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The way the art has been preserved makes you sorta realize that "ancient times" weren't that long ago. 2000 / 25 = ~80 generations It's not some uncountable n

The way the art has been preserved makes you sorta realize that "ancient times" weren't that long ago. 2000 / 25 = ~80 generations It's not some uncountable number with a million zeros. Assuming everyone knew one of their grandparents, it's more like 40 interpersonal "links". I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before in the same way that we feel pretty connected to Copernicus developing Heliocentrism or Columbus arriving in the New World. I wonder whether civilizations with seemingly more continuous histories like China feel more connection to the rest of their history. India's history was sort of interrupted by Islamic invasions starting from the 1200s. The Middle East, despite its tremendously long history, experienced a significant shift in culture with the rise of Christianity and then Islam. If Chinese people don't feel that historical connection, on the other hand, it might mean that our disconnect with ancient history might more just be a product of Modernity and the rapid change of the last couple centuries.

ImaCake 6y ago
>I wonder whether civilizations with seemingly more continuous histories like China feel more connection to the rest of their history. This is a really good point actually. I have talked recently to Persian coworkers about their nation's history. They identify with the full length of recorded Persian history. That is, all ~5000 years of it. I have read elsewhere that this is possibly a modern trend, that is, they didn't teach Persian history as the history of their current country at some points in the past. I suspect their emotional attachment to events 2000 years ago feels a bit different to mine then. They might feel a whole lot closer to the Sassasinds than I do to Boudicca. But maybe that has not always been the case.
- KhoomeiK 6y ago
  Yeah, it could be a modern phenomenon and even now, a very small percentage of people have an understanding of the grand scheme of history. Even without knowing the dates and exact order of events though, it still seems plausible for Persians to have an emotional connection to historical legends that they pretty much grew up with. That 5000 number is interesting though. Do they feel a connection with the Elamites, Sumerians, and Akkadians? That would be kind of surprising. It would make sense for them to connect with Xerxes and the Achaemenids or Medians though, despite the difference in religion. Sorta related, I've heard that there's a growing Zoroastrian movement among the "rebellious" Persian youth.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- konjin 6y ago
  You can talk to a Greek and an Italian and get the same. It was interesting seeing flowers in the spot where Caesar was killed on the Ides of March some 2000 years later.
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  I did a course on the history of the Christian Crusades back in college, right when Operation Desert Storm was going on. The professor said that due to an essentially oral history tradition, they talked about the Crusades as something that had happened relatively recently, like to their great-grandparents. American parents will warn their children that if they misbehave, "the boogeyman" will come for them at night. I was told that the Middle Eastern analogue was "Richard will come and get you" — as in Richard the Lion-Hearted. (I have no idea if this is true or not… it sounded like a fun anecdote back in college, now it sounds slightly ridiculous to me, but who knows?)
  - hcho 6y ago
    That does not ring true. Crusades were mostly forgotten until the rise of Arab and Turkish nationalisms. They were then appropriated into nationhood folklore.
    - al3xandre 6y ago
      Crazy how what we identify with historically depends more on what we decide to teach children in school than actual history, no?
      - oblio 6y ago
        Primary and middle school especially are part of nation building everywhere in the world. History lessons are purposefully a mix of history and propaganda. Every nation has a founding myth. Romania's is the struggle against adversity, foreign empires and our resilience over millennia. The American one is freedom (the struggle against tyranny) and the American dream. The British one is resistance against adversity on their island, vanquishing European autocrats. Russia's is liberation from the steppe nomads and then turning the tides in a rough part of the world. They're half lies, half truth in my experience. You know, myths :-)
  - Cyph0n 6y ago
    Firstly, the Middle East is a vast place, so there is really no “Middle Eastern analogue”. A regional version, maybe. Secondly, the Crusades happened a very long time ago. From experience, I have never met or heard of an Arab who thought it was anything but a historical event. So, I highly doubt that anyone in the Middle East thinks of the Crusades as being relatively recent.
pjc50 6y ago
If you went to a sufficiently posh school you could still be taught "classics" - Latin, Greek and their history - to give a direct cultural link to that time. Not for nothing did Enoch Powell reference the river Tiber. But that's also the problem; all this referencing of the ancient world culminated in Fascism (named from the Roman fasces, the bundle of sticks with an axe that symbolises judicial power). Since the smashing of Italian and German Fascism in the 1940s, it has become ... unfashionable. The challenge remains to reconnect with the past without using it to justify atrocities in the present. (For the avoidance of doubt, this is not limited to European history! China does historicist propaganda films too! As do a lot of places, right down to warring caucasian microstates) (I would reccomend Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time Of Gifts", which is nominally a walking tour but has an incredible connection to the history of Europe and the places he's walking through. Everything from Charlemagne to Esterházy to Roland to Homer)
- konjin 6y ago
  Saying classicism culminated in fascism is like saying medicine culminated in Dr. Mengele and since then getting fillings is unfashionable. If you showed that fast food place to an Italian fascist they would probably blow it up because it was low culture and glorifying consumerism.
  - frostburg 6y ago
    No, they would have loved it because at the time people in England were hunting in forests. Working class food vendors aren't problematic in the context of the fascist worldview. That having been said, the study of classics being unfashionable due to fascism isn't at all true.
    - konjin 6y ago
