Summary of Chapter 2 Early Civilizations This chapter tells us the story of the early wanderers, because of the innovation of bronze and iron, became settlers who need to grow on their land generations after generations. Of these the most famous peoples are the Sumerians and the Egyptians. Because of the use of iron, the agriculture developed fast and thus the civilization too. The Middle East, once called Fertile Crescent, was very different from today from the climate to the civilization. The Sumerians first built their kingdom here, due to the epic myth Gilgamesh, believing in polytheism and having a developed institution. They invented cuneiform to write down their histories and information, by which the Hammurabi Law Code was written to control the lower classes of the society. What’s more, the Egyptians also developed a big country ruled by the king pharaohs, also known as the gods of Egypt, left behind them a great number of pyramids and mysteries. Varied from the Sumerians, the Egyptians wrote in the hieroglyphics (pictogram writing) either for decoration or record. After these two civilizations, the Assyrians and the Persians also took control of this area. However, the quick development on science and technology also brought us which is unimaginable in the hunter-gatherers community health problems (like famine, poor nutrition, and contagious diseases), discrimination (like sexism and racism), unequal status of different classes and wars. Wars are a two-edged weapon which can be used for good or for evil. Some wars are for the peace of one kingdom, others intruding other kingdoms, but both can improve the communication between places and civilizations. In a word, wars promotes destruction but also cooperation. Development is good, yet we should focus on the side effect it brings us. Maybe the ignorance of these side effects is the reason why these once-popular civilizations decomposed at last. How civilization develops: Iron (or some important power) invented → agriculture (industry) expands → productive forces improve/become settlers (or have new kinds of lifestyle)→(new) classes appear (the winning class start to rule the society)/division of labor→country appears→new institution, new custom, new religion constructed→civilization develops Summary of Chapter 3 God Belief of the Jews Chapter 3 tells us a brief history of the Hebrews, also called the Jews, who recognized themselves as the Chosen People and believe in a jealous God preventing them from accepting the polytheism of their neighbors. They survived through the anti-Semitism from their neighbors a small but significant minority in the ancient world of the Middle East, Europe, and even deeper into South and East Asia, and thus became a special contribution to the Western civilization. The reason of their survival is still beyond me, but I’ m seeking to figure out. What actually differentiates them from their neighbors is the tiny political state they constructed, not an empire seeming everlasting. The Jew’s history is very special from others. The influence Jews made on the Western civilization not being compared to their political contributions, they are a group of people using spiritual ideas to control itself, but not political or economical institution. So what makes this group of people, even after the Diaspora, lived till now while the Romans or the Hellenes, once having a great empire upon the area around the Mediterranean Sea? The tolerance their conquerors had on them is first and foremost a lucky incident. They were allowed to preserve the traditional belief in God, and such is a long time, that they can at last survive with many Jews still not going back home to the twentieth century and build a country named Israel. What’s more, the most crucial part of the hard but successful survival is the sufficient institution on belief. Ten Commandments and over 600 laws regulate the action of the individual. The covenant the God made with His people and the organization without the intervening mediation of kings and priests make the Jews can communicate with the God individually, without the need of public feasts or priests preaching. As a result, wherever and whenever they are, He is always there, which makes them insist on doing what they want and successful no matter in science or in trade till now. The Jews has already become Fortune’s favored children by wisdom and diligence. Their belief in monotheism and devotion to one god has a power of centripetal force which makes their hearts together with god, and with each other. A Comparison on Early Civilizations hunters the the the &gatherers Sumerians Egyptians Jews Israel-Egypt- living place everywhere Mesopotamia Egypt everywhere belief polytheism polytheism polytheism monotheism tool stone bronze iron kingdom tribes kingdom kingdom kingdom-groups Paleolithic Age time Bronze Age Iron Age Neolithic Age discrimination no sexism sexism sexism/were anti king leader king pharaoh leader-king-leader Summary of Chapter 4 The Great Hellenes The