Western Civilization I: The Ancient and Medieval West

This is Unit Three of Social Sciences and History, part one of two: Western civilization from the first cities to the Roman peace. Carry one idea through this lecture. The anchor begins in Mesopotamia on purpose, because the Greeks did not invent civilization; they inherited an alphabet, a network and a set of enemies, and what they added was a way of arguing about it. Every state in this part rose on something borrowed and fell on something it could not hold: bronze that needed distant tin, a hoplite order that wealth undid, a republic that its own conquests outgrew. Keep asking what each state depended on, and the dates and the collapses fall into place. By the end you will be able to place the ancient Near Eastern states on a ladder of dates. To assign a feature to Sparta or Athens. To say why the Persian and Peloponnesian wars made and unmade the Classical Age. To sort a Greek passage by its kind and read who is missing from it. And to explain how Rome's institutions and its citizenship precedent built an empire and ended a republic.

Eight entries on civilization and the Near East: what the exam means by the West, what civilization means as a fact, and the first states from Mesopotamia to the Hebrews, ending with all of them on one ladder.

What the exam means by Western civilization.

SSH 0201 What Western Civilization Means on This Exam

The exam gives Western civilization thirteen to fifteen percent, from ancient western Asia and Egypt through Greece, Rome and medieval Europe to the present, and this unit ends at the Renaissance's doorstep. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Church, the towns, in that order. The anchor begins in Mesopotamia on purpose: the Greeks did not invent civilization.

What civilization means as a fact.

SSH 0202 Agriculture, Cities, and the First Civilization

Civilization, in the anchor's working definition, is agriculture plus social specialization, slow technological progress, and cultural sophistication in art, learning and belief. Hunter-gatherers could not sustain a city; a food surplus could, and the Fertile Crescent is where the cereals grew wild. The word carries a loaded opposite, barbarism. The course uses the neutral definition the anchor supplies.

Mesopotamia.

SSH 0203 Mesopotamia: Writing, Gods, Walls

Between the Tigris and Euphrates, cities rose from about thirty-five hundred BCE, with cuneiform writing, ziggurat temples, capricious gods appeased by priests, and thick walls held by peasant conscripts. Defense beat offense, so cities warred without conquering, until Sargon's empire, the first to rule beyond one city. Mathematics, astronomy, kingdoms and bureaucracy began here, in the anchor's account.

Egypt.

SSH 0204 Egypt: Unification, the Old Kingdom, Divine Kingship

About thirty-one hundred BCE, Narmer of Upper Egypt united the two Egypts. The Old Kingdom, from about twenty-seven hundred BCE, saw Djoser's first pyramid, a scribal caste and hieroglyphs, and the king held five names and joined gods to people. Long stable kingdoms were broken by intermediate periods. After the New Kingdom, Egypt was conquered repeatedly, yet stayed the richest prize.

The Bronze Age network and its collapse.

SSH 0205 Bronze Age Networks and Their Collapse

Four regions traded and corresponded in Akkadian: Greece, Anatolia, Canaan with Mesopotamia, and Egypt. The Hittites ruled Anatolia from about seventeen hundred BCE. Between twelve hundred and eleven hundred BCE most of these states collapsed, and records stopped as bureaucracies failed, so the cause is unsettled. Bronze needed tin from distant mines; when trade died, bronze died. That is the first dependence in this lecture's idea.

Iron, the Phoenicians, and Assyria.

SSH 0206 Iron, Phoenicians, and Assyria

Iron needs no alloy and no long-distance trade, so it spread slowly from about eleven hundred BCE. The Phoenicians became the sea traders and colonists of the new network, and a tale the anchor calls uncertain has their fleet circling Africa. Assyria alone survived the collapse and first conquered and held its neighbors with a standing army. Assyria was the model Persia softened.

The Hebrews.

SSH 0207 The Hebrews and the Road to Monotheism

The Hebrews appointed a king, Saul, about ten twenty BCE under Philistine pressure; David and Solomon followed, with Jerusalem as capital, a small hill kingdom whose religion outlasted every empire around it. The anchor, writing as secular scholarship, dates exclusive worship of Yahweh to the later Prophetic Movement. Judaism, Christianity and Islam share these texts. The anchor's frame is named.

Placing these states in order.

