.E., major changes take place all over the world. During approximately the same period, we find rationalism emerge among the pre-Socratic philosophers in Greece, Buddhism and Jainism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, mature Hinduism in India, and Confucianism in China. The Mayan civilization develops in Mexico. The Hebrews respond to the tribulations of the Babylonian captivity with some of the major prophets. All of these transformations occur around the sixth century before our own era.

Five centuries later, shortly before the birth of Jesus, we enter the Golden Age of Rome. The Pax Romana (Latin for "Roman Peace") ushers in almost two hundred years of relative calm all across the Roman empire.

By 500 C.E., the Western (Latin) Roman Empire has bitten the dust. Out of that confusion during the collapse of Rome in the West, out of that death-bed/seed-bed, that mixture of barbarism and civilization, particularly the mingling of Germanic and Celtic peoples (and ways of life) with the Greeks and Romans (and their ways of life), there emerges yet another golden era, the High Middle Ages. The ebb and flow, waxing and waning, continue inexorably. Five hundred years later, by the 1500s, the Black Death will have ravaged Europe, and the Renaissance and the Reformation periods will forge the bridge from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period.

AD 500-AD 1650] [ONE] [TWO] [THREE] [FOUR] [FIVE] [SIX] [SEVEN] [EIGHT] [Untitled]

Posted 28 August 2000
Last revised: 00-09-08
Text and images copyright © Ingrid Shafer 2000