world curriculum history

7/27/2019 World Curriculum History

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PROF. UNIV. DR. ION NEGRE -DOBRIDOR

ISTORIA UNIVERSALA A CURRICULUMULUIEDUCATIONAL

- documentar pentru studeni i masteranzi -

DANIEL J. ELAZAR- World History Curriculum

DOUNE MACDONALD - Curriculum change and thepostmodern world:is the school curriculum-reform movement ananachronism?

octombrie 2012


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NOT Studiul reprodus mai jos este una dintre cele mai complete i mai sintetice viziuni asupra devenirii civiliza iei i culturii omene ti prin intermediul planificrii i organizrii con tiente a educa iei indivizilor umani. Parcurgndu-l cu aten ie, cursan ii i vor constitui cu u urin o imagine realist asupra importan ei proiectrii i implementrii de curricula n n societate i, totodat, vor putea medita responsabil asupra consecin elor pe

care le implic schimbrile educa ionale determinate con tient.

World History Curriculum

Daniel J. Elazar

( ARTICOL PUBLICAT nJerusalem Center for Public Affairs )

Introduction

Approximately 90 miles north of San Francisco, on the Pacific Coast, sits Fort Ross StatePark, a quiet and pleasant restoration of a small frontier settlement. In the 1820's, Fort Rosswas the southern most Russian outpost in North America. For a brief moment, it reflected theouter limits of the expansionist ambitions of certain Russian leaders, who saw in the still

politically chaotic Pacific coast of North America of the early nineteenth century a chance toextend Russian hegemony southward in the face of the rival British, American and Spanishclaims.

The Russian effort was brief and unsuccessful. It had no real support from St. Petersburg(then the capitol of the Russian Empire) and was confronted by intense opposition from therival claimants. The Russians abandoned the fort in the 1830's, withdrawing to Alaska wherethey were to sit for another generation until Secretary of State William Seward arranged to

purchase that territory for the United States in 1867. Today, Fort Ross is a collection ofrestored log structures whose piquant history is an added attraction for visitors to a lovelysection of the Californian coast.

In one sense, however, Fort Ross is far more significant than its brief history would indicate.It represents the point of convergence of those elements of what we generally define asWestern civilization in their movement to encircle the globe. Its founding and brief history

brought to a culmination four millennia or more of expansion that ultimately embraced thewhole world.

Over five thousand years before the founding of Fort Ross, the Near Eastern civilizations outof which western civilization was to spring, were inventing civilization itself in the fertilecrescent from the Nile to the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. Some two millennia later, Israelgave birth to Judaism which became the religious foundation of western civilization. Amillennium thereafter the Greeks began the development of western philosophy and science.Between the Semitic peoples of western Asia and the Hellenic peoples of the Greek isles, thecontributions of these two civilizations were spread throughout the Mediterranean Basinduring the course of the millennium immediately prior to the rise of Christianity.


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Two thousand years ago, Christianity was born out of the Jewish people and within its firstmillennium synthesized its understanding of Jewish religious civilization with thecontributions of Greek philosophy and civilization and spread throughout Europe. Theenergies of the West thus organized and released, the following millennium saw theChristianized Russians move eastward across Siberia and the Bering Straits and the

Christianized Spanish, French, Dutch, and British peoples move westward across the Atlantic,away from their European heartlands, to colonize vast new territories and implant westerncivilization within them. The eastward movement of the Russians and the westwardmovement of the other European nations finally met - after having girdled the globe - innorthern California at Fort Ross, thereby completing literally millennia of migration,settlement and cultural transformation. The consequences of this western globe-girdling have

become quite apparent in the twentieth century as the entire world has entered the embrace ofwestern civilization.

While Western Civilization has succeeded in girdling the globe it has done so at every step byabsorbing important elements from the other civilizations it has encountered sometimes more

and sometimes less, so that 150 years after the building of Fort Ross, Western Civilization hadbeen transformed; first into modern civilization and then into world civilization. Today, thehistory of humanity needs to be based on an understanding of that interplay of civilizationsand how the new world civilization now emerging is more than simply western civilization

but is indeed an amalgam of the world's civilizations that has been continuing since the verybeginning of time.

The history of the world can be looked upon as the story and the record of how humanityemerged as a single entity in East Africa tens of thousands of years ago, progressively divideditself into sharper and finer divisions racial, ethnic, and national while at the same timemoving to a world unified on a more complex basis. Today we have reached the point where aunified world history can be seen and understood by all. What remains is to reorganize ourteaching of world history to incorporate the worldwide perspective while at the same time notfalling into the trap of making all historical events equal so as to give equal weight to all

peoples and places at all times or to equate the history of public events with that of privatebehavior.

This curriculum is designed to do just that. It takes what may be called a "civilizational"approach, looking at different civilizations, first and foremost West and East, but also Northand South. We shall try to understand how civilizations in the various areas of the worldeither interacted or acted separately from one another over nearly ten thousand years of

human history.

In doing so we will follow several themes:

1. the common source and ties binding the human race as a whole as well as itsseparation into various subgroups;

2. the pattern of human migrations which populated and have organized thepopulations of the world, first creating the distinctions among humans and, inthe last five hundred years, bringing about their reamalgamation;

3. the frontier (in the sense that Frederick Jackson Turner used the term) as thedriving force behind those migrations and the consequences of successive


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frontiers in bringing about human development or the lack of frontiers inretarding that development;

4. the role of human invention in responding to those frontier challenges and inrepeatedly reinventing the world which human beings occupy, examining the

human capacity to invent things that can elevate us or things that can destroyus;

5. the other great force driving humanity, namely, the force of religious beliefwhich, more than any other human factor, has galvanized humans to decisiveaction or to change themselves.

6. humans and their institutions, the way in which humans have organized theirlives and cultures to respond to the first five.

All of these themes have been of vital importance in guiding human history since the

beginning and in every subsequent era. They form the basis for our understanding of howhumans function in history. These are the themes on which we will focus in this curriculum.

The study of history is a matter of selection and judgment. Human activity is carried on at somany levels and with so many facets that any attempt to record and make sense of its historyrequires selection and the exercise of judgment in evaluating the record produced by what isselected.

In this respect history is prismatic rather than systematic. That is to say, what is selected andstudied is based upon the questions asked, i.e., what facet is being explored. Thus the study ofworld history will involve examining the historical record through examining that (or those)facets which have been most influential in shaping the history of the world. Consequently, itwill have much more to do with public affairs than, let us say, if we were to study the historyof the family which involves more of the private dimensions of life, a different facet in mostrespects. The selection of one facet or another does not necessarily reflect on the importanceof that facet in the overall scheme of things but on the questions being asked. This curriculumwill focus on the facet of world history and will concentrate on issues of public importancefirst and foremost, looking at personal and private matters only insofar as they bear on thoseof public importance.

If human life is a prism, the different faces of the prism also act as a control on the historian's

judgment. In other words, while the historian looks at history and makes his or her selectionon the basis of a particular view into the prism, the face of the prism itself must be to somedegree controlling since it can only show the historian what is there and the historian musthonestly try to discover what the face has to reveal. Thus, while every historian, like everyhuman being, comes with a particular set of leanings or judgments, he or she would not be ahistorian if he or she was not bound by the historical realities reflected back by the particularface of the prism and by other faces as well.

The orientation of this curriculum is toward the identification and exploration of thosepeoples, civilizations, and forces that have molded the world as we know it. If this at timesseems "Eurocentric," it should be understood as accurately reflecting the forces that have

shaped the world which have been heavily influenced by European civilization at least sincethe late Middle Ages. The curriculum's approach to European and other civilizations,


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however, is not at all Eurocentric. Indeed, it shares in the critique of Eurocentrism whichoften has distorted the perspective through which we in the West see the world.

For example, since the Age of Exploration and Discovery, the Eurocentric world has focusedon Atlantic Europe and North America, relegating Asia, Africa, and South America to a

secondary position. But if we emancipate ourselves from that perspective and go back beforethe rise of Islam, we will find a world centered on the Mediterranean including within itsouthern Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa equally active in one common sphere ofactivity with close connections between them and between the part of each continent withinthe sphere to those parts beyond it. That is a very different perspective than the Eurocentric

perspective of today.