Hellenes lived in the Hellas on the eastern and northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and expand their colonies to the southern and western coast of it. They are most famous for the political institution contributing to the Western Civilization, still having influence on us now. They have lived through 4 typical periods – the Dark Ages (the Homer Times), the Classical Age (including the Golden Ages), the Hero Times and the Hellenistic Age (the recession). Each period has some representative events and some famous heroes, which will be mentioned here. The civilization of the Hellenes begins from 1200 B.C., when so many other civilizations suffered crises at the dawn of the Iron Age. During this time, the Mycenaeans and Minoans lived in Greece together with the first Hellenes invaders, which causes the blending of people, with the appearance of the Greek. The early Greek was divided into three main ethnicities: Dorians, Ionians and Aeolians. What causes the political type of the Hellenes is the mountainous topography which divided people into different groups, all living in poleis. Not having adequate land for civilized agriculture, the people started involving in commerce and colonization – becoming seafarers. They also developed a useful alphabet (the word alphabet derived from the first two letters of the Hellenes letters alpha and beta) influencing our world till now. They borrowed this from the Phoenicians, varied from Sumer’s cuneiform, Egypt’s hieroglyphics, Chinese or Indian one. Granted that the many advantages Phoenicians had, but they ultimately failed in the competition of civilizations while the Greeks succeeded only by keeping confidence on themselves. When they borrowed many civilized things from other people, they thought that they were superior to all of them, calling them barbarians. One thing distinguishing them from others is the democracy form of government. There are 3 main types due to the standard of the rulers: kingship, aristocracy and tyranny. What’s more, Sparta and Athens also represents two kinds of ruling of government, and each leads a league in the Peloponnesian Wars. Sparta promoting oligarchy agreed to the institution leaning to the past and supported individuals with privileges while Athens inclined to the future and wanted to broaden access to status. Sparta had helots enslaved by them, organizing their entire state around militarism and egalitarianism to stop a successful slave rebellion. Athens, however, developed a democratic society, with many tyrants (Draco, Solon, Cleisthenes, Perikles) making innovations to seek to protect citizens’ rights and democratic institutions. In addition, two wars must be mentioned in the Hellenes history, which are the Persian Wars (494-449B.C.) and the Peloponnesian Wars (460-404B.C.). The former represented the unit of the Greeks while the other meant the separation of the Greeks between different groups. The Persian War is the cause of the Golden Age, which made Athens the leader of the Mediterranean with its democratic innovations going on. The Peloponnesian War marks the end of the Golden Age because of Athens and Sparta’s opposite politic ideas and their demand for the leader of the Mediterranean. This civil war made the whole Greece trap into a recession, which caused Alexander the Great from Macedon conquer the Greece. When Greece fell into a recession, their culture developed prosperously. Macedon accepted the Greek’s culture, and the hellenization began. The remains of the Temple of the Olympian Zeus, with the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens looming beyond, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, four tragedies and four comedies, all of which still attract us today. We can still experience the profound ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. We can still learn the rationalism, skepticism, hedonism, cynicism and the Sophists’ opinions, which contributed to the whole world of the Greek philosophy. However, because of their cultural arrogance, they became marginalized instead of being the ongoing bearers of history. Then the Imperium Romanum conquered Greece, adopting Hellenes’ culture and adding more to the foundations of the West. Summary of Chapter 5 The Imperium Romanum The Road to Empire While the Greeks quarreled themselves into fragmentation, the Romans, were proving much more adept at power politics. The Romans believed that their ancestors are twin brothers - Romulus and Remus, who were brought up by a she wolf and fought each other later. Romulus at last won the battle and established their ‘country’ in 753 B.C. However, the Romans at first didn’t have a real country, but just an ethnic group ruled under the Etruscan kings. The turning point came when Sextus (the son of an Etruscan king) lusted after Lucretia, which made the outraged Romans organize a rebellion and throw the Etruscans out of their city. Thus, rape and suicide inspired Roman political freedom. Actually, I have a question here – what does