      In the fascist world view a womans place is in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. A fast food vendor 2000 years ago means that the supposed golden age of the volk never was. The rootless proletariat of Rome is oddly enough something that communists latch on to: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37811.The_Assassination_of_Julius_Caesar https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37811.The_Assassination_... You should probably read what an ideology actually believes before making sweeping pronouncements for them. This is how we end up with American rednecks being called nazis and american college students communists when the first are slightly right of center market liberals and the second are slightly left of center market liberals.
contingencies 6y ago
In many ways Chinese (and perhaps those in Japan, Korea and Vietnam) are still prisoners of Confucianism, the (deeply misogynist and authoritarian) philosophy of a man who lived 551–479 BCE.
- trianglem 6y ago
  Confucianism is a fantastic belief system with amazing humanistic values and a track record of not fomenting any conflict. Not everything is going to fit progressive mindsets and believe it or not large segments of the population like the stability that comes with the mild authoritarianism.
  - contingencies 6y ago
    Unsure how to get on board with the "fantastic belief system" part (what exactly is 'fantastic'?), or the anti-conflict part as I believe most scholars of ancient history would say it has been the driver of the Chinese state which has 'integrated' numerous adjacent cultures over the last 2500 years. Present era stability is nice, however this was not always the norm, so I am umsure how much can be ascribed to Confucianism...
    - trianglem 6y ago
      It is fantastic because it doesn’t make up a supernatural being or god. It stresses strong family values, compassion, creativity, self-help, reverence and kindness.
      - contingencies 6y ago
        That is a pretty weak response. I believe we should judge the impact of cultural traditions by their practice not by their supposed theoretical scorecard. Your statements could be equally applied to all the major monotheistic traditions and look how much war and suffering they have produced.
        deleted 6y ago
africanboy 6y ago
We actually know more about our ancient history than ancient people knew about few generations before them. I am from Rome and live near the Colosseum, the connection with our past is very strong, especially now that we are uncovering more and more ancient relics thanks to modern archeology. A friend of mine is a guide and we go visit the archeological sites at least once a month. Ancient romans used to make fun of each other, regardless of the cetus When the Roman army won some important battle the Emperor himself could be mocked for a day, to express the human nature of every Roman in contrast to the divine nature of many ruling classes of their times. As an anecdote: Julius Caesar was bald and suffered about his condition, after a very important battle won by the Roman army he was made fun all day by his soldiers for being bald, despite being their general and one of the most important men in Rome. They had a very peculiar relation with death, the funerary inscriptions are particularly interesting https://exhibitions.kelsey.lsa.umich.edu/galleries/Exhibits/Death_on_Display/Text/inscription.html https://exhibitions.kelsey.lsa.umich.edu/galleries/Exhibits/... It's a tradition in Rome to joke about death, even today. Saying to a friend "ti ammazzo" (I'm gonna kill you) it's considered normal, in Rome if you hear "mortacci tua" (to your lousy bad ancestors!) you can be sure it's two friends that met after a long time and are saluting each other. Romans built their cemeteries outside the city walls to not pollute the urban space, except for the Monumental Cemetery of Campo Verano (simply Verano in Rome) and the Protestant Cemetery, both built in 19th century, there are no other burial sites in Rome and the city's cemetery is located 30 Kms away from the city centre. A lot of the Roman culture has survived through the centuries, it's the base of our society after all. We still use Roman roads and aqueducts, our cities are built on Roman settlements and follow the same structure, Roman law is a course and matter of examination at law university. My "real Roman" friends can trace back their family roots to Roman people and have Roman family names (Fabi, Crescenzi, Emiliano, Lattanzi etc.) Also we should not forget that Christians took a lot from the Hebrew tradition (angels in the old testament were inspired to mythological Egyptian or Mesopotamian creatures) and you can find testimony of their original form here, for example this Tetramorphous as Ezekiel described it, can be found at Anagni, a small city outside Rome. AFAIK there aren't many other places in the west where you can find them. http://www.lundici.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Cattedrale-di-Anagni.jpg http://www.lundici.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Cattedrale-... So, in a way, we are more connected to our past history than ever.
tianlong 6y ago
Italian here. We do study at school Roman history, a lot, since 6 years old. Obviously, we are very proud and connected to that historical period. Everyone knows Cesar, Augusto, Nerone and all the other important figures of the time. Mant of us, at high school, study latin. I did a science-based high school (public school) and I studied latin literature and grammar for 5 years, 4 hours per week.
- elboru 6y ago
  It’s weird but I, as a Hispanic-American, also feel really connected to the old Roman Empire, I hear latin every Sunday at Mass (traditional Latin Mass), a lot of idioms we use every day can be traced back to the Romans, our food is a mix of European and native ingredients, even our law is based in Roman roots. It’s awesome to feel connected to Aztecs, Mayas, Spaniards and Romans.
- DrJokepu 6y ago
  Just curious, as a native Italian speaker, how hard did you find learning Latin and what was the hardest part for you? My native language isn't a Romance language, but I have also spent five years learning Latin in grammar school and for me, learning both the vocabulary and the grammar was hard, hard work. I always assumed that for a native Italian speaking person it would be probably a lot easier.
  - riquito 6y ago
