Episode 1 - The General Prologue

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Hello and welcome to the Western Traditions podcast, a podcast about Western History.

The story of our Western Traditions is long. Where and when they began is debatable. Some

people think that western history begins with Classical Greece. Around 500 years before the

birth of Christ, the Greeks fought against the Persians in the great battles of Marathon,

Thermopylae, Salamis and Mycale. Many scholars see the Greek victories in these battles as

the crucial moments in which the West was truly distinguished from the East.

Others mark the birth of Western thought in Plato’s dialogues. These philosophical essays were

published a century after those great battles against the Persians. They demonstrated, among

other things, the independence of Western thinking.

These developments in classical Greece, the battles for independence and the rise of

philosophical thought, were then inherited by the Romans centuries later and eventually

passed on down to us.

But ancient Egypt was also quite important for the classical Greeks and the Romans.

Herodotus was the Greek author of the oldest history text in the world. He reports that

Egyptian priests told him that they possessed the most ancient civilization in the world. And

later historians also believed this to be true for many centuries.

Greek literature and myth does show that ancient Egypt greatly influenced Greek culture, so

you could say that Western history begins with ancient Egypt. In fact, right up until the 19th

century actually, this was an accepted viewpoint. History instruction in the West often began

with Egypt.

In the 19th century, though, archaeologists discovered the ruins of another civilization that

existed before the pharaohs came to rule over the Nile river in Egypt. The cities of Sumer,

scattered along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, were founded at

least a thousand years before any kingdom existed in Egypt.

And in the ruins, archaeologists discovered clay tablets marked with a strange form of writing

that used lines and shapes that were completely indecipherable at first. This kind of writing is

known as cuneiform. The story about how those tablets were decoded will be related in a

future episode.

Once the cuneiform was deciphered, scholars realized that most of the tablets contained

routine information about commercial and political issues important to the cities of Sumer.

However, there were some cuneiform tablets that told stories about the gods of the Sumerians,

about the Creation of the world, and about a great king of the Sumerians named Gilgamesh.

Once, we thought that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the earliest epic poems. They are both

famous Greek stories allegedly authored by the poet Homer. Now, though, this Sumerian Epic

of Gilgamesh has been established as the first known example of an epic poem, in which the

travails and the triumphs of gods and men are recorded.

Additionally, the Epic of Gilgamesh included a story about a Great Flood that was similar to the

story of Noah in the Bible. So similar was the story, in fact, that it is hard not to consider this

ancient tale to be part of our Western Traditions.But the roots of our Western Traditions go even deeper into the past than the ancient cities of

Mesopotamia.

The Bible is also a part of our Western Traditions. The Christian Bible, Old and New

Tetsaments, has always been one of the Great Books of the Western World. For many

centuries, a young person’s academic instruction always included the history of ancient Egypt,

Greece and Rome as well as passages from the Bible. In fact, you could say that the Bible, and

Christianity, are core elements of Western culture.

While this may seem obvious, it is also strange on some level. As we progress through these

podcasts, you will see that the stories in the Bible are quite old and a few of them are probably

even older than Egypt. The Bible is essentially a product of an eastern religion. The Hebrews

that composed and preserved the texts of the Bible came originally from the Mesopotamian

basin. Like the stories in the Epic of Gilgamesh and other Babylonian documents, biblical

stories are based on the cultural and religious ideas of the ancient Near East.

But we associate the West with Europe. We assume a European foundation or origin for

Western ideas. Yet perhaps the most important Western ideas are found in the Bible, and the

Bible has nothing to do with Europe. It rarely even mentions things European, outside of the

rare remark it makes here and there about people living in far off lands. For example, in the

story of Jonah, the prophet who was swallowed by a whale, the writer makes mention of the

city of Tarshish. This city was most likely in ancient Spain. However, these occasional remarks

about Europe are as far as the Bible goes in relating to European matters.