By the same token, when we speak of the conquest of the world by Western civilization, weare not simply or even basically speaking of military conquest. Nor is all of Westerncivilization European. In our own times, for example, just as Western industrialism andeconomic development has conquered the world, so, too, has rock music, a North American

synthesis of African, Jewish, and southern white musical expression that has become the basisof popular musical culture around the world. The MTV station seen in Asia is located in Indiaand develops that popular musical culture in the style of Indian music, which is notablydifferent from the MTV broadcast in North America; the synthesis takes place but the musicis unmistakably rock.

In other words, just as "Eurocentrism" is a bias, so, too, is the assumption that Eurocentrismmeans a bias toward European white male elites. By now, various groups, many of themdistinctly outside of the original European elites, have participated in the conquest of theworld by Western civilization and both the role of "elites" and those outside must be notedfairly and fearlessly.

The Common Source of Humanity

The combination of archeological and DNA explorations has brought us to a knowledge of acommon source of all humanity in East Africa, even though contemporary theory holds thatthere was literally a first woman and a first man and that all subsequent humanity aredescended from them. The history of the emergence of the first two homo sapiens and thespread of their descendants around the world in such a way that they became separated into

various subgroups teaches us about the unity and diversity of humanity both. Both arecritically necessary and how human history is, in one respect or another, an interplay of thatunity and diversity with both contributing to human behavior either in its underlyinguniformities and similarities or in its manifest differences.

Human Migration

A major source of the separations and differences for tens of thousands of years that is nowbecoming a major source of human reintegration is to be found in the pattern of human

migration. Those migrations, beginning from East Africa, populated and organized thepopulations of the world, generated the differences among peoples, yet brought different


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peoples into contact in different ways, at times hostile, at times symbiotic, and at timesfriendly. The very process of migration has changed individuals and peoples by bringing theminto contact with new and unfamiliar environments and creating circumstances that haveforced them to adapt and adjust to those new and different environments and circumstances.Humans appear to have a drive to migrate and at the same time the act of migration keeps

humanity on its toes.

The Frontier

The term "frontier" was transformed by Turner from the European definition describing theborder or border zone between two states or countries to what became the American one,describing the border between the settled and unsettled, the "civilized" and the "wilderness."The frontier, in Turner's view, was a dynamic process.

As a result, the central political problem of growth is not simply how to handle the physicalchanges brought by each frontier, real as they are. It is how to accommodate newness,

population turnover, and transience as a way of life. This is the frontier situation. It is arecurring one in history and needs to be understood if we are to find ways to solve our

problems, or at least meet them adequately, and at the same time, preserve thosecharacteristics which have enabled certain countries to continue to develop for a period farlonger than has been historically true in the case of other countries and societies.

The frontier is not merely a dramatic imagery but a very real process, indeed the basic socio-technical process that informs the experience of certain people and countries. As a process, itis dynamic and essentially progressive, although fraught with problems of its own, as is everyother dimension of human life.

A frontier in the sense used here involves ten characteristics:

1. Frontier activities are those devoted to the exploration of that which waspreviously unknown and the development of that which was previously "wild"or undeveloped.

2. The frontier involves extensive new organization of the uses of the land (orspace), uses so new that they are essentially unprecedented but so much a part

of the process in question that they will be applied across the length andbreadth of the continent.

3. The frontier involves an expanding or growth economy based on theapplication of existing technologies in new communities or new technologiesin settled communities.

4. The frontier movement, though manifesting itself as a single "whole,"actually coalesces a number of different "frontiers," both geographic andfunctional, that exist simultaneously and successively; each with its own goals,interests, character, and frontiersman, yet all tied together by their common

link to the central goals, interests, and character of the larger frontier of whichthey are parts.


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5. The frontier generates opportunities to grow, change, risk, develop, andexplore within its framework amid elements of risk and action, and demandsresponses involving courage, freedom, and equality.

6. There must be reasonably free access to the frontier sector of society for all

who want it.

7. A frontier situation generates a psychological orientation toward the frontieron the part of the people engaged in conquering it, endowing them with the"frontier spirit."

8. The "feedback" from the frontier leads to the continuous creation of newopportunities on many level of society, including new occupations to be filled

by people who have the skills to do so, regardless of such factors as familybackground, social class, or personal influence, thus contributing to themaintenance or extension of equality in the social order.

9. The frontier feedback must influence the total social structure to the pointwhere the society as a whole is significantly remade.

10. The direct manifestations of the frontier can be found in every section of acountry or region at some time (usually sequentially) and are visible in asubstantial number of localities that either have, or are themselves, frontierzones.

In essence, these frontier characteristics are what the frontier spirit is all about. To manifestitself, a frontier needs a great deal of freedom and willingness to take risks that really are risksthat is to say, without some outside source protecting the risk-takers from negativeconsequences because that same outside source will limit the benefits which can be gainedfrom the positive results. People with the frontier spirit see opportunity where others see onlydanger; will tend to say "yes, it can be done," rather than immediately responding "no, it hasnever been done before." Most can handle the ups and downs of risk-taking and are able to

begin again, if necessary.

The frontier spirit animates two types of people: frontiersmen and pioneers. Frontiersmen arethose who go out ahead of the camp and who gain their primary satisfactions from exploringsomething new or from the fallout of being first at something and thus freer with regard to it

than those who follow them. They may or may not gain the more conventional benefits ofpioneering but often do not, nor are those their primary interest.

Pioneers, on the other hand, seek those conventional gains. First and foremost, they follow thefrontiersmen to plant settlements where only explorers have gone before them; in the imageryof the land frontier, to farm the land rather than merely trap furs on it, not to invent computers

but to establish networks in cyberspace and profit from them.

In sum, frontiersmanship and the frontier spirit are as much a part of culture as of personality.Personality may be the most important when we try to identify individuals with that spirit, butcertain cultures appear to produce more people with those personality traits than do others.

Some cultures seem to have a penchant to produce a modal personality that is frontier-oriented. Even in such cases, no doubt, we are talking about a minority of the population, but


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a minority significant and large enough to influence the entire society. This is similar to thecase of other kinds of revolutionary movements, particularly religious, where whole

populations are moved by key minorities in key positions.

Human Invention

The application of the foregoing principles and the human "package" that they produce isexpressed through the role of human invention in response to those frontier challenges. Thenew circumstances brought about by migrations and frontiers can only be mastered throughhuman invention of all kinds, in technology, in ideas, in mores and ways of living, asindividuals, in families, groups, and society. While Americans are more conscious of the roleof invention than most, since American society has given such a prominent place to inventorsand inventions in very concrete and visible ways, humanity in general has tended to think ofinvention primarily in the realm of technology and not sufficiently in other human realms.

One can make a good case that history is about invention, its furtherance, and resistance to itand its consequences, as well as the impact of inventions themselves.

Religious Belief

The by now well documented apparent need of human beings to "believe in something," thatis to say, to reach out beyond themselves as individuals to transcendent powers that outlivethe human lifespan, has been recognized as a dominant human psychological characteristic ifnothing else. In fact, humans, in their reaching out, have developed religious belief which inits more primitive forms simply answer those psychological needs but in its largest andhighest expression provides humans not only with the satisfactions of belief but with guidanceas to how they should live their lives. Great systems of religious belief not only providehumans with great satisfactions but place great demands on them to be better than they mightotherwise be if they imply followed their own natural inclinations. Indeed, human nature asexpressed in human psychology may lead humans to satisfy the aforementioned needsthrough religious belief, but true religion serves to raise humans beyond their natures.

Within human nature there is the capacity to go beyond normal human limitations, but sincethat requires great effort, there must be a will to do so. Religious belief and religions have

been the great forces driving that will. A proper understanding of history would provide anunderstanding of how this is so, the various forms it has taken, and how to evaluate thoseforms in light of our transcendent goals for human improvement and the improvement of theworld.

Humans and Their Institutions

History is dynamic. It moves along forward, backward, and sideways. Every kind of humanbehavior can be found within it. It does not seem to follow any clear rules. At least for some,

generalizations from or about history seem to be futile or impossible. Yet the dynamics andconfusions of history should not obscure the truth that humans make, transmit, preserve, and


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change their history through their institutions. No matter how attractive any particular story oractor in history may appear to be, the significance of the story or the actor is only in

proportion to the degree to which institutions are involved. By institutions, we mean thestructures of civilization, the forms which political and social life take, and the organized orstructured expressions of particular cultures or ways of life. Civilizations are, in the last

analysis, congeries of institutions, among which are law, religion, government, economies,educational systems - one could go on to list many others.