this ‘political freedom’ mean? Does it mean freeing from the rule of other ethnicities? After all, the Romans due to the historical and archaeological evidence had indeed won freedom from the Etruscan domination and built up their own country. Instead of being like Greek’s democracy, the Romans used another form of country – republic. In Polybius’ article ‘Why Romans and Not Greeks Govern the World’, he explained that republic is a good institution for government construction. There are mainly three forms of government: kingship, aristocracy and democracy, which can be used for good or evil, each related to monarchy, oligarchy and ochlocracy. Such is the recurring cycle of constitutions, that the Romans had foreseen the dangers and developed a whole new constitution, the republic. It was a combination of all three constitutions. And one could consider it as monarchy or aristocracy or democracy, when one looks at it from different angles – the Consuls, the Senate or the mass. In my opinion, this might be an early form of separation of the executive, legislative and judicial powers, for the Consuls are more like the executive and the judicial, the Senate legislative, the mass something else(this doesn’t mean the real state of power separation in Rome but just an analogy). The Romans had the idea of check and balance to avoid high degreed centralization or absolutism, as it did in the case of having two people work together on one official position. Thus, this constitution could deal with all kinds of emergencies and worked together efficiently, which made ancient Rome finally govern the world. What’s more, two important innovations were carried out in Rome. Of these are the military innovation and the political innovation. At first, there were two main groups in Rome: the patricians and the plebians. However, the situation that the patricians shared all the positions of the government needed to be replaced, when wars caused the declination of the patricians and the larger say in government required by the plebians. Then after Rome’s near destruction by the Celts or the Gauls from the primitive Europe settling in what is now France and the British Isles and storming down the Italian Peninsula, first came the key military innovation that the smaller and more maneuverable legion were invented to replace the old Greek phalanx. And office of the tribunes were created to protect the plebians’ rights, the Assembly of the Tribes allowed by the patricians to being built, the wealthy plebians becoming magistrates as well. In addition, like the Greece, Rome also developed a famous process called the Romanization. The Romans are first and foremost tolerant to other ethnicities, their subject people were given rights to vote and hold important offices, treated as their own citizens rather the conquered. Step by step those beaten people accepted Rome’s laws and institutions, adopted Latin, worshipped the Roman deities, and even espoused Roman virtues like responsibility and seriousness. Furthermore, the Romans also transformed and built a large number of cities, making the city-state of Rome become the model throughout its empire (if not yet in the name). The forum, a market surrounded by government buildings and temples, is the heart of each city, preparing for the entertainments of the Romans. The construction of the cities possessed a high level of civilization, like the dome of the Pantheon. The Roman roads were so well designed that people still drive on them today, winning Rome a famous byword ‘all roads lead to Rome’. The most magnificent invention of the Romans was improvement of laws on protecting people’s rights. Different from Hammurabi or Moses’ laws which was told invented by god, the Romans invented the idea of natural law. The laws developed a lot during several centuries. The founding point was around 450 B.C. when the Twelve Tables were delivered to protect the plebians’ rights from the abuse of the patricians. In this way, with the continuing fashioned laws, the legal decisions and judgments were supposed to be founded on facts and rational argumentation, and Roman laws has become the basis of many European legal systems today. Hence, the laws could be used on more territories and ethnicities. However, I thought that this might be the reasons why Rome became an empire later – too many kinds of people causing so many different demands made Rome’s governance need to be more centralized; the imperial desire for more land, more people required Rome’s governance be more absolute. Because of their military success, the Romans developed an addiction to world domination. Not satisfied with the possible threat from the next hill, Rome decided to invade Sicily, a city of Carthage ruled by the Phoenicians. This decision led Rome to a life-or-death crisis. The Phoenicians certainly could not allow Rome’s expansion, while Rome being determined, which caused the Punic Wars from 264 to 146 B.C. Of these the most famous one was the invasion of Italy by the Carthaginian General