The Bible does not even present to us a cultural milieu anything like that found in Greek

mythology, which is another core element of Western culture. When the Romans encountered

the Greeks, even though their religious outlook was markedly different, they were easily able to

incorporate Greek themes into their spirituality. This was due to their sharing a common Indo-

European linguistic and cultural patrimony.

But the Hebrew writers of the biblical texts were not Indo-Europeans. They were Semites from

Mesopotamia. Yet from them we have received in the West our guiding religion, Christianity,

and the themes which have moved nations to both war and peace for thousands of years.

This ancient text, the Bible, sustains and interacts with the entirety of our Western Traditions.

It is true that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew virtually nothing about Hebrew culture or

religion. But later Western writers, such as Dante, author of the medieval classic the Divine

Comedy, successfully intertwined Greek mythology with the stories of the Old and New

testaments. Works like Dante’s and those of many other Western authors, such as

Shakespeare, demonstrate just how vital the tales of the Greek and Roman gods remained

during the Middle Ages and after.

This entanglement of earlier pagan traditions with Christian scripture in the great books of the

Western World is undeniable. One cannot understand a Shakespearean play without being

familiar with the Bible. And, simultaneously, one cannot understand a Shakespearean play

without having a decent knowledge of Greek or Roman mythology.

Christian men of learning in the West relied for many centuries on the scientific and

mathematical knowledge passed down to them by the pagan Greeks and Romans. But the

most famous men of science, art and philosophy, up until the last century or so, were all

steeped in religious knowledge as well.For example, Isaac Newton, renowned scientist, mathematician and hero to many a modern

atheist, was a devout Christian who wrote more books about theology than he did about math

or science. Gregor Mendel, father of the science of genetics, was an Augustinian monk. The

man who developed the Big Bang Theory in the early 20th century was a Catholic priest from

Belgium, named George Lemaitre.

It is clear, then, that the roots of the Western Tradition are quite deep, and quite widespread.

They encompass and somehow intertwine the ancient cultural heritages of the ancient Near

East, the mythologies and philosophies of the Greeks and Romans and the scientific

discoveries of both Medieval and modern Europeans.

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Before you I spread out a map. Its edges are tattered. Some portions are yellowed with time.

Loving hands have gently unrolled this map, have pressed the corners flat to see the extreme

regions depicted. Meandering lines trace the geographic frontiers and the coastlines of the

Near East, of Europe, and of the Americas.

There are no political borders on this map. It is not a map of a specific time period, though

certain cities of noteworthy age or significance dot the blank space between rivers, mountains

and ocean shores.

Jericho, Babylon, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Paris, Madrid, London, Washington.

See the geography laid out before us.

The rivers Tigris and Euphrates wind their way between the ancient cities of ancient Sumer

before uniting at the shores of the Persian Gulf. Buried somewhere here, according to the

ancients, is the garden of Eden.

The Nile River courses steadily north from the mountains of East Africa, passing the ancient

pyramids of Egypt, their locations noted on your map with simple, inverted triangles that do no

justice to their size or the power of their presence. Finally, this great river empties into the

Eastern Mediterranean.

Crete sits amid the waters of this Mediterranean Sea. The lost kingdom here was recipient of

knowledge from Egypt but also from other sources on the shores of that wine-dark sea. Here

the genesis of Greek culture took place.

Lost Mycenae, buried in the soil of ancient Greece, gives us the tale of the Trojan War, and the

bloodline of mighty Agamemnon. Not far away, Sparta and Athens endure today, just as their

soldiers endured 25 centuries ago against the Persian army and navy, sparking the fire that

would blaze forth from this seemingly insignificant peninsula and warm the hearts and minds of

a hundred generations in Europe and elsewhere.

The flame of this fire, the spirit of the Men of the West, burns in the stubborn desire for

independence among the Greek city-states, in the writings of Herodotus and Sophocles, in the

philosophy of Socrates and along the blade of the sword of Alexander the Great.

This fire will burn also in the hearths of Roman homes, from which sturdy, valiant men will go

forth to conquer the known world and unite its people under an umbrella latticed with roads

and laws.As Rome passes into history, the Church will rise amid its ruins and sustain its legacy through

the Middle Ages in scattered castles and burgeoning towns that Charlemagne will unite both

by the power of the sword and of faith.