Institutions and Cultural Orientations

While there are many different kinds of cultural orientations that inform and shape theinstitutions of civilization, all may be reduced to one or another of three basic models or idealtypes. They are hierarchy, organic development, and covenant. Particular polities andsocieties are, in most cases, some combination of all three but every one has a dominant

orientation to one or another.

Hierarchies organize authority, power, and status in a pyramidal fashion with clear divisionsbetween higher and lower elements in the pyramid and greater authority and status, andusually power as well, ascribed to the higher and less to the lower. Hierarchies may be morerigid or more flexible, but in the end they always come out to be hierarchies. The model of ahierarchy is the pyramid.

Hierarchies are often, one might even say usually, established by conquest, sometimes byconquest from the outside and sometimes by conquest from within. They are frequentlymaintained by force or at least by the threat of force.

Organic development describes social organizations generated by what seems to be accidentor chance, whereby people in specific situations respond in limited ways to deal with specificsituations or tasks. Over time institutions are formed as a result of those limited responses,adhering to one another and persisting through the generations. There seems to be little in theway of overarching design in the institutions, societies, or the civilizations produced by thiskind of development. In one sense organic development is less a matter of higher or lowerthan hierarchy, but in another, history reveals that the end result of these kinds of incrementaldevelopments is usually the development of an elite occupying the center of the polity,society, or civilization, with the rest of the population outside of the central circle located in

the peripheries, what Robert Michel referred to as "the iron law of oligarchy." This suggeststhat without planning and making provisions to the contrary, authority, power and status willinevitably gravitate toward a central elite, leaving the others outside.

When people perceive themselves to be equals, they reject submission to power pyramids orto the iron laws of oligarchy and choose to establish their institutions and societies byreflection, choice, and design. They do so by covenanting among themselves, that is to say,coming together and agreeing to morally based pacts that provides for the constitutionalizeddistribution of authority and power among themselves to preserve as much liberty andequality as possible within a political and social order where institutions necessarily restrictliberty to some extent to enable people to live in society and recognize those necessary

inequalities generated by the human condition and needed for society to survive and flourish.Covenants are designed to provide that all those entering society preserve some share in its


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shaping, either by acting together collectively or cooperatively, or by acting individually,thereby preserving basic liberties and equality. The result is a mosaic, or matrix of arenas of

political and social organization framed by common institutions established by agreement.

As indicated above, these three models are ideal types. In fact, in the real world they are

usually combined in some way, with all civilizations, societies, and institutions havinghierarchical, organic, and covenantal elements, but different ones begin from different startingpoints and emphasize one of these models more than the others. For example, East Asiancivilizations as a rule are more hierarchical while English-speaking civilizations as a rule aremore covenantal. Both have mixtures of other models within them and some specificcountries or institutions may be predominantly of one of the other models. By the same token,continental European civilizations tend to be either hierarchical or organic, but in the modern

period acquired elements of the covenantal model. We will deal with these models whereappropriate in the following discussion.

The models, their mixtures, and the struggles among them and between institutions, polities,

or civilizations having one or another, made a decisive difference in history, in shaping thedirection of parts of the world and then the world as a whole. Not only that, but their studyadds a special spice to the study of history.

First Period: Before History

(prehistoric times to approximately 4000 BCE)

Human history begins with the invention of writing sometime around 3750 BC orapproximately 5750 years ago (significantly close to the date that both the Jewish andChristian traditions note as the date of the creation). Of course we have archeological records

that go back considerably further and paleontological records that extend back 3.6 millionyears in the case of the first finds of homo sapiens, beings that were human in the way that weare, and 6 million years for the first pre-humanoids. Finds such as Australopithecus,Pithecanthropus, and Neanderthal man have entered the human lexicon and mark the

beginnings of what we take to be human life.

Perhaps most exciting are the discoveries of the past few years, since the beginning ofcontemporary genetics based on DNA and on the studies pursuant thereto, that all humangenes can be traced back to one woman and one man in East Central Africa, the "Adam andEve" of the human race. It is now fairly certain that homo sapiens originated in East CentralAfrica as the works of the Leakeys, father and son, have demonstrated. The additional

findings of the geneticists only strengthen the Leakeys' findings and also bring us closer tounderstanding the beginnings of humanity.

From East Central Africa, the Kenya of today, these early homo sapiens began to spreadaround the globe. All of this took place in what is defined as the Pleistocene Age, which isdivided into three periods: the Lower Paleolithic or Older Old Stone Age, from 600,000 yearsago to 100,000 years ago; the Middle Paleolithic, from 100,000 to 50,000 years ago; and theUpper Paleolithic, from 50,000 to 10,000 years ago. During those 600,000 years we havefound evidence of four ice ages and three interglacial periods which are benchmarks in humandevelopment.

By the end of the Pleistocene period, not only had humans migrated throughout the world, butwhat today we identify as the basic human races, the Mongoloids of Asia, the Negroids of


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central Africa, the Caucasoids of West Asia and Europe, and the Australians were all clearlyestablished.

Our material evidence from the Pleistocene Age includes skeletal remains of proto-humansand early humans, stone and bone weapons and tools, and, toward the end of the age, cave art.

Although the matter is not clear, we can learn something about the patterns of migration fromthese discoveries. At least three of the four groups of tools had their origins in Africa. Thefourth might have since the finds are on the south shore of the Mediterranean, on the IberianPeninsula, and in southern France.

The finds for one group are concentrated on the Asian mainland in southeast and east Asia.The finds of the second in western and central Europe and west and south Asia. The thirdgroup finds are found in the same area, the fourth group primarily in Europe but seemingly

brought northward by people from Africa. The first material evidence of religion comes fromthis period, as well, with findings that indicate belief in magic, a hunting cult, and a belief ingods as well.

After the end of the fourth ice age around 10,000 BCE and the retreat of the ice northward,the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) culture period began. Most of our material evidence for itis from west Asia and throughout Europe from the Mediterranean to the Scandinavian coast

plus Africa. It seems that most settlements were along or near the seacoast and that peoplelived by hunting and gathering, often living in small settlements either in caves or huts of theirown construction.

Tools become more sophisticated and included canoes and skin-covered boats, paddles,fishhooks, and weapons for hunting both large and small game animals. Dogs weredomesticated. The division of labor giving women responsibility for collecting plant foodsand men for hunting was evident. In the Middle East primitive farming began and brick

buildings were constructed in the earliest cities such as Jericho.

The Mesolithic period was replaced by the Neolithic. It came relatively soon in the warmerparts of the world while the Mesolithic period persisted into the second millennium BCE innorthern areas. Neolithic people had become more sophisticated. They made moresophisticated pottery (e.g., funnel-necked beakers). They invented more sophisticatedweapons (e.g. the battle-axe). They developed more extensive trade based on more travel byrivers and by roads or paths, with the latter even improved by logs and branch in wet places.The wheel was invented, more animals were domesticated including horses and oxen, and

from the evidence, their religions developed a belief in life after death, a heavenly god orgods, as well as continuing to believe in magic and evil spirits.

Culture expanded and people moved to new settlements when they needed new land.

This was the era of the so-called Neolithic Revolution (Gordon Childe), with thedomestication of wild grains for cultivation and sheep, goats, pigs, and asses. At the very endof the period, the first cities (hardly more than villages) were founded (e.g. Jericho andDamascus), with buildings constructed of dried brick. There were great advances in art, in theway of jewelry, sculpture, decoration, and both abstract and naturalistic representations ofhumans and animals. Stone construction was introduced. The first sacred buildings were

erected in the form of temples in the Mesopotamian cultural area. The first steps were takentoward language in the form of picture language which later evolved into cuneiform and


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hieroglyphics. With the development of writing, a new era could be said to have begun. What,to me, seems most interesting about this period before history is the story of the emergence ofhumans as it unfolded. It is especially interesting to learn that there was a single human racewith even common mother and father, and that their migrations led to the development ofvery real and lasting diversity among them.

