History of Western Civilisation - Wednesday 5th Period: Discussion 2: Egypt and Crete

[prof-methos.livejournal.com]

Greetings and Salutations, class. Now that your hands are throughly exhausted from taking notes on yesterday's lecture, I'm going to make you talk until your jaw is tired as well.

For your homework, due next Tuesday but turned in to this thread, I'd like you to comment in at least 100 words on some aspect of Egyptian or Cretan civilisation. Bonus points for comparing something between the two.

[[OCD comment threads are up. Comment away!]]

Comments

Re: HOMEWORK: Egypt/Crete

[actingltcrumpet.livejournal.com]

Around 1700 BC, a highly sophisticated culture grew up around palace centers on Crete: the Minoans. What they thought, what stories they told, how they narrated their history, are all lost to us. All we have left are their palaces, their incredibly developed visual culture, and their records. Mountains of records. For the Minoans produced a singular civilization in antiquity: one oriented around trade and bureaucracy with little or no evidence of a military state. They built perhaps the single most efficient bureaucracy in antiquity. This unique culture, of course, lasted only a few centuries, and European civilization shifts to Europe itself with the foundation of the military city-states on the mainland of Greece. These were a war-like people oriented around a war-chief; while they seemed to have borrowed elements of Minoan civilization, their's was a culture of battle and conquest. We call them the Myceneans after the best-preserved of their cities, and their greatest accomplishment, it would seem, was the destruction of a large commercial center across the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor: Troy. Shortly after this defining event, their civilizations fell into a dark ages, in which Greeks stopped writing and, it seems, abandoned their cities. It was an inauspicious start for the Europeans: while the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians had enjoyed almost two thousand years of continuous civilization, in Europe the experiement began with the brilliance of the Minoan commercial states translated into the brief, war-like city-states of the Myceneans, only to slip back into the tribal groups that had characterized European civilization for almost all of its history.

[OOC: Source: http://www.wsu.edu:8000/~dee/MINOA/MINOANS.HTM]