SSH 0208 Placing Ancient Near Eastern States on a Timeline

The exam's ancient questions are often about order and overlap, and the anchor's dates make a ladder. Mesopotamian cities from about thirty-five hundred BCE. Narmer's Egypt about thirty-one hundred. The Old Kingdom from about twenty-seven hundred. The Hittites from about seventeen hundred. The Bronze Age collapse about twelve hundred to eleven hundred. Iron from about eleven hundred. Saul's kingdom about ten twenty. Assyria dominant until its fall in six twelve. Cyrus's Persia from five fifty. Hold three anchors, thirty-five hundred, twelve hundred and five fifty, and place everything else between them. Given Hittites, Sargon, Assyria and Persia, the order is Sargon, Hittites, Assyria, Persia. At the collapse the Hittites vanish, Assyria survives, Persia is centuries later. Cuneiform is Mesopotamian; the alphabet is Phoenician, copied by the Greeks. The trap is Egypt's length: it spans the whole ladder, so it is never first unless the question means Narmer, and it never ended at the collapse. A second trap is treating Israel as a great power; the anchor calls Jerusalem a hill town of about five thousand.

Two entries on the Greek city-state: the polis and the hoplite, and the two cities the exam contrasts.

The Greek city-state.

SSH 0209 The Polis and the Hoplite

The Greek Dark Age ended about eight hundred BCE. Archaic Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, founded colonies, and built the polis: independent city-states sharing language, gods, citizenship and the Panhellenic games. In the phalanx, citizen spearmen each shielded the man to the left. Hoplites paid for their own arms and were not all aristocrats. Weight in battle became weight in politics.

Sparta or Athens.

SSH 0210 Sparta or Athens? Classifying a Feature

The exam pairs Sparta and Athens and asks which city a feature belongs to. Sparta: two kings, a small council, an assembly of men over thirty, citizenship limited to men who survived the training that began at seven, a tiny warrior elite over the largest enslaved population in Greece, and austerity. Athens: wealth from trade, art and drama, a struggle between landowners and everyone else that produced the first democracy, a large enslaved population too, and a navy. Ask what the feature is for. Boys trained in barracks serve a warrior elite: Sparta. A reform widening the vote answers a wealth conflict: Athens. A fleet serves trade and empire: Athens. Two hereditary kings checked by councils: Sparta. Controlled a large enslaved population: both, and a question treating slavery as Sparta's alone is wrong. The trap is the modern word spartan, which suggests Sparta was poor; it was austere by choice and rich in land and enslaved labor. The second trap is calling Athens equal: about a tenth of its people voted, on top of an empire.

Four entries on Persia, war and the Classical Age: the empire that ruled by leniency, the war the Greeks won, the war between the victors, and democracy's height and its limits.

The empire that ruled by leniency.

SSH 0211 Persia: Empire by Leniency

Cyrus the Second united Medes and Persians in five fifty BCE, took Lydia, and let conquered Greeks keep language, religion and culture in return for loyalty and tribute. Darius added the Royal Road, standard law and coinage, and satrapies; a messenger could cover sixteen hundred miles in a week by relay. Zoroastrianism was dominant under a policy of tolerance. Leniency, not terror, was the innovation.

The Persian War.

SSH 0212 The Persian War and the Delian League

When Ionia revolted, Darius moved against the Greek cities that helped, and the Greeks won. The anchor warns that the war was later recast as civilization against barbarism, a reading built on Greek sources alone. Athens turned the Delian League from a defensive coalition into its own empire. Victory bred confidence, and confidence bred the Classical Age's achievements and its wars.

The war between the victors.

SSH 0213 The Peloponnesian War and Its Aftermath

Athens and Sparta fought from four thirty-one BCE. Sparta finally allied with Persia and won, but the war undid the hoplite order: Spartans grew rich or too poor to train, and diplomacy mattered as much as arms, so that Thebes defeated Sparta in three seventy-one to general shock. The Greeks emerged less isolated and more cosmopolitan. Their sense of superiority was muted, not gone.

Athenian democracy at its height.

SSH 0214 Athenian Democracy and Its Limits

The Classical Age ran from four seventy-nine to three thirty-eight BCE. Democracy crystallized under Cleisthenes and peaked under Pericles, with about a tenth of the population voting, while Athens extracted wealth from other cities through the League: the anchor's phrase is the ironies of democracy. Democratic government would not return to the West until the late eighteenth century. The idea outlived the institution.

Four entries on Greek thought and its heirs: humanism and history, Alexander and the kingdoms after him, the schools of calm, and how to read a Greek source.

Humanism, history, and philosophy.

SSH 0215 Humanism, History, and Philosophy

Humanism, the idea that humankind is beautiful, capable and creative, ran through Greek drama, art and thought. Greek science was mostly wrong in conclusions and right in method, and Herodotus wrote history as explanation from sources. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle asked whether ethics were nature or custom. The Parthenon's golden ratio belongs to the same impulse: perfection as balance.

Alexander.

SSH 0216 Alexander and the Hellenistic Kingdoms

Philip of Macedon conquered Greece; his son Alexander conquered Persia in twelve years, married his officers to Persian nobles, and died without an heir. By two eighty BCE three kingdoms stood, Antigonid, Ptolemaic and Seleucid, with Alexandria in Egypt the largest of the new Greek cities. Greek culture spread across the Middle East only now. Rome was rising in the same decades.