This combination of fundamental unity along with very real diversity has accompaniedhumanity from earliest times to the present, with the human visions that we have come toadmire all reflecting a striving for restoration of that unity in one way or another with the bestvisions seeking to achieve unity without eliminating the enhancing elements of diversity andthe worst visions seeking unity only through the triumph of one group over another. Inessence the human vision is in part a search for the benefits of the farthest past, albeit not bygoing back, which cannot be done, but by going forward.

The second major item of interest is the pattern of human migrations, how humans have beena migrating, one might say (in Frederick Jackson Turner's terms), a frontier phenomenon,

since our emergence as a species. That continuing frontier and the challenges it poses,effectuated in part through migrations, has been a constant motivating force for humandevelopment.

The third point is that humans are an inventing species from the first. We make a constanteffort to overcome our limitations, weaknesses, and/or discomforts through inventions. Morethan that, we have the same capacity for inventing things that elevate us or things that destroyus. The invention of art and agriculture come alongside the invention of better weapons ofdestruction.

Four, the emergence of religious belief and its apparent development into cults, indicating thathumans have been believing creatures since earliest times and that it is impossible to conceiveof humans without belief systems to which they are attached and rituals to symbolize andexpress them.

All of these four themes have continued to be of vital importance in guiding human history inevery subsequent era. It can be said that they form the basis for our understanding of howhumans function in history. These are the themes around which we will focus in thiscurriculum.

Second Period: Beginnings (C.4000-2000 BCE)

This unit shall focus in more closely on the emergence of civilization or civilizations in EastAsia, particularly China; South Asia, particularly the Indus Valley; West Asia, particularlyMesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent; North Africa, particularly Egypt; and should alsoexamine developments in this period in the other regions mentioned above, but shouldemphasize the specific civilizations whose impact has been most completely articulated andlongest lasting in the world.

Much of this period is referred to as the Bronze Age. Metalworking developed in the MiddleEast, but by the fourth millennium BCE, the period under consideration here, it had spread toEurope as well, principally in the Balkans but rapidly throughout the rest of eastern andwestern Europe. While this led to a more sophisticated material culture, the social culture thatwent along with it remained basic in Europe throughout this period.


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While the evidence from material culture gained through archeology for this period is great,including the discovery of the first written records, this still has many of the element of

prehistory in the sense that we must piece things together from archeological evidence, somerecorded myths, and monumental inscriptions describing the victory of one ruler or another,usually exaggerated and at times not even accurate, as we have come to know from other

sources. The first documents were found in excavated libraries or archives but do not have ahistorical record upon which to draw. Nevertheless, civilization does come into its own in thisperiod and very different patterns of civilization are established, both in Africa where earlierforms of civilization continued, in the four centers of advanced civilization and perhaps evenin Europe. In the regions of the advanced civilizations, primitive migration and normalism isno longer a major factor. That kind of migration is confined to the peripheries and in thecivilized areas themselves a relatively sedentary age begins in which there is much lessmigration and what there is is more sophisticated.

On the other hand, there is a great burst in those areas in the development of theaccoutrements of civilization in terms of a technology, government, administration,

economics, and religion. In the case of the latter, the great creation myths are givensophisticated form to become the basis for the mythic system of the West but probably also ofsouth and east Asia. Not only that, but we can distinguish the three forms of political andsocial organization that are to accompany humans at least from then on: hierarchy, organicdevelopment, and pact or covenant.

The former, usually the result of conquest, either external or internal by some powerfulindividual or group, leads to a political and social order organized as a power pyramid, wherethe last word is at the top and the pyramid is built so that those at the top can exercisemaximum possible control up and down the line. Egypt is the best example of that.

In the organic model, people as families, clans, or tribes more or less drift together, settling atthe same point and at some point need to organize themselves. This usually happens when theheads of the families, tribes, or clans come together as a governing elite and divide poweramong themselves based on the ability of each to control those within his group. Whatemerges is a circle with a governing or ruling inner circle or a center surrounded by a

periphery within its orbit. This was the pattern in the Mesopotamian city states.

It is hard to say whether the third model was found in this period, although we may assumeso. It was a model whereby all individuals or families in a particular area were consideredequal and came together as equals to establish pacts, usually sacred, for organizing their lives.

Originally these were probably peoples that saw themselves descended from some commonancestor and hence related, thereby establishing the basis for their equality. Under sucharrangements, no hierarchies were dominant, nor were elites able to gain control of the innercircle. Rather there is a specialization and differentiation based upon a rough but genuineequality among those bound by the pact. Whereas the first two were well established by thetime this period ended, the third was not to take on full form until the next period.

If Africa is the heartland of the first period, the Middle East is the heartland of the second. Itis there that the major civilizational advances are made. A major sign of this is that area ledthe way in the invention of writing in this very early stage. By doing so, in essence itestablished the dominance of its myths which were later to migrate westward to become the

central myths and beliefs of Western civilization and ultimately to spread throughout theworld.


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At some point around 6,000 years ago or 4,000 BCE, the first advanced civilizations emergedfollowing the "Neolithic Revolution." These were the riverine civilizations in Egypt along the

Nile, in Mesopotamia along and between the Tigris and the Euphrates, in India along theIndus, and in China along the Hwang Ho. The historian Wittfogel has referred to these as"hydraulic societies" and has written an elaborate theory of the emergence of sophisticated

techniques to manage the water upon which they depended including centralization ofgovernment. In fact, what emerged were different forms of social organization in each place,which have been amazingly persistent in shaping the civilizations that emerged from eachever since.

All four emerged in the great belt of arid land, desert and near desert, that stretches from theSahara to east Asia. It is possible that a climate change which began in the Mesolithic periodled to the growth of those desert belts after the population had increased in what wereoriginally watered areas, as a result of simple farming. If so, the inhabitants of those areas hadto migrate to the fertile river valleys and organize the use of the rivers to provide water toenable their societies to continue to exist.

The development of a more sophisticated economy eliminated the need for all to engage insubsistence farming and began an economy of exchange and economic specialization beyondsimple trading. Not only did economic exchange increase but also specialization took placewith regard to more sophisticated craftsmanship, defense, religious life, administration, andtechnology. This led to social stratification and the development of a differentiated societycovering the means of production, trade, defense, and organization.

Cities became centers for the production and exchange of goods, for trade and markets, forreligion and defense, and became generators of civilization, not merely convenient places foragriculturalists to meet and exchange. City walls were built and temples and other sacred

buildings were erected. To carry on all of this, writing developed, first as a kind of picturelanguage as in the Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Chinese word characters. Almostimmediately thereafter, Mesopotamian populations developed cuneiform, which was a step

beyond the earlier pictograph. They also began to write on clay tablets.

These early civilizations included metalworking, brickmaking, the use of square hewn stonesfor construction, polygonal wall construction, working in precious metals and stones,

production of thin-walled vessels, large sculptures, polished stone, irrigation, urbansettlement, and writing. Political and social organization became differentiated and moresophisticated.

Egypt and the Old Kingdom (2850-2052 BCE)

The six-hundred-mile-long stretch of the Nile Valley from the Mediterranean into the AfricanDesert from ten to fifteen miles wide became the site of the Egyptian empire, the oldest of theempires of the ancient world. The two kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt developedaround 3000 BCE. They united under Narmer and Ahi. A joint capital was founded atMemphis at the boundary between Upper and Lower Egypt.

Since the two kingdoms and their joint successor were separated from other populationsbecause of their physical location, they developed in substantial isolation. Except for border


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struggles with nomadic tribes, they were able to dictate when and where they came intocontact with others. They did through periodic invasions into Lebanon at the north and Nubiaon the south. The first two dynasties, known as the Thinis period, functioned between 2850and 2650 when dynasties III to VI beginning from 2650 and lasting to 2190 constituted theage of the pyramids.