    Not the parent, but... it's not that difficult. You have to apply yourself, of course, but there is a connection (once you get the gist of the declinations, as italian you can understand a certain amount of words without looking at a dictionary). Difficulty varies a lot based on who writes though: e.g. Caesar is very easy, because he purposefully wrote in a simpler, clear way (less number of terms overall, trying to avoid synonyms, straight to the point). In Italy if you follow classical studies you learn ancient Greek too (first 2 years of high school), which was definitely harder than latin, but you grock the alphabet in a short time. I seem to recall that more often than not the same word had very different meanings depending on the context, while the grammar was similar to latin (well, of course it's backward...).
nobody9999 6y ago
>it might mean that our disconnect with ancient history might more just be a product of Modernity and the rapid change of the last couple centuries. Has it occurred to you that "our disconnect with ancient history" isn't as widespread as you may think? In fact, I was rather taken aback by your assertion: >I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before in the same way that we feel pretty connected to Copernicus developing Heliocentrism or Columbus arriving in the New World. A connection to anything requires the effort of making that connection. And history is no exception. If someone feels disconnected from history, it's incumbent upon them to engage and connect with it. I'd point out that for pretty much all of recorded history, it's only been those with power and wealth that have had the leisure or need to become literate, let alone to study history. That's changed to a certain extent but most folks, even in modern times, give little thought to history, and have little interest in it. As for "Western" culture, there's a great deal that's known and a huge amount of scholarship has and continues to be done around it and its history. If you put even a tiny bit of effort[0][1][2], you can gain great deal of knowledge about history. Should you wish to expend more effort, there are literally thousands of books, academic papers and treatises which provide enormous insight into our history. And if you're really interested, you can make a whole career out of the study and exposition of history. As such, I'd say that any "disconnect" from history is rooted in a lack of interest or even a modicum of energy expended in "connecting" with it. Our current culture and educational systems seem to deprecate and devalue history, even recent (the last 50 years or so) history. That's a shame IMHO. Please don't take my comment as a personal attack, it's not. The sentiment you express isn't unusual or surprising. The solution to such a "disconnect" is to access historical information and cultural narratives. Such access is, I'd argue, more available to the lay person than ever before. I'd also note that the "disconnect" you mention, while seemingly related to mass communications and its focus on trivia and current events, isn't anything new or profound. Rather, it's related to a lack of interest among most people. Whether that lack of interest is based on a lack of leisure time, a discouragement of such endeavors by our media and educational systems and/or other factors, it's that lack of interest that causes such a disconnect -- and that's easily remedied. [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1U_8A7q8La1VfEa-HJifnO3r1JgOdSVP https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1U_8A7q8La1VfEa-HJif... [1] https://www.edx.org/learn/western-civilization https://www.edx.org/learn/western-civilization [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_decline_of_the_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_decline_of_the_West Edit: Improved clarity.
rizpanjwani 6y ago
What do you mean by "interruption" of history? You mean written history?
- coldtea 6y ago
  He means the fall of Rome and organized state, and the regression due to barbaric attacks during the middle ages. It took several centuries for the germanic, etc. tribes that defeated Rome to become civilized enough to Roman standards, and build equal structures and quality of life. (As a point of comparison, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc. had centuries of written history, whereas e.g. the British written history starts with the Roman invasion of the island, and starts by Romans).
mulmen 6y ago
A few years ago I was lucky enough to visit the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan. The Jade Cabbage was the headline attraction at the time. The thing that stood out the most to me was a tea cup. The date was ~1800. I was impressed by a 215 year old tea cup. Then I realized the date was 1800 bc. A 3800 year old cup! I had a similar experience in Japan last year when I learned the same family has ruled for something like 1500 years and trace their history back 2600 years.
- ridgeguy 6y ago
  Two years ago, my wife and I visited the Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. We were on our way out when I saw a door that branched to a room of "deep antiquities", or words to that effect. One of the exhibits consisted of three gold bracelets - beautiful, modern designs that would have looked at home in a window at Tiffany's. They had been excavated from strata with charcoal that dated at ~6,000 - 5,000 BC. That single exhibit imbued in me a feeling of connection to our human past as much as has a lifetime of interest in history.
  - lumberingjack 6y ago
    I'm native American, visiting Sequoia national Park being among the ancient forests I literally start to hear the songs and the war drums of my people. One of the most amazing experiences of my life I always thought Richard fineman was crazy for beating a bongo drum. But he was on to something.
    - MisterTea 6y ago
      > One of the most amazing experiences of my life I always thought Richard fineman was crazy for beating a bongo drum. But he was on to something. Not crazy at all. Dancing, singing, music is part of just about every human culture. I'd even say dancing is a sort of fun communal therapy. Which makes total sense why its part of ceremony. Note, Many people such as myself claim they don't dance. But secretly I "dance" (thrash about incoherently) around the when the music is going and no one is looking.
coldtea 6y ago
>I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before Well, that's true for the western Roman Empire. The eastern side (which included southernmost Italy, Greece, most of the mediterrenean, middle east - Syria, Lebanon, and balkans, and eastern (modern) turkey) persisted, kept and advanced the Roman civic structure, organization, legal system, etc and didn't collapse during the middle ages. That's why you find e.g. levantine people like Taleb that feel and express the whole connection of their area back to the ancient times...
