4 A Beginner’s Guide to the History of Western Culture
4 A Beginner’s Guide to the History of Western Culture
History has no natural divisions. A woman living in Florence in the fifteenth century did not think of herself as a woman of the Renaissance. Historians divide history into large and small units in order to make characteristics and changes clear to themselves and to students. It’s important to remember that any historical period is a construction and a simplification. Below are some important basics to get you started.
As you read the timeline below, please keep in mind that equally momentous developments have occurred in Africa, Asia, the Americas and in the Pacific.
Prehistoric (before c. 3000 BCE)
The term “prehistoric” refers to the time before written history. In the West, writing was invented in ancient Mesopotamia just before 3000 BCE, so this period includes visual culture (paintings, sculpture, and architecture) made before that date.
The oldest decorative forms we can recognize as art come from Africa and may date back to 100,000 BCE. In contrast, the oldest cave paintings known are about 40,800 years old, and although we used to think that only our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, made art—anthropologists now speculate that Neanderthals may have made at least some of these very early images.
The Neolithic revolution, one of the most profound developments in all of human history, occurs during the Prehistoric Era. This is when our ancestors learned to farm and domesticate animals, allowing them to give up their nomadic ways, and settle down to build cities and civilizations.
Ancient (c. 3000 BCE to c. 400 CE)
This period includes the great early civilizations of the ancient Near East (think Babylonia), ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, the Etruscans, and the Romans—everything that comes after the invention of writing and before the fall of the Roman Empire. Keep in mind the disintegration of the Roman Empire took centuries, but to simplify, c. 400 will do.
It was during this period that the ancient Greeks first applied human reason to their observations of the natural world and created some of the earliest naturalistic images of human beings. This period is often credited with the birth of Western philosophy, mathematics, theater, science, and democracy. The Romans in turn created an empire that extended across most of Europe, and all the lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea. They were expert administrators and engineers and they saw themselves as the inheritors of the great civilizations that came before them, particularly, Greece and Egypt (which they conquered).
It’s important to remember that although history is often presented as a series of discrete stories, in reality narratives often overlap making history both more complex and more interesting. For example, it was also during the Roman Empire that the historical figure we now call Jesus Christ lived. Jesus and his apostles were Jewish men living in what is today Israel, but which was then part of the Roman Empire.
Middle Ag