A hierarchical political and social order emerged, capped by the pharaohs, each of whom wasrevered as a god or the son of a god. They maintained a state religion to support pharoanicrule. Power was centralized, a sun-based religion was the state religion, and the GreatPyramids were built. Society was hierarchically ordered into sharply differentiated classes ofrulers, priests, warriors, officials, craftsmen, traders, peasants, and slaves. All of the politywas organized around the annual flooding of the Nile and the ability of the ruler and hisadministration to control and regulate that flooding, for which they used writing and newlydeveloped accounting procedures to organize the technology, the economy, and the foodsupply. Egyptian society did not develop a flourishing urban civilization but rather used citiesas administrative centers for an essentially rural civilization. It was entirely appropriate and

probably no accident that the symbol of that civilization became the pyramid, the embodimentof the hierarchical approach to social and political organization. As we know, pyramids were

built by the pharaohs in that period as their tombs and monuments. By the sixth dynasty, thepharaohs were becoming increasingly weaker and the power of feudal lords increased. Theunitary state began to break down as struggles broke out among the feudal lords. The southgained its independence.

All of this is reflected in the literature of the times. Between 2190 and 2052 the feudal lordsremained powerful and in conflict until regional rulers of Heracleopolis gained power andreestablished a centralized state. During this entire period hieroglyphic writing was the norm.A solar calendar of great accuracy was developed, probably to support the solar religion. InMesopotamia, on the other hand, cities became the centers of civilization. Each wasindependent or semi-independent, governed by councils of local notables, those who occupiedthe key positions in the city's political and social order. These were essentially oligarchies inwhich the rulers were no more than first among equals. These cities seemed to havedeveloped more or less organically out of responses to necessity in the valley of the tworivers.

The first such civilization was the Sumerian civilization. The Sumerians settled in southernMesopotamia sometime between 3200 and 2800. They divided the land into city-states whichhad their own patron gods, although they shared the same pantheon. Local princes known as

lugal, meaning great man, dominated both the priesthood and the city in each case. Theireconomy was a kind of state socialism. Cuneiform writing was developed.

Somewhere around the year 3000 in the Middle East there was a great flood in both Egypt andMesopotamia involving the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. Mesopotamian civilization leftus the Gilgamesh Epic from that period, while the Bible leaves us with an account of theFlood and the religious explanation for it.

The origins of the Sumerians are shrouded in mystery. There is some evidence that they cameup from the Horn of Africa. There is other that leads us to speculate that they came from theIndian subcontinent. Samuel Noah Kramer has given us the best account that we have of

Sumerian civilization, summarized in his bookHistory Begins at Sumer. In any case, their


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same time, other centers were formed in the Aegean region in what was called the earlyHelladic epoch. A peasant society developed in Thrace, Phocis, Boeotia, Attica, Argolis, andCorinth, with close communication with the Semitic and Hemetic civilizations of the easternMediterranean. Asia Minor became a meeting ground of civilizations as the Indo-Europeansmigrated southwestward and the Semites migrated northwestward to what became the first

"West."

New Directions

Humanity, having diversified racially and geographically, entered a period of sophisticateddiversification based upon the combination of major migrations and the development ofstrategies or adaption of the migrating peoples to the new areas in which they relocated. Inevery case, those strategies had to be implemented through invention. In all, humans rose tothe challenge but the uneven character and spread of their inventions made the difference

from civilization to civilization in two ways: One is technical - that is to say the level ofsophistication that they attained. The second is political - how they organized theircivilizations and the societies within them.

The combination of their technical and political inventions within their geo-historicallocations shaped or reshaped their religious beliefs in light of their migratory experiences.Hence in hierarchical Egypt, the human on top of the hierarchy was seen as a man-god whilein oligarchical Mesopotamia the gods were also seen as dominga super oligarchy abovehumans but interacting with them in ways subject to human manipulation.

In Indian and China, on the other hand, inventions seemed to reach a kind of plateau and thesecivilizations turned in different directions. In those parts of the world where invention wasarrested for one reason or another or failed to progress at the rate that it did elsewhere, thecivilizations themselves became more static. They fell prey to the more dynamic civilizationsor were pushed into the back-waters of world history.

Third Period: The Beginnings of East and West

(2000-500 BCE)

With the central elements of civilization as we know it in place in Egypt, Mesopotamia, theIndus Valley, and China, world history took a new turn in this period. The period saw the

beginnings of the conscious division of the world into East and West. The civilizations of theformer were grounded in a search for harmony through quiescent individual acceptance of themyriad natural forces beyond human control, and the latter, the pursuit of human developmentthrough the harnessing of the many dynamic forces in the world through conflict and themanagement of the tensions that stimulate human progress.

The Indian and Chinese civilizations and their offshoots came to represent the East, while theEgyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations and their offshoots, particularly the Israelite andGreek peoples, came to represent the West. Persian civilization developed in this period as akind of bridge. In this period, those offshoots often emerged out of rebellion against the greatempires or civilizations already in existence. In the process and direction of those rebellions,they sharpened the differences between East and West while maintaining contact between thetwo.


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By the end of the period, the differences between Eastern and Western civilizations wereclearly defined and the course of each more or less laid out. We shall focus on Westerncivilization which, over the next four millennia, spread around the world and became thedominant civilizational thrust, albeit, only after absorbing elements of other civilizations.

The two peoples that were critical factors in shaping this period were Israel and Hellas, that isto say, the Hebrew and Greek peoples. The Israelites gave the world monotheism and laid thereligious foundations of Western civilizations and the Hellenes gave us philosophy beginningat the very end of this period, out of which came the definitions of excellences in Westerncivilization. Both monotheism and the idea of what constitutes excellence were to be the

principal shapers of first the Western world and then the world as a whole.

While the Israelites and the Greeks founded what became Western civilization, their locationand flourishing in west Asia and its immediate European and African environs meant thattheir cultures and communities were still linked to both East and West and partook of thecivilizations of both. Hence they were bridging cultures as well as architects of the separation.

So, too, in their own way were the great cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Egyptian culturewas both tied to the other cultures of the Fertile Crescent and west Asia and also reachedsouthward and westward into Africa, down the Nile and north and south of the Sahara Desert.Meanwhile, in the farther reaches of Africa south of the Sahara, independent and separateAfrican cultures took form.

So, too, Mesopotamian culture had a powerful influence on the Iranians (Medes and Persians)who lived to the east. Elements of Mesopotamian culture reached the Indus Valley via thePersians. For example, all students of linguistics know that, with the exception of the

pictographic writing of the Mayans and the east Asians, all alphabets, east and west, grow outof the original Semitic alphabet of western Asia whose earliest expressions have been foundalong the eastern Mediterranean coastal areas from Sinai to Phoenicia (Lebanon and coastalSyria today) from whence it was diffused to Europe and Asia. In its diffusion the originalalphabet was modified, both East and West to become, in time, the Greek, Latin, and Cyrillicalphabets that the Western world uses today and the Arabic and south Asian alphabets that areused in the East. Only north and east of the Himalayas did an independent culture areadevelop, minimally influenced by the root cultures of the Fertile Crescent, although fromancient times there was trade between the two regions whose extent is just being rediscoveredin our times.

The beginnings of Israel and Hellas had much in common. The Israelites began their greatproject perhaps 600 years before the Hellenes to introduce their greatest contribution, namely,ethical monotheism, at about the time that the Hellenes were beginning to emerge. The peakof the Hellenic contribution came at the very beginning of the next epoch in the golden age ofthe Greek city-states at a time when Israel was moving into the second phase of its project, thedevelopment of Judaism as we have come to know it.

The beginnings of both are in the confrontation with the great empires of the Nile Valley,Mesopotamia, and the Iranian steppes that dominated or tried to dominate their respective

parts of the world. Both simultaneously drew from the cultures of those great empires and, intheir revolt against them, tried to reshape those cultures and to winnow out what for them

were their best aspects, refine those aspects, and turn them into instruments for furtherdevelopment.


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Unlike many later world-class conflicts which were interracial, these revolts were essentiallywithin the same racial groupings or transracial. The Israelites emerged out of conflict with theSemitic peoples in the Middle East, while the Hellenes emerged in confrontation with theIndo-European peoples of central Asia and beyond. Not only are there no signs of racial

prejudice in the history of these peoples, there are no discussions of white against black or

yellow or brown or any other combination of these. Instead, there are all kinds of recordsindicating that there was no racial issue, that, indeed, the races mixed insofar as they cameinto contact.