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Didn’t the Ottomans interrupt that continuity rather significantly? For example, we don’t call it “Constantinople” any more and the inhabitants of the region don’t seem to consider themselves descendants of Romans as much as Ottomans (or perhaps Islamic identity more generally), at least as I understand it.
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  - joeyo 6y ago
    > For example, we don’t call it “Constantinople” any more Not to detract from the rest of your point, but "Istanbul" actually comes from a Greek nickname meaning "to the city", and didn't even become the official name until 1930.
    - jan_Inkepa 6y ago
      Curious, about this, I got sucked into a rabbithole of reading about this background of this etymology. Thanks for the nerdsnipe! :) "THE ETYMOLOGY OF İSTANBUL: MAKING OPTIMAL USE OF THE EVIDENCE" https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/bitstream/handle/item/15924/stachowski_woodhouse_the_etymology_of_istanbul_2015.pdf https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/bitstream/handle/item/15924/stac... (It disputes the details of the traditional 'to the city' etymology, but in the end proposes deriving from something else with very similar meaning, "στην Πόλι" (something maybe like 'sten Poli' but there are details of historical pronunciation in the article I didn't read closely) rather than "εἰς τὴν Πόλιν" [is timˈbolin].)
dpe82 6y ago
I was raised as a pretty conservative American protestant and went to religious school where a lot of our study covered history (as recorded in the Bible) of Israel and surrounding areas. As a result I felt some connection to it; I suspect this phenomenon is a driver behind the American religious right's unwavering political support of the modern State of Israel.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  I was also raised in this manner, but in the 80s and it seems in a time before the state of Israel itself seemed to be considered a 'friend' of the evangelical movement. I understand this shifted significantly later, or maybe it just took longer to come to Canada. It was far more ambiguous, and tinged with a lot of anti-Semitism; like Jews now were something apart from and different from the Hebrews in the old testament -- and that Jews themselves were tainted with the rejection of Christ. But yes, we got a lot of middle eastern history; big fascinating archaeological sections in the appendix of my Bible. But of course it all ended in around 100 AD, with no mention of anything after, really. And it of course put a lot of emphasis on the land of Israel, which in the real world of the ancient near east was really a minor player surrounded by Egypt, the Hittites, Assyria, etc.
  - varjag 6y ago
    The major component of Evangelical obsession with Israel is seeing it as fulfilment condition for the coming Rapture. Nothing to do with liking Jews much. Just a waypoint on death cult checklist.
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
      Yes and I do feel like this particular interpretation of the content of Revelations, etc. seems fairly new.
      - varjag 6y ago
        Possibly it took off with advent of televangelism?
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I think that's a neat concept. I feel it can also be destructive. It seems like a lot of modern problems will never be solved until decide to move on. Whole wars have been fought for what happened hundreds of years ago because people won't move on to a new world where people are people rather than this culture or that culture and they're "so different". History is great and all but you have to put it into perspective or old wounds will never heal.
ashtonkem 6y ago
This dovetails with something else I regularly say; everyone defines "normal" as "whatever the state of affairs was before my birth". Human time horizons are really short, and a lot of things that feel unbelievably ancient are actually only a small number of generations in the past. Heck, the Civil War was only ~6-7 generations ago.
ardit33 6y ago
Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. The whole continent was a basket case and hadn't advanced at all, and often regressed from the complexity/organization of civilization of the Roman empire. Even some of the major battles of the time, had only few thousand combatant, not more than a couple of Roman legions. Kings couldn't field armies, even larger to ancient greece, or persian empire (we are talking about 400-500 B.C.). The regress in overall state structure and organization was astonishing. It took the renaissance to change things up and for innovation and cultural progress to pick up. So, it was more than a 1000 years lost to petty warfare, destruction and general ignorance. If the Roman Empire had endured, who knows how things would have evolved. We would have been a different civilization by now. We probably would have had colonized mars by now :) Ps. The byzantine empire, the eastern side of the Roman empire, after the late 600s - 700s, was just a shade of its original, and kept losing territory and influence until it was just a city state conquered by the Ottomans in 1453.
- lou1306 6y ago
  > Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. Uhm, I'd say more like 378 (battle of Hadrianopolis) - 800 (Charlemagne is crowned Emperor). The idea that the whole medieval period is a "dark age" [1] is currently discredited among historians: from 800 until the Black Death of the mid-1300s, European culture and economy grew almost nonstop. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
  - ciceryadam 6y ago
    Similarly for central/eastern Europe the Mongol invasion in the 13th century was a major "dark age" setback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe
- Bayart 6y ago
  >Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. That's old but very sticky Early Modern propaganda, mostly due to anti-Catholicism. No serious historian today would make that claim, and frankly it's complete nonsense.
odiroot 6y ago
> I wonder whether civilizations with seemingly more continuous histories like China feel more connection to the rest of their history. Well, they're still able to read their ancient texts and probably understand them well. Now, even Greeks would struggle with the ancient Greek texts.
- rantanplan 6y ago
  No we don't! How dare... um... ok yes we do struggle. Unless you're an ancient Greek teacher, it's very hard to make sense of it. But you can certainly pick up numerous -unchanged- words or roots(common parts) since modern Greek is derrived from them.
iceman2654 6y ago
My grandparents are from China, and they've always been very proud of the culture/heritage. However, I think the Cultural Revolution destroyed a lot of it because of the book burning, mass exodus and killing of intellectuals. For reasons....the culture in Taiwan may have a stronger connection to historical China.

