Resumo de Ancient World Cultures

Ancient World Cultures

The question that initiates this program is a broad one: Why study ancient cultures?
Students do study and will study ancient cultures; such study is an expected part of a tradition of intellectual development. The response to the why of the initial question is a matter of tradition, if not fact. A study of the ROMAN EMPIRE, a reading of Greek philosophy and literature, a look at the PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT -- these are all accepted parts of a Western education.
Probably so: even today, in the plurality of approaches to the study of history and to the study of cultures, people talk about PLATO or DANTE or Krishna or Mohammed.
Historically in a discussion of universality, consider, the case of Arjuna in The Bhagavad Gita. The battle that Arjuna holds off while frozen on his chariot relates, for example, to contemporary battles in World War II. Convinced that his relatives will die in this life only to be reborn in another, Arjuna can reluctantly permit the carnage to begin. No such choice is left to Schindler (featured in Spielberg's film Schindler's List), on the other hand, whose intervention on behalf of Jews saved many people in this life. The danger in looking for universals thus consists in reformulating other, possibly alien, views to fit our own. We must always guard against the assumption that other people think as we do -- or that they should. Arjuna speaks within the context of one culture; Schindler acts within the confines of another.
The differences among cultures are of greatest interest here, and reading about ancient cultures is thus reading about other people whose lives were surely different from our own. The social organization of Socrates' ATHENS -- where a gimpy-legged man could hobble around interrogating citizens at will -- differs profoundly from today's world beset with modern media whereby people rarely get to see or literally hear their critics.The psychology of the thousands of Egyptian workers who, apparently unquestioningly, spent their lives dragging great blocks of stone across burning sands in the construction of staggering pyramidal edifices whose completion took many lifetimes.
What is a culture after all? Most people would ascribe an abstract value to culture -- that which produces good art, great literature, right behavior, etc. Yet the criteria of quality are scarcely international or inter-cultural: a revered classical work on the sitar resists comparison to a Mozart symphony beyond the statement that both are considered great cultural achievements in the context of their home cultures.
Many people would like to conceive of history as a succession of movements or stages in an on-going (and, generally) ever-improving cultural novel of human life. For these people, the Romantic period is definable, its gifts to the human spirit are calculable. Yet, how can any culture speak for all its practitioners? Do all people share equally in the culture of which they are a part? It is precisely because AKHENATON chose to resist the pantheism that characterized pharaonic Egypt before and after his brief reign and instituted a qualified monotheism that he is remembered (and magically, too, in a contemporary opera by Philip Glass). So, a culture includes both the dominant tradition and its transgression.
As you begin your study of ancient cultures, you might want to recall these questions as you forge for yourself a meaning to the term culture. In the process, try not to measure others against your own cultural standard, which has, in many ways, formed you and your apprehension of the world. Instead, try for a moment to see the glittering battle scene with Arjuna's eyes.
Who knows how many translations the stories underwent before their reworking in the Babylonian language? Who knows how many parts of the story might have offended or misrepresented the eponymous king? Who knows how many story-tellers made more (or less) of Mashu, the mountainous gateway to the other worldthey kept their audiences spellbound with fantastical details of this greatest of human adventures -- the struggle to find (and retain) eternal life?
What is known is no less intriguing. How curious is the parallel between the story of Utnapishtim and the Hebrew account of Noah. How symbolic is the description of Enkidu, the prototypical natural man, as he sheds his animalistic behaviors in preference for the pleasures of human society. How extraordinary is the description of the snake, whose stealing of the essence of immortality from Gilgamesh results in the snake's rebirth each time it sheds its skin.
Of course the Hebrew iteration of the Flood story is not coincidence. For a time, the HEBREWS lived in SUMER, home to Abraham's people. Nomadic people, they left the fertile river valleys and headed for CANAAN and later EGYPT, taking with them ancient accounts of floods and righteous people whose obedience and wisdom helped them to survive the consuming waters.
Nor is the function of the snake coincidental either. The Hebrews find the powerful, mysterious serpent in their creation story and the Garden of Eden, which surely was located in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, not the dry vistas of Canaan or the arid Sinai peninsula. But while, for the Sumerians, the snake is merely deceitful and clever, the snake becomes the symbol of creeping evil for the Hebrews.

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