Lecture

Sentences and phrases in quotation marks in this section are taken from an anonymous student's class notes which were very helpful to me and/or from the textbook or reader. The absence of quotation marks means that I am adding something of my own, possibly heard elsewhere or read in a different source.

What is Humanities?

Humanities is culture and history. We learn what is most important for us individually about being human, and what we have in common with other human beings. (One of these things is asking questions.) What do people want? anything besides survival at one level and power at another?

"Why Study Cultural History?"

The more we study about others, the more we can learn to respect them. It is not an easy process that you can master simply by deciding to do it one day.

"Culture is a term with several meanings, but we use it here to mean the artistic and intellectual expressions of a people, their creative achievements--usually the"  'visual and performing'   "arts, architecture, literature, religion, music, and philosophy--organized around a discussion of the relevant style or styles appropriate to that time....A cultural style is a combination of features of artistic or literary expression, execution, or performance that define a particular school or era....Culture usually refers to the sum of human endeavors: methods and practices for survival; political, economic, and social institutions; and values, beliefs, and the arts." Sometimes culture is defined as a conversation (Juan Rodriguez) in the sense that several minority perspectives are always in dialog with the dominant perspectives and have a good chance of becoming dominant in their society some day.

"By the West we mean that part of the globe that lies west of Asia and Asia Minor and north of Africa, especially Europe--the geographical framework for much of this study."  Inclusion of occasional non-Western cultures in the main part of the chapter is explained at the bottom of page xvii and the top of page xviii. "The Westernization of the globe that has been going on ever since 1500 is perhaps the dominant theme of our time. What human greed, missionary zeal, and dreams of empire failed to accomplish before 1900 was achieved during the twentieth century by modern technology, the media, and popular culture. The world today is a global village, much of it dominated by Western values and styles of life," including industries and transportation as well as the terms mentioned in the preceding sentence. In our time, Westernization has become a two-way interchange." We are learning from other cultures too. Had they not been the objects of genocide, many indigenous peoples of the Americas would have had an even greater influence on Western culture than they do today.

"In cultural history the past is often divided into historical periods and cultural styles. A historical period is an interval of time that has a certain unity [because of] the prevalence of a unique culture, ideology, or technology or because it is bounded by defining historical events, such as the death of a military leader... or a political upheaval like the fall of Rome....Each chapter of this survey focuses on a historical period....After the appearance of writing in about 3000 B.C., the Western cultural heritage is divided into three sweeping historical periods: ancient, medieval, and modern. [The ancient period dates from] 3000 B.C. to A.D. 500 (Timeline 1). During these thirty-five hundred years the light of Western" culture "begins to shine in Mesopotamia and Egypt."  Obviously, no one thought of it as Western at the time.

"The medieval period, or the Middle Ages, covers events between A.D. 500 and 1500....The modern period begins in about 1400 (there is often overlap between historical periods) and continues today (Timeline 3)." Some people would call our present Western culture today or even the whole world today postmodern.

"The first modern movement is the Renaissance (1400-1600);,,, the next significant movement is the Reformation (1500-1600);...The Reformation is followed by the Scientific Revolution (1600-1700)...Radical in its conclusions, the Scientific Revolution is somewhat out of touch with the style of its age, which is known as the Baroque....The Scientific Revolution gives impetus to the Enlightenment (1700-1800)....In stylistic terms the eighteenth century is...dominated first by the Rococo [style]...and then by the Neoclassical, a style inspired by the works of ancient Greece and Rome" but also "reflective of the principles of the Scientific Revolution. Before the eighteenth century is over, the Enlightenment calls forth its antithesis, Romanticism (1770-1870)....Towards the end of the nineteenth century Modernism (1870-1970) arises." Feeling that technological advancement had not necessarily always led to cultural progress, Modernism attempted in some ways to erase the past. "Since 1970 Post-Modernism has emerged."  It looks ironically around at the different presents and back to the different pasts.