ImaCake 6y ago

>I wonder whether civilizations with seemingly more continuous histories like China feel more connection to the rest of their history. This is a really good point actually. I have talked recently to Persian coworkers about their nation's history. They identify with the full length of recorded Persian history. That is, all ~5000 years of it. I have read elsewhere that this is possibly a modern trend, that is, they didn't teach Persian history as the history of their current country at some points in the past. I suspect their emotional attachment to events 2000 years ago feels a bit different to mine then. They might feel a whole lot closer to the Sassasinds than I do to Boudicca. But maybe that has not always been the case.

KhoomeiK 6y ago
Yeah, it could be a modern phenomenon and even now, a very small percentage of people have an understanding of the grand scheme of history. Even without knowing the dates and exact order of events though, it still seems plausible for Persians to have an emotional connection to historical legends that they pretty much grew up with. That 5000 number is interesting though. Do they feel a connection with the Elamites, Sumerians, and Akkadians? That would be kind of surprising. It would make sense for them to connect with Xerxes and the Achaemenids or Medians though, despite the difference in religion. Sorta related, I've heard that there's a growing Zoroastrian movement among the "rebellious" Persian youth.
- deleted 6y ago
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konjin 6y ago
You can talk to a Greek and an Italian and get the same. It was interesting seeing flowers in the spot where Caesar was killed on the Ides of March some 2000 years later.
Eric_WVGG 6y ago
I did a course on the history of the Christian Crusades back in college, right when Operation Desert Storm was going on. The professor said that due to an essentially oral history tradition, they talked about the Crusades as something that had happened relatively recently, like to their great-grandparents. American parents will warn their children that if they misbehave, "the boogeyman" will come for them at night. I was told that the Middle Eastern analogue was "Richard will come and get you" — as in Richard the Lion-Hearted. (I have no idea if this is true or not… it sounded like a fun anecdote back in college, now it sounds slightly ridiculous to me, but who knows?)
- hcho 6y ago
  That does not ring true. Crusades were mostly forgotten until the rise of Arab and Turkish nationalisms. They were then appropriated into nationhood folklore.
  - al3xandre 6y ago
    Crazy how what we identify with historically depends more on what we decide to teach children in school than actual history, no?
    - oblio 6y ago
      Primary and middle school especially are part of nation building everywhere in the world. History lessons are purposefully a mix of history and propaganda. Every nation has a founding myth. Romania's is the struggle against adversity, foreign empires and our resilience over millennia. The American one is freedom (the struggle against tyranny) and the American dream. The British one is resistance against adversity on their island, vanquishing European autocrats. Russia's is liberation from the steppe nomads and then turning the tides in a rough part of the world. They're half lies, half truth in my experience. You know, myths :-)
- Cyph0n 6y ago
  Firstly, the Middle East is a vast place, so there is really no “Middle Eastern analogue”. A regional version, maybe. Secondly, the Crusades happened a very long time ago. From experience, I have never met or heard of an Arab who thought it was anything but a historical event. So, I highly doubt that anyone in the Middle East thinks of the Crusades as being relatively recent.

pjc50 6y ago

If you went to a sufficiently posh school you could still be taught "classics" - Latin, Greek and their history - to give a direct cultural link to that time. Not for nothing did Enoch Powell reference the river Tiber. But that's also the problem; all this referencing of the ancient world culminated in Fascism (named from the Roman fasces, the bundle of sticks with an axe that symbolises judicial power). Since the smashing of Italian and German Fascism in the 1940s, it has become ... unfashionable. The challenge remains to reconnect with the past without using it to justify atrocities in the present. (For the avoidance of doubt, this is not limited to European history! China does historicist propaganda films too! As do a lot of places, right down to warring caucasian microstates) (I would reccomend Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time Of Gifts", which is nominally a walking tour but has an incredible connection to the history of Europe and the places he's walking through. Everything from Charlemagne to Esterházy to Roland to Homer)

konjin 6y ago
Saying classicism culminated in fascism is like saying medicine culminated in Dr. Mengele and since then getting fillings is unfashionable. If you showed that fast food place to an Italian fascist they would probably blow it up because it was low culture and glorifying consumerism.
- frostburg 6y ago
  No, they would have loved it because at the time people in England were hunting in forests. Working class food vendors aren't problematic in the context of the fascist worldview. That having been said, the study of classics being unfashionable due to fascism isn't at all true.
  - konjin 6y ago
    In the fascist world view a womans place is in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. A fast food vendor 2000 years ago means that the supposed golden age of the volk never was. The rootless proletariat of Rome is oddly enough something that communists latch on to: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37811.The_Assassination_of_Julius_Caesar https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37811.The_Assassination_... You should probably read what an ideology actually believes before making sweeping pronouncements for them. This is how we end up with American rednecks being called nazis and american college students communists when the first are slightly right of center market liberals and the second are slightly left of center market liberals.