Both the Israelites and the Hellenes were small peoples confronting large and powerfulempires. In both cases, the small peoples involved emphasized quality over quantity in theirrespective projects. Indeed, their respective emphases on quality are among the most notablefeatures of their civilizations, based upon their recognition of their smallness and theirconfrontation with much larger empires.

Another element the two have in common is their location at the crossroads between Asia,

Africa, and Europe. Israel is particularly well-located in that respect, but the Hellenes in theiroriginal location in Asia Minor were hardly less so.

Finally, we should consider that, while the great empires against whom the Israelites andHellenes revolted and fought were increasingly imperial, that is to say, hierarchical andinequitable in their character - what nineteenth century historians referred to as orientaldespotisms, both the Israelites and the Hellenes were essentially egalitarian, popular, and non-centralized in their orientations toward life in political society. They were united by ideasrather than by power pyramids and succeeded in holding their peoples together through thoseideas, their spread, and exercise. Their institutions were empowered through their criticalideas and their revolts invariably involved a significant dimension of revolt against power

pyramids and their power holders.

All of this ultimately combined to give Western civilization its essential characteristics, evenif, as is often the case, their implementation of those ideas within their societies left much to

be desired. The Greek polis is still looked upon as a classic polity in world political history,while the Israelite tribal federation has inspired generations of political scientists andtheologians in the development of their ideal polities.

Both the Israelites and the Ionians originated in migrations. The Bible, indisputably the singlegreatest and most influential book in Western civilization, gives us the record of the sacred

history of the Israelites. That sacred history is founded in great migrations, first, the migrationof Adam out of the Garden of Eden as a result of expulsion; second, the dispersion of thepeoples of the world as a result of God's displeasure over the Tower of Babel whereby thehuman race tried to become like God, i.e., to challenge God's supreme power, according to the

biblical account; third, and most important for our purposes here, the migration of thePatriarch Abraham and his family from northern Mesopotamia westward to the land ofCanaan by God's command so as to detach himself from the land of his birth, his civilization,and his kin, and thus be open to the fundamental transformation of his culture to build a newway of life based on monotheism that would not be encumbered by the forms of the old in

place.

Abraham's migration is ultimately followed by the migration of his grandson Jacob and theIsraelites to Egypt. After generations of Egyptian slavery, the by-then very numerous


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Israelites led by Moses, left Egypt in the great Exodus to return to Canaan. Through thatdecisive migration they fully established themselves in what became the Land of Israel.

The Bible goes on to describe two other sets of migrations at the end of the epoch, one, theforced exile of ten of the Israelite tribes by the Assyrians at the very end of the eighth century

BCE and then the forced exile of the last two tribes by the Babylonians relatively early in thesixth century BCE. The period culminates with a small but significant return migration ofIsraelites from Babylonia to the Land of Israel after the Persians conquered the Babylonianempire and destroyed it.

The Bible treats these migrations with the significance they deserve. The attempt to establishnew civilizations based upon new ideas and beliefs can only be done if people are detachedfrom familiar surroundings and relationships and forced to build anew because the old andfamiliar cannot sufficiently provide for them. Contrast the difference between the Americanand French revolutions in our time. The American Revolution came as the culmination of aninitial migration from Britain and northwestern Europe involving Pilgrims, Puritans, Dutch

Reformed, Huguenots, and Scots, who sought a new world in which to build a new way oflife, which contributed greatly to the measure of its success.

The French had to have their revolution in the midst of the old order, the Ancien Regime, andcould never fully disrupt the institutions or habits of the old order, despite far more radicalefforts than ever tried in the new United States, including the reign of terror, an attempt toreplace the Christian calendar with a new revolutionary one, and many other such devices.For example, the French army to this day considers its first loyalty to be to France, whichsurvives from regime to regime, because the army had its origins in pre-revolutionary Franceand was able to serve the revolutionary regime and the regimes that followed it on thegrounds that it was serving France. Thus, the biblical insight as to the importance of migrationfor renewal is very important and still stands.

The Ionian peoples were also migrants into the western part of Asia Minor where they settledand founded their cities. Ionia was the mother city of more than ninety urban settlementsalong the coast of the Black Sea. Hence, their history also contains a record, albeit lessexplicit, of their migrations and their civilization was also born after the peoples who gave it

birth had been detached from their original places of settlement. The migrations of Indo-European tribes known as Ionians or Aeolians (Achaeans) is usually believed to have taken

place between 1850 and 1600 BCE as a series of movements by tribes and parts of tribes intothe region.

These migrations, which took place about the same time as Abraham left Mesopotamia forCanaan, were followed after 1250 BCE, about the time that the Israelites left Egypt, by a newwave of migrations. Over the following 250 years there occurred the Delian migration. TheIllyrians advanced to the Mediterranean Sea. Northwestern Greeks settled in Epirus, Aetolia,and Acarnania. The Aeboians migrated to Crete and southwestern Asia Minor by sea and tothe Peloponnesus by land.

Another wave of Greek colonization further to the west took place between 750 and 550 BCE.It was brought about by the development of crafts, the expansion of maritime trade, and theemergence of a population surplus which had to be relocated. There also was a growing

indebtedness of the peasantry and social conflicts, especially in Greece proper (e.g., Corinth


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and Athens). There was also emigration for political reasons. What united all of thiscolonization was a new consciousness of life asserting itself with elemental power.

The colonization involved the founding of a mother city, often influenced by an oracle, whichplanted satellite colonies around the Mediterranean for both trading and agrarian purposes.

Each colony acquired political autonomy, but also maintained its connections with the mothercity through common cults and customs. The expansion proceeded westward because theGreeks were blocked by the Assyrians to the east. Hellenic civilization essentially spread onthe northern coast of the Mediterranean because the Carthaginians, themselves descendants ofthe Phoenician colonists of Carthage, dominated the southern and far western Mediterranean.

Both the Israelite and Greek migrations were into what were then called the lands of the Westand, in essence, established another fundamental element of Western civilization, whatAmericans later referred to as "westering." In a sense, Asia's Mediterranean coast from theSinai Peninsula to the Dardanelles and the area immediately east of it to a depth of perhaps100 to 150 miles was the first conscious West of human history; that is to say, it was referred

to at the time as the land of the West and the Semitic peoples who settled those lands wereknown as Amorites or the peoples of the West. The building of new civilizations in thoselands by various peoples Hittites, Phoenicians, Israelites, and Ionians - was the first consciouswestering process to be recorded in history. Out of those westering elements, the Israelitesand the Ionians emerged to successfully give birth to the major elements that became knownas Western civilization.

By the end of the period, the Israelites had also embarked on a colonization effort of adifferent sort. Exiled from their land, they were not in a position to found separate andindependent cities as colonies but were forced to establish minority communities in landsoccupied and governed by non-Israelite majorities. To do so, the Israelites developed adiaspora with communal institutions such as the synagogue that could be implanted wherevera group of Jews were settled together and could function with some measure of autonomywithin the host society. Thus, two forms of colonization were in place by the end of the

period: one, the establishment of new, independent entities in available spaces, and the other,the establishment of diaspora communities in already settled areas. Both would continue asuseful and acceptable means of colonization in the world.

The recorded history of those peoples that we have is a history of what we would later cometo call frontier challenges and responses, the process of organizing peoples in new territoriesto form new peoples with new political and social institutions. The migrations and the

formation of new peoples and new institutions should be the essence of our interest in them.What were the frontier challenges that faced them and how did the Israelites and Ioniansrespond to these challenges? The Israelite response was essentially religious and rural, whilethe Ionian response was essentially aesthetic and urban.

The subjects which help define a frontier include a "West," the role of migration and itsimpact on cultural change, the problem of land distribution, equal or equitable access to land,and the question of appropriate governmental forms to serve frontier situations.

We can view the Israelite and Ionian experiences as parallel phenomena at the westernextremity of Asia. In both land frontiers led to the development of their forms of civilization.

Applying Turnerian categories, we see that they played a role in that development similar to


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that played by frontier settlement elsewhere in later times. If so, both Hebraic and Helleniccivilizations had their origins in the West Asian frontier from the Negev to Asia Minor.