Hannibal in 218 B.C., who, shocking the Romans, led its army across the Alps. This extraordinary military feat set a good example for Napoleon several centuries later. Hannibal was a great military general, when he didn’t at last won the war. Had he quickly defeated the Romans, he couldn’t have let the Romans know his tactics. Had he not returned to Carthage but stayed in Rome waiting to defeat it completely, Carthage wouldn’t have been destroyed by Rome in the end – ‘Carthago delenda est’, chanted by the demagogues in Rome. Then in the same year when Rome wielded undisputed mastery over the Western Mediterranean, the Romans had an opportunity to declare the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum, which was the invitation asking Rome to become protectors from the conquered and enslaved Greeks against the Macedonians. Rome, of course, accepted it and brought the Greeks order and peace, which was welcomed by many Greeks. During the development of the whole country, the cliché of ‘the rich get richer while the poor get poorer’ had become a weak spot in Rome’s society and had worsened – a new class proletariat appeared, migrating to the cities (especially to Rome itself). Due to this, the patricians first introduced a welfare system known as ‘bread and circuses’, then proscription to remove overly powerful politicians. In this way, those patricians divided into two factions, the optimates protecting oligarchy and the populares democracy. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, two patrician brothers in the populares party tried to help the plebians by land reforming, yet they were killed in 133 B.C. by the rival optimates. Their death marked that the old and undue democratic politics fell to the fights over tyranny. Swiftly, violence became the routine means to solve political problems. Marius and Sulla fought one another to win the power, dictators staying for the long term, proscription becoming a tool to defeat enemies. In all, the Romans must seek out a way to solve the worsened bloody crises and the staggered Roman Republic. And the Empire Ages came. Two greatest ‘Emperors’ Julian calendar is the basic of the calendar we use today. It was introduced by Caesar, July deriving its name from Julius, August Augustus. They are Rome’ greatest ‘emperors’. Julius Caesar, leader of the populares, formed the first informal Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus. Caesar exploited the fighting among different Celtic tribes to conquer Gaul and wrote the successful conquest down in his book, The Gallic War. Then, in 49 B.C., his crossing of the river Rubicon marked his intention of leadership in Rome, which set his former allies and the old Roman constitutions against him. Eventually, by 46 B.C., Caesar defeated his rivals and became the sole director of Rome. During his ruling of the country, Caesar added Egypt to Rome by having sexual and political alliance with the queen Cleopatra; he carried out land reform, especially by rewarding his veterans with confiscated property; he gave the Gaul and the Spanish citizenship; he built many public facilities. He was a powerful man full of innovative ideas. This also made him an enemy to democracy (or those people who feared he might make himself a king), causing the murder during the ides of March in 44 B.C., as he entered the Senate’s meeting place. Caesar had already known that someone was to kill him, but he didn’t fear, being a brave hero facing death. After Caesar’s death, Octavian, also called Augustus, defeated his rival Antony and won the struggle for power. During his rule, the empire entered Pax Romana – a period of peace and prosperity. Instead of carrying out innovations openly like his late uncle did, he behaved that he was reluctant to assume power and refused the title of king. What is true is that he actually concentrated all power in his own hands, replacing the Roman Republic’s form of government with his own version of absolutism - bureaucracy. He didn’t have the title of king, yet he had the titles and offices, such as consuls, tribune, and even pontifex maximus. Performing like a normal Roman consul, he in fact became a true Roman ‘emperor’. Augustus’ life was more peaceful than Caesar, because of his mild but absolute innovation and perfect performance. Granted that some of his following Julio-Claudian emperors are cruel, like Caligula and Nero, and the dynasty didn’t last long; but the perfect bureaucracy was inherited by the following dynasties. Similar to Chinese Qin Dynasty, the constitution it constructed influenced the following dynasties for nearly 2000 years. When Diocletian, an absolutist, ruled Rome, his being intolerant to the Christians was a symbolic thing during the early Dominate. Surprisingly, those Christian victims ran the empire within only a few years. Prosperity Fortunate or unfortunate, this is a question. Fortunate for us to see the prosperity in Pompeii today, unfortunate for the Romans buried under the volcanic soil, the Vesuvius’ eruption destroyed but also preserved Pompeii. From the heritages, we can see that Rome learned a lot from Greece, such as the deities, the literature and art, the philosophy, the language (Latin derived from Greek). Some scholars organized the Roman curriculum, choosing 7 subjects, called the seven liberal arts. Actual freedom in Rome is limited, especially when facing the Christian culture. Ironically, what finally claimed to offer Roman classical antiquity a new kind of freedom was exactly their new, unexpected enemy in Christianity. Summary of Chapter 6 The Revolutionary Rabbi Mentioned in the summary of chapter 3, a handful of people called the Jews resented Roman religion and preserved their cult, living in Palestine, a small part of the Roman Empire. Their cult, at first obscure, later grew into the major religion called Christianity, and then became an essential part of Western civilization. Christianity started with Yeshua, better known as Jesus Christ, who lived and died a Jew. Like Socrates and Confucius, he taught and preached at people, gathering a group of disciples and apostles, his words recorded in biographies called the Gospels. Yeshua’s opinions on the Kingdom of God influences the Westerners till now. By focusing on the nest world after death, he emphasized, it was essential to follow the Jewish religious laws to have moral action. He died of Roman punishment for behaving like the king of Jews, becoming a victim of crucifixion, though he tried to avoid conflict with the Romans. His followers believed that he was resurrected in the body, encouraged and later developing this small group into a force changing the Roman history. However, the actual identification of Jesus was not clear. Jesus called himself ‘Son of Man’, some referring him to ‘Messiah’, others ‘Son of God’. Later, his followers decided that what was orthodoxy and what was heresy. Christian leaders considered that Jesus was God himself, holding that the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit has ordained a universe where people live and die. In this way, an organization was developed, with the Church Fathers taking the role of apologists defending Judaism, ancient philosophies and mystery cults, Church built and its leaders selected by the baptized Christians who accepted the idea of apostolic succession and the distinction between the laity and the secular clergy, bishops appearing and managing elders and servers, and Church councils bringing leaders together to debate the controversies. What’s more, the methods to help people in their heavenly pilgrimage were developed. Of these are baptism, the mass, holidays and punishments (e.g. excommunication). Living within a culture that was hostile to them, the Christians developed their belief by giving understanding to the contents of Christianity, establishing an organization and debating controversies to improve the Creed. Thus, they attracted more and more believers in the Roman Empire. During the development of Christianity, there were several other cultures preventing them from expanding. The Jews were the first to attack them, actively hostile to the new faith and stoning many Christians to death. However, one of the persecutors, Paul of Tarsus, claimed to have a vision of Jesus and converted to Christianity, whose missionary work encouraged the Christians to abandon obligations to many of the Jewish dietary rules. As a result, more people could easily become Christians and Christianity allowed more socially disadvantaged people to believe in. By regularly using syncretism on paganism and heathenism, Christianity offered a religion of passion, open to all. The second people who wanted to make Christianity disappear were the Romans believing in the Græco-Roman gods. The Christians suffering the strict punishments were believed to be martyrs and immediately enter heaven. Fortunately, the persecution didn’t last long, thanks to the contribution of Emperor Constantine to help the Christianity develop in such a speed that Christianity was swiftly accepted throughout the Roman Empire. To solidify the rule, Constantine first created an old-fashioned dynasty, and then he built a new capital – Constantinople – for the eastern half of the administratively divided empire. The most influential action he took was the religious policy of helping Christianity. He issued the Edict of Milan in 313, won victory over an imperial rival under the labarum in a battle at the Milvian Bridge, designed many Christian constructions, and bestowed special privileges on Christians. Churches were built to commemorate the saints and became destinations of regular worship and special veneration. After Christianity spread throughout the empire, the conflict between various denominations threatened Constantine’s aim to provide stability, so he called the Council of Nicaea in 325 to help the Church settle the matter. And the leaders embedded the formula into the Nicene Creed that Jesus was simultaneously fully God and fully human. At the same time, another