contingencies 6y ago

In many ways Chinese (and perhaps those in Japan, Korea and Vietnam) are still prisoners of Confucianism, the (deeply misogynist and authoritarian) philosophy of a man who lived 551–479 BCE.

trianglem 6y ago
Confucianism is a fantastic belief system with amazing humanistic values and a track record of not fomenting any conflict. Not everything is going to fit progressive mindsets and believe it or not large segments of the population like the stability that comes with the mild authoritarianism.
- contingencies 6y ago
  Unsure how to get on board with the "fantastic belief system" part (what exactly is 'fantastic'?), or the anti-conflict part as I believe most scholars of ancient history would say it has been the driver of the Chinese state which has 'integrated' numerous adjacent cultures over the last 2500 years. Present era stability is nice, however this was not always the norm, so I am umsure how much can be ascribed to Confucianism...
  - trianglem 6y ago
    It is fantastic because it doesn’t make up a supernatural being or god. It stresses strong family values, compassion, creativity, self-help, reverence and kindness.
    - contingencies 6y ago
      That is a pretty weak response. I believe we should judge the impact of cultural traditions by their practice not by their supposed theoretical scorecard. Your statements could be equally applied to all the major monotheistic traditions and look how much war and suffering they have produced.
      - deleted 6y ago

africanboy 6y ago

We actually know more about our ancient history than ancient people knew about few generations before them. I am from Rome and live near the Colosseum, the connection with our past is very strong, especially now that we are uncovering more and more ancient relics thanks to modern archeology. A friend of mine is a guide and we go visit the archeological sites at least once a month. Ancient romans used to make fun of each other, regardless of the cetus When the Roman army won some important battle the Emperor himself could be mocked for a day, to express the human nature of every Roman in contrast to the divine nature of many ruling classes of their times. As an anecdote: Julius Caesar was bald and suffered about his condition, after a very important battle won by the Roman army he was made fun all day by his soldiers for being bald, despite being their general and one of the most important men in Rome. They had a very peculiar relation with death, the funerary inscriptions are particularly interesting https://exhibitions.kelsey.lsa.umich.edu/galleries/Exhibits/Death_on_Display/Text/inscription.html https://exhibitions.kelsey.lsa.umich.edu/galleries/Exhibits/... It's a tradition in Rome to joke about death, even today. Saying to a friend "ti ammazzo" (I'm gonna kill you) it's considered normal, in Rome if you hear "mortacci tua" (to your lousy bad ancestors!) you can be sure it's two friends that met after a long time and are saluting each other. Romans built their cemeteries outside the city walls to not pollute the urban space, except for the Monumental Cemetery of Campo Verano (simply Verano in Rome) and the Protestant Cemetery, both built in 19th century, there are no other burial sites in Rome and the city's cemetery is located 30 Kms away from the city centre. A lot of the Roman culture has survived through the centuries, it's the base of our society after all. We still use Roman roads and aqueducts, our cities are built on Roman settlements and follow the same structure, Roman law is a course and matter of examination at law university. My "real Roman" friends can trace back their family roots to Roman people and have Roman family names (Fabi, Crescenzi, Emiliano, Lattanzi etc.) Also we should not forget that Christians took a lot from the Hebrew tradition (angels in the old testament were inspired to mythological Egyptian or Mesopotamian creatures) and you can find testimony of their original form here, for example this Tetramorphous as Ezekiel described it, can be found at Anagni, a small city outside Rome. AFAIK there aren't many other places in the west where you can find them. http://www.lundici.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Cattedrale-di-Anagni.jpg http://www.lundici.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Cattedrale-... So, in a way, we are more connected to our past history than ever.

tianlong 6y ago

Italian here. We do study at school Roman history, a lot, since 6 years old. Obviously, we are very proud and connected to that historical period. Everyone knows Cesar, Augusto, Nerone and all the other important figures of the time. Mant of us, at high school, study latin. I did a science-based high school (public school) and I studied latin literature and grammar for 5 years, 4 hours per week.

elboru 6y ago
It’s weird but I, as a Hispanic-American, also feel really connected to the old Roman Empire, I hear latin every Sunday at Mass (traditional Latin Mass), a lot of idioms we use every day can be traced back to the Romans, our food is a mix of European and native ingredients, even our law is based in Roman roots. It’s awesome to feel connected to Aztecs, Mayas, Spaniards and Romans.
DrJokepu 6y ago
Just curious, as a native Italian speaker, how hard did you find learning Latin and what was the hardest part for you? My native language isn't a Romance language, but I have also spent five years learning Latin in grammar school and for me, learning both the vocabulary and the grammar was hard, hard work. I always assumed that for a native Italian speaking person it would be probably a lot easier.
- riquito 6y ago
  Not the parent, but... it's not that difficult. You have to apply yourself, of course, but there is a connection (once you get the gist of the declinations, as italian you can understand a certain amount of words without looking at a dictionary). Difficulty varies a lot based on who writes though: e.g. Caesar is very easy, because he purposefully wrote in a simpler, clear way (less number of terms overall, trying to avoid synonyms, straight to the point). In Italy if you follow classical studies you learn ancient Greek too (first 2 years of high school), which was definitely harder than latin, but you grock the alphabet in a short time. I seem to recall that more often than not the same word had very different meanings depending on the context, while the grammar was similar to latin (well, of course it's backward...).

