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Like Holy LARP Bro... (thelemmy.club)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/main@hexbear.net
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[–] 32 points 3 days ago* (4 children)

Ironic bc historically, Ancient Greece generally had more technological and cultural exchange with the Middle East/ eastern Mediterranean ex-Byzantine states than cultures we today consider "Western." I mean present-day western Turkey was literally apart of Ancient Greece and an integral part of Hellenistic culture!

"Western Civilization" is a blurry, incoherent concept younger than the US, almost like a civil religion with Greece as the bs founding myth. Western Europeans even looked down on Greeks as primitive others for all of medieval history, until the last century they noticed and whitewashed their historical achievements

Fun fact: Ancient Greece spent centuries without a writing system (The Odyssey was originally a long oral tradition passed by word of mouth for 400 years), before they borrowed the alphabet of the Phoenicians (present-day Lebanon/Syria), which later became the basis of the Latin alphabet. That's not to say Greeks were backwards, just that the Fertile Crescent had the head-start of civilization. (Very few cultures have independently invented written language, and none of them are European)

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  • [–] 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 child)

    Aren't all writing systems in use today borrowed from high Punic, except for Chinese and and the Korean system?

    Edit: I meant other people invented writing, but the punic script is more efficient on paper, parchment, etc, as opposed clay tablets.

    But yes you are right h regarding Greece, according to Greek mythology Cadmus prince of tyre founded Thebes in beotia and brought the alphabet.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago*

    Of all the commonly known scripts sure, but there's definitely niche writing systems that don't descend from any of those. Like millions of indigenous Mesoamericans still use scripts descending just from their ancestors. As for some nicher writing systems from the Old World, I think it's a lot more unclear

    Mesoamerica, Sumeria (present-day Iraq), and China are the only cultures proven to invent true writing systems independently from anyone else. Then there's a few cultures who seemingly took the idea of written language from another culture, but decided to make their own unique system from scratch instead of innovating on an existing one, like Korean Hangul, Cameroonian Bamum, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics, along with other African scripts with fuzzy origins that were probably semi-inspired (but not directly borrowed) from Punic derived scripts, but mostly original and/or evolved from local proto-writing systems. (And then there's scripts we know almost nothing about their origins, like Tifinagh and the Indus Valley script)

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  • [+] 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 8 points 3 days ago

    There is genuine legal, economic, and religious continuity from Rome to later Europe. When the empire fell, all of those systems didn't just evaporated but carried right in into the systems that would eventually morph into feudalism, with its many complex contractual and democratic structures. The first European ruling classes to rise after Rome were in some cases literally the same manorial powers and in others "barbarians" directly and explicitly emulating the Roman style.

    Roman style class systems morphed but continued to expand, supplanting much older and more democratic forms in place throughout Europe, and it was Roman imperial law that acted as the basis to dismantle consultative and communal legal forms, meaning that Roman law became stronger and more rigid after Rome fell (in time, not immediately).

    Obviously the Church remained a central power fundamentally oriented around Rome geographically and culturally, with intellectual culture almost entirely Latin until well into the bourgeois era. Rome was every ruler's source of legitimacy.

    Medieval Europe by Chris Wickham is a great Marxist history of this entire process that treats the transition from empire to feudalism with a proper DHM analysis.

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