Episode 2 - Introduction to the Ancient World

(Music)

Hello and welcome to the Western Traditions Podcast. This is the second episode of the

podcast. Today's episode will introduce the Ancient World, which is the first series of the

podcast. The 25 episodes of this series will be broken into two units. The first unit is called

Prehistory and the second unit is called Civilizations of the Ancient Near East.

The music that I played at the beginning of this episode is from a piece called Night Vigil by

Kevin McLeod. A night vigil is a prayer service, typically held in a monastic setting, although

devout Christians of any background might participate in such a liturgy. In the Catholic Church,

this prayer service is known as matins, from the latin word matutinum, which means morning. It

marks the beginning of the coming day, even though it is typically held during the dark of night.

You see, in the most ancient interpretations of day and night, each day actually began the night

before. This is why the Jewish sabbath begins on Friday night, even though Saturday is

technically the Sabbath day. Saturday begins, you see, when the sun sets on Friday. This is

also why the Biblical account of creation marks the days the way that it does in Genesis

chapter one, verse 5,

-and there was evening and there was morning, the first day

So the day begins in the darkness of night. Sunrise comes only when the day is already

several hours old.

I chose this music then, first of all, because it probably evokes images of something very

medieval, such as monks rising in the middle of the night to mark the the beginning of the day.

And while the Middle Ages will not be discussed until the fourth series of podcasts, the

medieval period remains the touchstone of Western civilization. It is the period in which the

West finds its identity, even if the roots of that identity stretch back thousands of years before

the rise of Charlemagne.

But I also chose this music because our study of history, just like an ancient day in the Hebrew

calendar, begins in darkness. The past, you see, can be broken into two unequal pieces of

time. There is history, and there is prehistory.

We apply the title of history to any time period after which a given culture begins to produce

written records of its existence. Obviously, determining the exact point in time at which this

occurs is debatable. One might say that history begins with the Bible, for instance, since this

document attests to some of the most ancient activities of humans on the planet. One might

say the same about Greek or Egyptian or Sumerian mythology.

However, by convention, historians tend to mark the start of history sometime around 5,000

years ago, or a little before that, when large cities first appeared in the Mesopotamian river

basin. A couple centuries ago, before the ruins of those cities were discovered, historians

would have possibly placed the starting point of history a thousand years later, maybe around

2,500 BC, with the appearance of the pyramids in Egypt. It may be that this historical frontier

will be pushed even farther back by the time that you finish the series of this podcast.

The period of time that comes before the beginning of history, whenever that was, is known as

prehistory. The world and human civilization existed before the rise of cities in Mesopotamia,

but the records that we have of that time period are either fragmented or non-existent.Earlier, I said that our past is broken into two unequal pieces. Officially, true history comprises

only the last five or six thousand years. We set that limit because we do not find solid evidence

of writing before that era. What came before the beginning of history is called prehistory.

Prehistory, though, would consist of more than just the thousands of years during which

humanity roamed the world as clans of hunter-gatherers. Instead, the title of prehistory applies

to the unimaginable amount of time that came before anything even resembling a man ever

walked the Earth. If science is right about the age of the universe, then we are talking about the

many billions of years that the universe existed before the appearance of human beings.

Prehistory, then, is truly a time of darkness.

We know very little about whatever came before Egypt and Sumer. Occasionally, we get

glimpses and hints of human events before those civilizations. A few decades ago, the

discovery at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey surprised everyone. Here were ruins of a society of men

and women who were able to erect large structures and decorate them competently with

realistic art. The structures were ultimately determined to be over ten thousand years old: more

than twice as old as the pyramids.

But that is still prehistory. The ruins at Gobekli Tepe, and other sites discovered since then, do

not show any signs that the people who built them were able to write. So there is no way to

turn such discoveries into official history. Gobekli Tepe just sheds a little light on the darkness

of human antiquity, without dispelling the dark completely.

But no matter how far back we push the bounds of official written history, there will always be a

darkness at the beginning. Whether we believe the accounts of the Bible or some other

religious text, or we believe the latest scientific update about the beginning of the universe,

there will always be darkness before the dawn of time.

“Let there be light,” God says in the opening verses of the Bible. Before that then, there must

have been darkness.

So the first unit of episodes will address what little we know about human life before the rise of

civilization.

The second unit of episodes in this series, then, will be about the ancient civilizations of the

Near East. This term, the Near East, refers to Egypt and Mesopotamia and to the lands in

between and right around them.

Now, the ancient Near East may seem to be an unusual topic for a podcast about Western

Civilization. When we think of Western History and culture, the Middle Ages might first come to

mind. Or perhaps you might think of the history of the Greeks and the Romans. But, as I intend

to show with the coming episodes, it is impossible to consider the history of the West without

unearthing its roots in the history of the Near East.

The introduction of the Bible into Greek and Roman circles over two thousand years ago has

much to do with this intermingling of Western and Near Eastern histories. If the Greeks and the

Romans and the Celts and the Norse and others in Europe had not become Christians, then

the histories of East and West might have remained defined and separate.

But the Bible, which came with the Christian religion into the West, speaks of times and

cultures that are primarily Near Eastern. In the pages of that book, we encounter settings in

ancient Egypt and in Babylon and in the Persian Empire and other Near Eastern cultures. Andsince the Bible has become such a fundamental text in the West, our history is therefore

intertwined with the history of the Middle East.

As the episodes of the second unit will show, however, it may be that this interlacing of

Western and Eastern history was inevitable. Herodotus was a Greek writer who lived during the

5th century BC. He is sometimes called the father of history because he wrote the first secular

history of the world as he knew it. And Herodotus devoted nearly half of that Greek history to

matters pertaining to Egypt, to the ancient Hittites, and to the Babylonians and the Persians

and others in the Near East.

Maybe, then, the history of the West has always had Eastern roots.

In any event, then, the second unit of episodes in this first series will delve into what we know

about the history of ancient Egypt and other civilizations in that region of the world.

(Music)

The next episode in this podcast will properly introduce the first unit of episodes about the

Prehistorical period.

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