heresy developed and later spread itself to Asia, which was the Arianism, whose people remained unconvinced about Jesus’ complete combination of divinity and humanity. In addition, with the development of Christianity, the punishments on other paganisms were carried on by the Christians, murders and persecutions being everywhere. Eventually, however, the Christian Church borrowed much from classical antiquity, which made it easier later for intellectualism to develop. In A.D. 410, the army of the Visigoths sacked Rome. It seemed a curse of ‘Roma Delenda Est’ was proved, like what Rome had done to Carthage. Nearly having been destroyed by the pagans, some of the Romans thought that this was because of Christianity’s development in Rome, which made the Græco-Roman gods angry. To answer the charge, bishop Augustine of Hippo wrote the book The City of God, defending Christianity by his points of view – he divided people into two groups, one go to heaven, while the other hell. The Roman Empire’s fall or rise depended on the God’s will. So this lead to a serious question – how was Roman Empire defeated by the Visigoths? There are 3 main reasons given by historians, two of which are moral corruption and values of pacificism spread by Christianity. Furthermore, the most essential one might be its economic troubles, plagues reducing the number of citizens, taxes burdening the smaller population, and the shortage of revenues meaning smaller armies. Ironically, the Romans didn’t Romanize the Germans, being barbarized by them. After the military invasion, the Germanic barbarian migration began, for the Huns from Asia swept into Europe and terrified the Germans, making them fled from where they once had lived. The barbarians only trampled the western part of the empire, leaving the eastern one continue to live through several centuries. Being the last emperor of Rome and the first Byzantine emperor, the Emperor Justinian had several notable achievements. First, he built Hagia Sophia, one of the greatest churches in the world in Constantinople. Second, he had the old Roman laws recognized into the Book of Civil Laws, the Justinian Code. Third, his armies managed some reconquests. Despite all of these, his attempt at the revival of Roman power failed. After his death, Constantinople was ignored by both the German kings and the Byzantium. While the Romans and the Germans were fighting each other, the sudden rise of the Islamic civilization in the 7th century surprised everyone. Mohammed became Islam’s founder and only prophet, claiming that Gabriel revealed to him the message of Allah in the form of the Qur’an. The Qur’an contained five essentials of Isla. Of these are shabadab, salat, zakat, sawm, bajj. Islam was syncretic, combining the Arab’s polytheism religion, the Persian dualism of Zoroastrianism, and even recognition of Jesus as a prophet. Scholars over the next decades developed rules of behavior or sets of laws called shari’a. Jihad, also defined by the scholars, was interpreted as Mohammed’s message to mean that Islamic submission to Allah should reign everywhere. The successful conquest of the Muslims could be explained by many reasons, such as that the fanaticism and skill of its nomadic Arab warriors overwhelmed the other armies, that both Roman Byzantium and Persia had exhausted themselves from their long wars, and the tolerant of the religious diversity among the Muslim rulers’ new subjects. Unlike other conquerors, the Muslims weren’t Romanized or Hellenized, but carried on a process of islamicization as well as arabization. Hence, a huge Arabic Empire was built. The Muslims split over who should be Mohammed’s successor, called khalifa. Unfortunately, no physical remained descendents and ethnic differences made Islam lose its political unity and unable to regain it ever since. Then in Persia in 1040, the Seljuk Turks seized power and gained the Asia Minor, today the country of Turkey, the loss of which weakened the Byzantine Empire. What hurt the empire further were the Crusades against the Muslims in the Holy Land, as western forces seized land for themselves, increased Islamic fanaticism, and even briefly conquered much of the empire itself in the 13th century. By 1453, the last ‘Roman’ emperor died on the Constantinople’s walls, fighting alongside his handful of imperial troops and volunteers. Then the Ottoman Turks renamed Constantinople as Istanbul and made it the capital of their own Muslim Empire. The collapse of the Roman power in the west combined with the rise and fall of the Byzantine and various Muslim empires meant that Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia remained outside the main development of Western civilization for the next thousand years or more. However, the cultural divide between the Eastern and Western Europe developed. ‘Only in Western Europe did various elements of Græco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and German cultures meld through many difficult centuries to become Western civilization.