The Hellenistic schools.

SSH 0217 Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics

Barred from politics, Hellenistic philosophers turned to personal ethics: how to live in tranquility. Epicureans withdrew from public drama and feared neither gods nor death. Stoics did their duty under fate. Cynics rejected convention. Knowledge of the world widened meanwhile, from Ethiopia to India. The exam contrasts Epicurean pleasure with Stoic duty; the anchor's point is that both sought calm.

Reading a Greek source.

SSH 0218 Reading a Greek Primary Source for Its Claim

The exam quotes Greek writers and asks what they argue, and the anchor's account of Greek thought supplies the tools. Herodotus explains events by how people respond to pressure; a passage that explains a war by motives rather than by gods is his method. A philosopher's passage asks whether a practice is natural or customary. A Periclean speech praises Athens as a model while its empire stands behind it. Three questions sort any passage. Does it explain by human motive or divine will? Motive marks the historians. Does it test a custom against nature? That marks the philosophers. Does it praise a city or a way of life? That marks a political speech, and the reader asks who is absent, usually the enslaved and the allies paying tribute. A passage saying free Greeks fight better is a Greek source's own perspective, the bias the anchor warns against. The trap is taking a Greek source's praise of freedom as a description of Greek society. Read the claim, then read who makes it and who is missing.

Six entries on Rome from Republic to Principate: the institutions, the struggle inside them, the expansion that built an empire, the clientage that ended the Republic, Augustus, and the Roman peace.

The Republic's institutions.

SSH 0219 The Republic's Institutions

Rome sat on defensible hills by a ford of the Tiber at a crossroads of trade. The Centuriate Assembly made laws; two consuls with imperium held near-unlimited power for a year each, twelve lictors before them and each checking the other; the Senate, aristocrats for life, controlled finances. A few families worked behind the forms. The design lasted about five centuries.

The struggle inside the Republic.

SSH 0220 The Conflict of the Orders

From about five hundred to three sixty BCE, plebeians fought for representation against patricians who could enslave debtors. In four ninety-four they threatened to leave Rome and won tribunes with a veto, then a Plebeian Council, intermarriage, a ban on debt slavery, and one plebeian consul. By two eighty-seven the Plebeian Assembly's votes carried the force of law. The anchor compares the struggle to Athens's.

How Rome grew.

SSH 0221 Expansion, Citizenship, and the Punic Wars

Rome led the Latin League, beat it in three thirty-eight BCE, and offered the defeated citizenship without the vote in return for loyalty and troops. Wars were annual and deliberately terrifying, as Polybius noted. From two sixty-four, the Punic Wars broke Carthage, and Greece was taken in the same decades. Every victory added soldiers. The citizenship precedent, more than any battle, built the empire.

How the Republic ended.

SSH 0222 Clientage and the Republic's End

Roman life ran on clientage: patrons securing contracts, commissions and land for clients, who voted as directed. Conquest's wealth flowed to elites, and by about one hundred BCE debt and poverty afflicted citizens the assemblies could not protect. Marius, Sulla, Caesar; the Second Triumvirate of forty-three BCE; Octavian over Antony. The anchor insists neither the rise nor the fall was inevitable. The Republic depended on what conquest outgrew.

Augustus.

SSH 0223 Augustus and the Principate

Octavian, as Augustus, kept republican forms as a facade and ruled as princeps, first citizen, with the Senate told which actions to take. He built a professional army with twenty years' service and land on retirement. Caesar became the office's name, later Tsar and Kaiser. The empire lasted about five centuries in the west and over a thousand years in the east.

The Roman peace.

SSH 0224 The Pax Romana and the Frontiers

From about one to two hundred CE, roads, one language and protection from bandits ran from Spain to Mesopotamia. Three dynasties ruled: Julian, Flavian, and the Five Good Emperors who adopted successors; under Trajan in one seventeen the empire was largest, and Hadrian's frontier fortifications were later called the limes. Parthian Persia was the rival Rome never beat. Chinese silk drained Roman gold.

Look at what you can now do. You can place the Near Eastern states on a ladder anchored at thirty-five hundred, twelve hundred and five fifty BCE, and you know Egypt spans the whole of it. You can assign a feature to Sparta or Athens by asking what it is for, and you know both cities held large enslaved populations. You can say that the Persian War bred the confidence of the Classical Age and the Peloponnesian War undid the hoplite order beneath it. You can sort a Greek passage into historian, philosopher or speech, and read who is missing from it. And you can explain how the citizenship precedent built Rome's empire and how clientage and conquest's wealth ended its Republic, each state depending on something it could not hold, which is the idea this lecture opened with. Part two carries Rome from its society and law through its third-century crisis, Christianity, Byzantium, Islam, the Franks, feudal law, the Crusades and the Black Death.