From the Hebrews and the Greeks Western civilization expanded along two lines over thenext three millennium. One went westward through the Mediterranean, then northwestward

through west central Europe and western Europe, across the North Sea to the British Isles andIceland, and then across the Atlantic Ocean to North and South America. The other linemoved northward around the Black Sea into the Russian steppes, then eastward acrossSiberia, then across the Bering Straits to Alaska where it turned southward. The two lines metat Ft. Ross in northern California, about 70 miles north of San Francisco, at the beginning ofthe nineteenth century, thereby completing the encirclement of the world.

Ft. Ross was an outpost built by the Russians in their efforts to penetrate southward, just northof the northernmost mission settlements established by the Spanish in the late eighteenthcentury in their effort to expand northward and just below the point where the British andAmericans were penetrating into what was then referred to as the Oregon Territory. While

circumstances brought about a Russian retreat after a relatively few years, that retreat wasaccompanied by greater British and American penetration into Alaska and the Yukon,continuing the links between the eastern and western branches of Western civilization,achieved after 3,800 years of "westering." Offshoots of the first line also spread northwardinto Scandinavia, southward to southern Africa, and eastward through south and southeastAsia to east Asia, in some cases having frontier characteristics.

In the century following the meeting of the two streams, the land frontier - more accurately,the rural land frontier - was completely settled by the West and, except for a few isolatedspots, ceased to be a vital force in the development of civilization. Indeed, in most places thefrontier period was a short one, marked by the sociological and political fluidity of thesettlement of new territories which, once occupied, ceased to manifest the characteristics of afrontier.

The frontier challenges for both peoples essentially involved entry and settlement of theirrespective territories, establishing institutions - political, social, and religious - that enabledthem to express the new societies that they were building. In the case of political institutions,

both established federal arrangements, first confederations and then regimes more likefederations, in Israel based upon tribes and in Ionia based upon cities. The Greek polis is stilllooked upon as a classic polity in world political history. While the Israelite tribal federationhas inspired generations of political scientists and theologians in the development of their

ideal polities. Socially, in both societies there were three defined groups: citizens, residentaliens, and slaves. The Israelites granted equal civil and social rights to both citizens andresident aliens, had limited terms of servitude for Israelite slaves, and reserved the politicaland religious rights for citizens. The Greeks distinguished between citizens, resident aliens,and slaves across all three dimensions.

By and large, these responses were inventive since they not only had to serve new societiesbut new societies that were far more egalitarian in their orientation than any non-tribalsocieties that preceded them. Any examination of those responses, whatever technologicaladvances were involved with them, would be very useful. For example, the Greeks enteredinto the Iron Age earlier than the Semitic peoples including Israel. Indeed, the Israelites had to

acquire Iron Age technology from the Philistines, that branch of the Hellenic peoples whomigrated southward, apparently from Crete, to the coast of Israel.


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The greatest inventiveness of both peoples was directed toward the realm of religion andphilosophy. Israel's great contribution was in the field of religion and, indeed, thatcontribution set the tone of Western and subsequently world civilization from then on. Israel'sgreat contribution was monotheism, and ethical monotheism at that. We must understand thatmonotheism is not a matter of arithmetic, one god against more than one. It is a basic and total

transformation of the way people look at the world.

All polytheisms essentially view the world as cyclical and controlled by fate. There is nobeginning and no end, hence no progress, only a repetition of a sequence of events fixedeither for the human race as a whole or for certain groups of humans. The cycles can be greatones, as in the case of Indian religion which sees worlds being created and destroyed aftervery long periods of time, or they can be based upon shorter cycles as seems to have been thecase with regard to Greek religion, but cycles they are. Everything is going to repeat itself, atleast in its essence, and humanity does not move forward. In that sense there is no history, forhistory has to have a beginning and potentially an end.

Beyond that, the world is ruled by fate. Even the gods are subject to fate as the Greek mythsdescribe. The gods represent a kind of a club. There are greater and lesser gods but basicallythey are all equal members of the club. The gods can interact with humans and do so in waysthat have all the flaws of human behavior, without the restraints that humans have placed onthemselves by virtue of the limits of human power or their moral expectations. The gods, withfewer limitations, can indulge their appetites to a greater degree. Those appetites includesexual appetites and appetites for greed, revenge, power - all the weaknesses of humanity. Thegods interact with humans to satisfy these appetites and passions. In pagan religions, the taskof humans is to achieve self-protection by pacifying and conciliating the gods or learning howto manipulate them through magic. All of these lie at the foundations of pagan rituals. Thegods need to be propitiated, pacified, and manipulated. Sacrifices are designed to propitiateand pacify, imitative rituals such as fertility rites are designed to manipulate the gods.

Monotheism, on the other hand, posits one powerful transcendent being who is not part of thenatural world but transcends the natural world, who initiates history through His creation andmoves it along certain paths which, if humans follow them faithfully, will ultimately bringabout their redemption, i.e., the end of history and human suffering. In the interim there must

be progress toward that final end and humans are encouraged to be progressive to enablethings to move along. Moreover, monotheism has a strong ethical dimension. There is adistinction between good and bad. Appetites must be controlled for the good to occur. Thegood consists of fulfilling God's commandments which include, even emphasize,

commandments that are designed to promote justice, charity, kindness, neighborliness, andrighteousness. God is not neutral with regard to these qualities, but loves good and hates evil.These differences mark the great gulf between monotheism and polytheism. Monotheism alsorecognizes that nature per se is neutral and what is natural is not always what is best, that Godhas made humans responsible in this world, not only for respecting nature but for directingnature, including human nature, into the service of the good.

If Israelite religion through the Bible and then Judaism and, later, Christianity and Islam wasdesigned to bring the world under monotheism for its own good, Greek thought emphasizedexcellence rather than the good. That excellence could vary from excellence in the pursuit ofthe excellence of the body expressed through sport, excellence of the mind as expressed

through philosophy, and excellence in the pursuit of morality as expressed in obedience to thelaws, but the emphasis was on excellence. The greatest work of the Greeks, Homer's Iliad,


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composed at about the same time as the Bible, is a celebration of excellence within theframework of the cyclical world of polytheism and the tragedies that are fated to result.

All of the activities of the Greeks, from the athletic to the aesthetic to the moral, arepredicated on this achieving of excellence. At the end of the epoch, that drive for excellence

of thought was to lead to the birth of systematic philosophy, the greatest Greek contribution tohuman self-definition. Philosophy initially developed in Asia Minor from the seventh centurybefore the common era. Its first exponents were located in Asia Minor and in colonies farfrom the Hellenic heartland, testifying that it was also a frontier experience that rose out of theinteraction of Greek cities with the frontier challenges and non-Greek societies.

Biblical monotheism and Greek philosophy were later synthesized by Philo, a Jew from theHellenistic city of Alexandria, Egypt, into a single system. That system was adopted byChristianity after its birth and institutionalization and became the system that directed thethought of the West for 1,600 years until it was challenged by Spinoza, another Jew living inthe Reformed Protestant Netherlands in the seventeenth century of this era.

Meanwhile, the great empires of the Middle East came and went. The Egyptian empire in theNile Valley which extended its powers southward into Ethiopia and northward along theMediterranean coast as far as Asia Minor; the Assyrian empire of Mesopotamia whichextended its power throughout the valley of the two rivers and westward to theMediterranean; and the new Babylonian empire which replaced partially three Assyrianempires (the old, 1800-1375 BCE; the middle, 1375-1047 BCE; and the new, 1047-625BCE). After 539 BCE the empire of the Medes and the Persians conquered western Asia andtried to conquer the Hellenic peoples in Asia Minor and in Greece proper. The history ofGreece acquires its central character through the successful struggle of the Greeks to resistPersian domination, just as the history of Israel consists of the efforts of the Israelites tosurvive by maneuvering between the Egyptian and the several west Asian empires.

Meanwhile, in China, in the years between 1500 and 1000 BCE, while Israel and Helles areemerging to define Western civilization, the Shang dynasty established a feudal state innortheastern Hunan which initiated the transformation of neolithic China into a moreinstitutionalized feudal state governed by Taoism, a religion dedicated to the search for theordered universe through a combination of ancestor worship, fetishism, and the pursuit ofharmony with those forces.