Those towns will become the powerful cities of the early modern period, where men of genius

will be born and produce new scientific knowledge that will challenge the preconceptions of

age past. Columbus and others will carry this fire thousands of miles overseas to the New

World in ships made by hand from mere lumber.

The fire will also burn North, and bring dominion to London, which will become a nexus for

power and wealth as the years pass and approach the present. Finally, the British Empire will

fade, and the locus of Western Civilization will shift across the Atlantic Ocean to the United

States, where even now decline is underway, and the trajectory of our Western Traditions seeks

a new location, presently unknown.

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Many people today focus their studies, or their children’s studies, on the Great Books of the

Western World. The Great Books are a collection of the greatest written works of Western

civilization, beginning with the Iliad and ending with the works of certain early 20th century

authors. These books also form a significant foundation for this podcast, although the

episodes are not in any way limited to their scope.

But why do we walk this road? Why follow the map? Why go to meet with Aristotle, with

Charlemagne, with Columbus? Why study history at all? And why study Western History with

such attention?

Why do so many people and their families immerse themselves in in the richness of this

heritage? Some may do this simply to maintain a connection between the past and the

present, to retain a sort of communion with all those who have come before us.

Others do this for more pragmatic reasons. The vast sum of knowledge possessed in the West

today has grown incrementally over the last centuries. Learning through the great books allows

one to acquire knowledge as the ancients did, standing on the shoulders of the great men who

came before them.

But this approach also allows us to learn from their mistakes, to understand how

preconceptions can cloud your approach to problems.

Finally, there is no doubt that the journey through the history of the West is exciting, especially

when compared to the drab experiences most students have in the average school

environment. At best they learn history from sanitized snippets of the great books. Often they

do not hear of the great books at all. Instead, their teachers serve them predigested bits of

information, summarized in the dull paragraphs of a textbook.

The Western Traditions podcast aims to provide the listener with much more thorough

explorations of these great books and the lives of the men and women who wrote them. But

this will be more than a tour through a library.

Here you will build a vision of the human past in your mind. As the podcast progresses, the

complex tapestry of battles and truces, marriages and love affairs, speeches and prayers,

briths and deaths, will weave itself into a coherent picture of events that will lead from the most

distant past to our present day and to you yourself.You have inherited this history.

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There will be twelve separate series of episode produced for this podcast.

The first eight series will focus on a particular period of history and the culture associated with

it. These episodes will progress chronologically for the most part, along a sort of historical

spine that extends from the beginning of the world to our contemporary time.

The first series is called The Ancient World. It describes events from the Creation of the

Universe through Biblical times in the Near East, up to the rise of the Persian Empire.

The second series is called the Greek Sun. Here begins the truly distinct history of the West.

Greek culture reaches an apex after defending itself from the Persian Empire.

The Third series is called the Roman Empire. It begins with Roman origins in the mythological

past and extends all the way to the decline of Roman culture in the 3rd century after Christ.

The Middle Ages are the subject of the fourth series, which begins with the rise of the Roman

Emperor Constantine and continues until the fall of Constantinople in AD 1453.

The fifth series is called the Early Modern Period, a segment of history that begins in the late

15th century with the discovery of the Americas and ends around the time of the Seven Years’

War between France and England in the 18th century.

The period from about 1750 until the year 1914 is sometimes called the Long Nineteenth

Century. This sixth series will explore the cultural, political and technical unity of that era.

The seventh series tells the story of the short 20th century, beginning with World War I, which

radically changed the political and cultural landscape of the entire world, and ends with the fall

of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Then, the eighth series will explore our contemporary world, from the advent of the Internet on

through the beginning of the 21st century.

Four additional series of podcasts provide insights into current events, the history of the Native

Americans, analysis of the Bible, and the last series shows you how to apply these podcasts

and the Great Books as curriculums for both children and adults.

Until next time, then, I thank you for listening to the Western Traditions Podcast.