nobody9999 6y ago

>it might mean that our disconnect with ancient history might more just be a product of Modernity and the rapid change of the last couple centuries. Has it occurred to you that "our disconnect with ancient history" isn't as widespread as you may think? In fact, I was rather taken aback by your assertion: >I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before in the same way that we feel pretty connected to Copernicus developing Heliocentrism or Columbus arriving in the New World. A connection to anything requires the effort of making that connection. And history is no exception. If someone feels disconnected from history, it's incumbent upon them to engage and connect with it. I'd point out that for pretty much all of recorded history, it's only been those with power and wealth that have had the leisure or need to become literate, let alone to study history. That's changed to a certain extent but most folks, even in modern times, give little thought to history, and have little interest in it. As for "Western" culture, there's a great deal that's known and a huge amount of scholarship has and continues to be done around it and its history. If you put even a tiny bit of effort[0][1][2], you can gain great deal of knowledge about history. Should you wish to expend more effort, there are literally thousands of books, academic papers and treatises which provide enormous insight into our history. And if you're really interested, you can make a whole career out of the study and exposition of history. As such, I'd say that any "disconnect" from history is rooted in a lack of interest or even a modicum of energy expended in "connecting" with it. Our current culture and educational systems seem to deprecate and devalue history, even recent (the last 50 years or so) history. That's a shame IMHO. Please don't take my comment as a personal attack, it's not. The sentiment you express isn't unusual or surprising. The solution to such a "disconnect" is to access historical information and cultural narratives. Such access is, I'd argue, more available to the lay person than ever before. I'd also note that the "disconnect" you mention, while seemingly related to mass communications and its focus on trivia and current events, isn't anything new or profound. Rather, it's related to a lack of interest among most people. Whether that lack of interest is based on a lack of leisure time, a discouragement of such endeavors by our media and educational systems and/or other factors, it's that lack of interest that causes such a disconnect -- and that's easily remedied. [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1U_8A7q8La1VfEa-HJifnO3r1JgOdSVP https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1U_8A7q8La1VfEa-HJif... [1] https://www.edx.org/learn/western-civilization https://www.edx.org/learn/western-civilization [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_decline_of_the_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_decline_of_the_West Edit: Improved clarity.

rizpanjwani 6y ago

What do you mean by "interruption" of history? You mean written history?

coldtea 6y ago
He means the fall of Rome and organized state, and the regression due to barbaric attacks during the middle ages. It took several centuries for the germanic, etc. tribes that defeated Rome to become civilized enough to Roman standards, and build equal structures and quality of life. (As a point of comparison, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc. had centuries of written history, whereas e.g. the British written history starts with the Roman invasion of the island, and starts by Romans).

mulmen 6y ago

A few years ago I was lucky enough to visit the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan. The Jade Cabbage was the headline attraction at the time. The thing that stood out the most to me was a tea cup. The date was ~1800. I was impressed by a 215 year old tea cup. Then I realized the date was 1800 bc. A 3800 year old cup! I had a similar experience in Japan last year when I learned the same family has ruled for something like 1500 years and trace their history back 2600 years.

ridgeguy 6y ago
Two years ago, my wife and I visited the Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. We were on our way out when I saw a door that branched to a room of "deep antiquities", or words to that effect. One of the exhibits consisted of three gold bracelets - beautiful, modern designs that would have looked at home in a window at Tiffany's. They had been excavated from strata with charcoal that dated at ~6,000 - 5,000 BC. That single exhibit imbued in me a feeling of connection to our human past as much as has a lifetime of interest in history.
- lumberingjack 6y ago
  I'm native American, visiting Sequoia national Park being among the ancient forests I literally start to hear the songs and the war drums of my people. One of the most amazing experiences of my life I always thought Richard fineman was crazy for beating a bongo drum. But he was on to something.
  - MisterTea 6y ago
    > One of the most amazing experiences of my life I always thought Richard fineman was crazy for beating a bongo drum. But he was on to something. Not crazy at all. Dancing, singing, music is part of just about every human culture. I'd even say dancing is a sort of fun communal therapy. Which makes total sense why its part of ceremony. Note, Many people such as myself claim they don't dance. But secretly I "dance" (thrash about incoherently) around the when the music is going and no one is looking.

coldtea 6y ago

>I honestly feel like if Europe didn't have the Early Middle Ages (~500-1000AD), we would feel pretty connected to all the history that happened before Well, that's true for the western Roman Empire. The eastern side (which included southernmost Italy, Greece, most of the mediterrenean, middle east - Syria, Lebanon, and balkans, and eastern (modern) turkey) persisted, kept and advanced the Roman civic structure, organization, legal system, etc and didn't collapse during the middle ages. That's why you find e.g. levantine people like Taleb that feel and express the whole connection of their area back to the ancient times...