"Our approach to the Western heritage in this book is to root cultural achievements in their historical settings, showing how the material history--the political, social, and economic aspects of each period--influenced their creation. About 1/3 of each chapter is devoted to an interpretive discussion of material history, and the remaining two-thirds are devoted to the" visual and performing "arts, architecture, philosophy, religion, literature, and music of the period....one of our aims is to show how [history and culture] are intertwined."

"Each period possesses a unique outlook that can be analyzed in the cultural record. A good example of this phenomenon is Classical Greece in the fifth century B.C., when the ideal of moderation, or balance in all things, played a major role in sculpture, architecture, philosophy, religion, and tragic drama."

Chapter One

"[The original] Hominids" (pre-humans) "lived in packs, followed herds of wandering animals, and ate wild seasonal fruits and vegetables...Hominids invented crude stone tools, used fire, and probably developed speech [and later] began to paint and sculpt." In the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age (about 8000 B.C.) "human beings ceased their nomadic existence and learned to domesticate wild animals. They learned to plow the earth and sow seeds, providing themselves with a much more reliable food supply, which in turn encouraged the development of permanent settlements" (first villages) "and eventually the rise of urban centers. This agrarian pattern of life dominated the West until about two hundred years ago....Between 6000 and 3000 B.C., human beings also learned to mine and use copper, signifying the end of the Neolithic period and ushering in the Age of Metals....The Bronze Age, which extended from about 3000 to about 1200 B.C., gave rise to two major civilizations in the Near East. The earlier developed in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (in present-day Iraq), and the other, probably emerging just slightly later, originated along the Nile River in Egypt. The Tigris-Euphrates river valley forms part of what is known as the Fertile Crescent, which starts at the Persian Gulf, runs slightly northwestward through the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and then turns westerly to the Mediterranean Sea and curves south along the shoreline toward Egypt (Map 1.1)....Mesopotamia is a Greek word meaning 'land between the two rivers'....Three successive" cultures  "--Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian--flourished in Mesopotamia for nearly fifteen hundred years (Timeline 1.2)....Agriculture dominated the economy of Mesopotamia." Note the common root between the words  agriculture (cultivating plants and animals) and cultivating ourselves (culture).

"The Sumerians were probably the most influential [of the three cultures]. From Sumer came writing, the lunar calendar, a mathematical computation system, medical and scientific discoveries, and architectural innovations...The Sumerians had developed a form of writing by 3000 B.C....At first, the Sumerians needed a simple way to record agricultural and business information and the deeds and sayings of their rulers...King Gilgamesh, whose reign in about 2700 B.C. is well documented, became a larger-than-life hero in Sumerian folk tales (Figure 1.5). In all probability, the Gilgamesh epic began as an oral poem and was not written on clay tablets for hundreds of years. The most complete surviving version, from 600 B.C., was based on a Babylonian copy written in Akkadian and dating from about 1600 B.C....The Epic of Gilgamesh stands on its own as a poetic utterance worthy of being favorably compared with later Greek and Roman epics....Elegant musical instruments were played in homes and in palaces to accompany the poets and storytellers as they sang of the heroes' adventures and the deities' powers."

"The periodic overflowings of the Nile" were responsible for "the survival and prosperity of the Egyptians. The river dominated and shaped the Egyptian experience...The Egyptian [calendar], which divided the year into twelve months of thirty days, each with five days of holiday at the end, was conveyed to Western civilization by the Romans. The Greek builders...borrowed the Egyptian tradition of sound engineering principles rooted in mathematics. Similarly, Greek sculptors owed a debt to Egyptian forms and poses....In science, Egyptian physicians became renowned throughout the Near East for their medical learning and knowledge of drugs....With the decline of Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires after 1000 B.C., successor kingdoms arose in the eastern Mediterranean, notably those of the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians." Mesopotamia and Egypt were nearer than the United States is today to the home of Judaism and Christianity.