Regional empires rose and collapsed in both India and China. What seemed to be the most

lasting "achievements" of both were the establishment of permanent hierarchicalarrangements through which to organize society including political society, the caste systemin south Asia, and Chinese feudalism in east Asia. These were to become so rooted that theywere to continue to have their influence long after their original manifestations had beeneliminated or transformed.

In India, that same period was the early Vedic period in which the Aryans conquered theDravidians, the original inhabitants of the subcontinent, forcing them to the southern part ofthe subcontinent. These Indo-Europeans brought the chariot with them to give them militarysuperiority. The Vedas, written in Sanskrit, became sacred scriptures establishing a systematic

polytheism and a caste system for the human believers. Both were to last until late modern

and even postmodern times and to continue to shape the South Asian peoples. In Africa, only


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the Nile Valley peoples as far south as Ethiopia entered into the mainstream of world historyduring this period, primarily in connection with Egyptian culture and political power.

Fourth Period: The Shift to Europe (500 BCE-500 CE)

While the great civilizations of the world continued to flourish in their respective locationsthroughout this period, the European segments of Western civilization became especially

powerful and set the stage for their later dominance. The cutting edge of civilization wastransferred to the West from the Middle East. The first step in that direction came through theflourishing of Greece and the rise of speculative philosophy and a comprehensive aestheticsduring the Greek Golden Age in the fifth and early fourth centuries BCE. Then from themiddle of the fourth century onward for the next two centuries, Hellenism flourished.Hellenism was a syncretistic civilization whereby the Greek conquerors of western Asia andnortheastern Africa developed a syncretism of Greek, West Asian, and Egyptian elements intoa neo-Hellenic civilization that represented the last significant attempt to unite East and West

until modern times.

Rome and the Roman empire replaced the Hellenistic empires to the east in the first centuryBCE, and the Carthaginian empire to the south and west a century and a half earlier,establishing a new border between East and West, between the Roman and Parthian empires.This was the period in which Rome grew, flourished as a world empire, and declined,dominating the stage in the Old World. It was also the period in which the Jews developedJudaism as we know it and then gave birth to its offshoot, Christianity, which became the firstmass-based monotheistic religion, especially in the West.

With the triumph of Christianity, paganism virtually disappeared in the West, remaining only

in northern Europe for another six hundred years. Paganism survived in the rest of Asia, andAfrica, and the Western Hemisphere still unknown to the West. South Asian civilizationflourished separately but with inputs from the Middle Eastern civilization. East Asiancivilization was far more separate, despite continuing trade contacts with west Asia. Newcivilizations developed in Africa south of the Sahara, also influenced by those in north Africa,and entirely separate civilizations developed in the Americas. An almost completely separatehistory was being developed outside of the Mediterranean. Africa south of the Sahara wasonly slightly more connected to the West.

The Roman empire was finally brought down by the invasions of barbarian tribes from theEast. Those tribes settled in central and northern Europe and contributed to shaping the map

of Europe as we know it today by establishing new peoples.

Two great migrational trends can be noted. One was the sweep of the barbarian tribes out ofChina and the great steppes of east-central and central Asia into eastern, central, and evenwestern and southern Europe. Those tribes, while primitive compared to the civilizations theyencountered south of the Caucasus, Carpathian Mountains, and the Alps, were filled with atough military spirit and were strong in their collective institutions, including politicalinstitutions that were less hierarchical than those they confronted among the civilized peoplesthey encountered. Coming to better lands in Europe than they had known on the steppes, theysettled down and ultimately merged with the indigenous populations to form today's European

peoples.


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The other great migrational stream consisted of peoples who were exiled from their lands as aresult of military conquest and religious oppression. Their major migrations were generallywestward: Greeks, Jews, and countless other Asians who were conquered by the Romans andtaken westward as slaves or prisoners or who migrated westward of their own free will whentheir homelands could no longer provide them with a decent living or life. Less massive was

the migration eastward into the western and northern parts of the Indian subcontinent bysimilar populations displaced from the various Persian/Iranian empires that controlled theterritory between the eastern edge of the Roman empire and India proper.

The first migration was more in the classic frontier model; that is to say, people searching fornew lands and new opportunities, while the second was more in the dispersion model, peopleswho had to migrate not because they wanted to but because of the circumstances in whichthey found themselves, circumstances generated by human activities such as wars, conquests,and famines.

By and large, this was a period in which the frontier as we have described it here had less of

an impact. Most of the areas that were settled and resettled as a result of these populationmovements were already inhabited. Only in northern Europe and in the desert areas ofnorthern Africa and western Asia was there a line between the settled and the unsettled.

Northern Europe did, indeed, become a frontier area as the steppe tribes spread into thoseunoccupied or very lightly populated areas and made them their own. The desert areas alsosaw some localized frontier situations as in the desert immediately south of the settled parts ofthe Land of Israel in what is today the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula where settlement wasextended into desert areas by the development of sophisticated irrigation techniques. But onthe whole, the battle with the desert was (and is) a continuing one with sometimes the desertwinning and sometimes humans winning and extending their settlements into it. In any case,the frontier areas were all related to the rural land frontier, so that once the land was settled,the frontier disappeared, since there was no means for continuing the experience.

On the other hand, there was considerable invention, especially for a pre-industrial age. TheRomans were particularly inventive in material matters and technology. Their inventionsranged from better road building to serve the needs of their empire to the construction ofsystems of indoor plumbing to make life easier.

The Jews and Greeks continued their inventiveness in their traditional fields of religion andphilosophy, the Jews by inventing both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, and the Greeks byinventing systematic philosophy and aesthetics. Both developed institutions to transmit their

ideas that were very long-lasting. Some still remain with us, such as the synagogue, thechurch, and the academy.

Politically, the age continued the struggle between hierarchical imperialism and popularrepublicanism, at times supported by federalism. The Romans began with an adaptation of theGreekpolis and initially expanded their empire through a series of treaties between Rome, thegreat polis, and other city-states which it conquered. These cities were related to Rome asfoederatii. Those federal relationships, while quite different from the comprehensivefederations and confederations of a later age (they were similar to the federacy or associatedstate relationships that exist today, e.g., between the United States and Puerto Rico or theUnited States and the Marshall Islands), were nonetheless authentic federal linkages that

preserved the local autonomy of the cities in question but transferred powers over foreignpolicy and defense to Rome. The system persisted until it was destroyed during the Roman


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empire when the formal constitutional framework was changed to match the true imperialdistribution of power, but by that time it had long since become a paper framework only.

This period was one of great upheavals in religion throughout the world. The period startedout with a series of religious revolutions including the emergence of Buddhism in India and

its spread to south and southeast Asia and the emergence of Confucianism as a quasi-religioussystem in China and east Asia, all of this within a single century in the sixth and fifthcenturies BCE. The Israelite religion of the Bible was transformed by Ezra into normativeJudaism organized around the halakhah, the sacred law of the Jewish people that combined

both civil and religious elements. While this religious revolution did not change the moralcharacter of biblical teachings, it changed the means by which those moral teachings would bemade operational. Instead of kings, priests and prophets, Ezra introduced an assembly of thoseeducated in those codes to teach and interpret them. This republican meritocracy became the

principal pillar of Jewish religious and civil self-government for the next millennium. Anintellectual paganism developed among the Greeks, led by the Greek philosophers differentand, indeed, considerably more sophisticated in character and content than the popular

paganism. In Persia, the emergence of Zoroastrianism with its belief in two gods, one of goodand one of evil, replaced the older polytheism of the Persians. Buddha was active in India andConfucius and Lao-Tze in China. These great Asian religious reforms came at approximatelythe same time as the Greeks were introducing their great philosophic reforms so that the

juncture between the sixth and fifth centuries BCE became a period of extraordinarytransformation in belief and intellectual endeavor throughout the civilized world of the time,East and West, each civilization in its own way. Not until our own times has there been such aconvergence of transformatory movements in a single century, a time when all four forces thatwe have identified here as being critical to the civilizational process seemed to converge.

In the middle of the period, Christianity and gnosticism were born as well as a number ofother pagan cults, but the day of overt paganism was coming to an end in the West. Afterseveral centuries of struggle that involved substantial persecution of Christians by theRomans, Christianity triumphed to become the Roman state religion and as such to be giventhe keys of the kingdom. That transformation put Christianity in the position

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