throwaway894345 6y ago
Didn’t the Ottomans interrupt that continuity rather significantly? For example, we don’t call it “Constantinople” any more and the inhabitants of the region don’t seem to consider themselves descendants of Romans as much as Ottomans (or perhaps Islamic identity more generally), at least as I understand it.
- deleted 6y ago
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- joeyo 6y ago
  > For example, we don’t call it “Constantinople” any more Not to detract from the rest of your point, but "Istanbul" actually comes from a Greek nickname meaning "to the city", and didn't even become the official name until 1930.
  - jan_Inkepa 6y ago
    Curious, about this, I got sucked into a rabbithole of reading about this background of this etymology. Thanks for the nerdsnipe! :) "THE ETYMOLOGY OF İSTANBUL: MAKING OPTIMAL USE OF THE EVIDENCE" https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/bitstream/handle/item/15924/stachowski_woodhouse_the_etymology_of_istanbul_2015.pdf https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/bitstream/handle/item/15924/stac... (It disputes the details of the traditional 'to the city' etymology, but in the end proposes deriving from something else with very similar meaning, "στην Πόλι" (something maybe like 'sten Poli' but there are details of historical pronunciation in the article I didn't read closely) rather than "εἰς τὴν Πόλιν" [is timˈbolin].)

dpe82 6y ago

I was raised as a pretty conservative American protestant and went to religious school where a lot of our study covered history (as recorded in the Bible) of Israel and surrounding areas. As a result I felt some connection to it; I suspect this phenomenon is a driver behind the American religious right's unwavering political support of the modern State of Israel.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
I was also raised in this manner, but in the 80s and it seems in a time before the state of Israel itself seemed to be considered a 'friend' of the evangelical movement. I understand this shifted significantly later, or maybe it just took longer to come to Canada. It was far more ambiguous, and tinged with a lot of anti-Semitism; like Jews now were something apart from and different from the Hebrews in the old testament -- and that Jews themselves were tainted with the rejection of Christ. But yes, we got a lot of middle eastern history; big fascinating archaeological sections in the appendix of my Bible. But of course it all ended in around 100 AD, with no mention of anything after, really. And it of course put a lot of emphasis on the land of Israel, which in the real world of the ancient near east was really a minor player surrounded by Egypt, the Hittites, Assyria, etc.
- varjag 6y ago
  The major component of Evangelical obsession with Israel is seeing it as fulfilment condition for the coming Rapture. Nothing to do with liking Jews much. Just a waypoint on death cult checklist.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    Yes and I do feel like this particular interpretation of the content of Revelations, etc. seems fairly new.
    - varjag 6y ago
      Possibly it took off with advent of televangelism?

stjohnswarts 6y ago

I think that's a neat concept. I feel it can also be destructive. It seems like a lot of modern problems will never be solved until decide to move on. Whole wars have been fought for what happened hundreds of years ago because people won't move on to a new world where people are people rather than this culture or that culture and they're "so different". History is great and all but you have to put it into perspective or old wounds will never heal.

ashtonkem 6y ago

This dovetails with something else I regularly say; everyone defines "normal" as "whatever the state of affairs was before my birth". Human time horizons are really short, and a lot of things that feel unbelievably ancient are actually only a small number of generations in the past. Heck, the Civil War was only ~6-7 generations ago.

ardit33 6y ago

Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. The whole continent was a basket case and hadn't advanced at all, and often regressed from the complexity/organization of civilization of the Roman empire. Even some of the major battles of the time, had only few thousand combatant, not more than a couple of Roman legions. Kings couldn't field armies, even larger to ancient greece, or persian empire (we are talking about 400-500 B.C.). The regress in overall state structure and organization was astonishing. It took the renaissance to change things up and for innovation and cultural progress to pick up. So, it was more than a 1000 years lost to petty warfare, destruction and general ignorance. If the Roman Empire had endured, who knows how things would have evolved. We would have been a different civilization by now. We probably would have had colonized mars by now :) Ps. The byzantine empire, the eastern side of the Roman empire, after the late 600s - 700s, was just a shade of its original, and kept losing territory and influence until it was just a city state conquered by the Ottomans in 1453.

lou1306 6y ago
> Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. Uhm, I'd say more like 378 (battle of Hadrianopolis) - 800 (Charlemagne is crowned Emperor). The idea that the whole medieval period is a "dark age" [1] is currently discredited among historians: from 800 until the Black Death of the mid-1300s, European culture and economy grew almost nonstop. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
- ciceryadam 6y ago
  Similarly for central/eastern Europe the Mongol invasion in the 13th century was a major "dark age" setback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe
Bayart 6y ago
>Yeah, the 440 to late 1400s were a regress for European civilization. That's old but very sticky Early Modern propaganda, mostly due to anti-Catholicism. No serious historian today would make that claim, and frankly it's complete nonsense.

odiroot 6y ago

> I wonder whether civilizations with seemingly more continuous histories like China feel more connection to the rest of their history. Well, they're still able to read their ancient texts and probably understand them well. Now, even Greeks would struggle with the ancient Greek texts.

rantanplan 6y ago
No we don't! How dare... um... ok yes we do struggle. Unless you're an ancient Greek teacher, it's very hard to make sense of it. But you can certainly pick up numerous -unchanged- words or roots(common parts) since modern Greek is derrived from them.

iceman2654 6y ago

My grandparents are from China, and they've always been very proud of the culture/heritage. However, I think the Cultural Revolution destroyed a lot of it because of the book burning, mass exodus and killing of intellectuals. For reasons....the culture in Taiwan may have a stronger connection to historical China.