The Voyages of Aeneas Public domain.
Original: Dr. Maria Helena Trindade López.
Professor of Ancient History.
When God created the Mediterranean, He said to the Mediterranean:'I created you and will send my servants to you. When they ask me for help, they say'Glory to God! '、'God is divine! '、'God is great! '、'There is no other God but God! '。''Lord, the Mediterranean people replied - I will drown them. ''
Fuck off - I curse you - I'll make your appearance poor and make you less fishy"。
al-Muqaddasi, "The Best Arrangement for Understanding the Land".
Everything must be recaptured and reoriented within the general framework of history, so that, despite all the difficulties, despite the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we can still respect the unity of history, which is also the unity of life"。
Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean
..The splendor of Greece, the magnificence of Rome! "
Edgar Allan Poe, To Helen
Greek (red) and Phoenician (yellow) colonies circa 6th century BC.
1 Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman civilizations are some of the oldest human civilizations organized around the Mediterranean. 1 The Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman civilizations were the oldest human civilizations around the Mediterranean. They have had a significant impact on the history and existence of cultures around the Mediterranean, and are therefore one of the keys to our understanding of the development of Western civilization. Thousands of years have passed, and it took a more entrenched corporation in one region (whose spatial perception is rooted in the imagination) to be able to control a vast empire.
In Egypt, people create a space according to their desires, dreams, abilities, and imagination. 3 The obstacles that once loomed over their vision—the deserts of the east and west,4 the waterfalls of the south, and the seas of the north—had been assimilated and turned into borders or bridges. The borders are closed and protected, while the bridges allow passage. They are gone, winning the freedom of space and, therefore, of time. The sea to the north, with its salty waters, led them out of their own world and opened"An adventure from no return"5。
In Phoenicia, the human gaze extends to the vast world that the Mediterranean Sea has to offer. The mountains on the back merge the land with the sea. As soon as humanity arrived, it was abandoned: control of space always escaped from them. The Phoenicians sailed in different currents and tides, built"Image"or"Epic"6 。"Cedar forest"It's done"God's home", a privileged space that anyone dreams of reaching.
Like all peoples of antiquity, the Greeks felt the magic of space.
They called the earth Gaia and the sky Uranus. Gaia mates with Uranus, and the Titan is born. She then mated with her child, Pontus, the god of the sea, and gave birth to Nieus, Taumas, Forsys, Setos, and Eurybia. The rivers are gods, and the mountains are gods. Hesiod explains that all things originated from chaos.
Orpheus, however, presents a very different story:"At first it was time Kronos"。
Thus, space is read, learned, and completed.
But when we look for a real Greek concept of space, we don't find it in the works of Hesiod, Orpheus, poets or sculptors. The Greek concept of space lies in Hercules, and Alexander7 tried to replicate Hercules. The paragon of the heroic fate is marked by Hercules, who served life and carried Greece to the world, because Greece was confused with the world with its enormous size, remarkable depth, peculiar way of looking to the future, and transmitting information through the eyes. Through words, gestures, movements, or simply"A gesture of effort"。
Slightly different, the Romans became a model of utilitarian looks. Their difficult task is to effectively occupy a vast territory and control, master and defend it. They translated space into quantity and scope, rather than detailed topographic maps, which was also a task they favored as well. The current domestication of space8 is inherited from the knowledge and representation of the Romans. Measurement is about building, labeling, separating, and cognizing. Part of our intellectual heritage and our ability to transform the world certainly have nothing to do with Roman civilization. As such, the Mediterranean Sea is a common source of societies and civilizations that have flourished here at different times in history.
9 The civilization's continuity, durability and peace are due to the elements of its unity—the pharaohs,10 mart,11 religions,12 languages,13 and the peace that guarantees its borders, but it has gradually lost much of its originality: traditions that have been preserved for centuries are mixed with other traditions and cultural characteristics.
Openness to the world makes it possible to learn about new political, religious, and spiritual features (new words enrich the language), but this"Cultural exchange"It is mutual, because Egypt has also left the world with a particularly noteworthy set of information and practices. One of the major benefits that Western civilization gained from Egypt was the pattern of writing creation. Ptah, the creator god of Memphis, conceived the universe in all its forms in his mind and achieved this through the creativity of words. 14 The doctrine of creative verbs is often characteristic of biblical texts15 and is placed in specific historical, geographical, and temporal contexts, but it can actually be traced back to a very different time and space: the Nile Valley, where different priestly castes offer different answers to the most diverse phenomena.
God also created man in the likeness of the universe. He probably is"Born of her tears"16, which could also be from Knum"The dust of the earth"17. 19 The legacy of Egyptian civilization has endured throughout history, crossing the Mediterranean, encountering different spaces such as Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine, and Anatolia, and merging with our Western tradition through two very different channels: classical antiquity and the Bible20.
The furthest extent of the Roman Empire in 117 AD. Note, however, that on this map, the sea is called mare internum, ie"Inland Sea"。Map author: tataryn
In contrast, the Phoenicians never had a strong sense of nationhood, perhaps because of"Phoenician political space"Larger than the territory of Phoenicia himself21. In addition, the geographical area in which these people wrote their stories was also influenced by Egypt, the Hittites, the Aegean, and the Semites. When"Independence"When they appear, these effects begin to blur. Humanity succumbs to the sea in order to fulfill its mission: the unification of the Mediterranean world, the union of West and East, and the dream is about to become a reality. From the 12th century onwards, the Phoenicians embarked on an international** adventure22 that not only made awareness of the possibility of navigation, but also brought all the great ancient civilizations together between 1200 and 332 AD. From this position, the Phoenicians fulfilled their cultural mission, establishing contacts, exchanges and intimacy between the West and the Far East. In addition to this, they further played a unifying role, leaving us one of the most important inventions in the history of human culture: the alphabet.
Unlike the Egyptians, the Greeks chose to divide the land to unite humanity. 24 If, on the one hand, this division was the main cause of their greatness and glory, it later became the real cause of all their weaknesses.
However, the history of Greece, its definition of space, its organizational structure in the cities that make up sovereign states, each with its own face, personality and life, are heavily influenced by its geographical location. 25 However, when the Greek borders extended from Italy to Asia Minor, the geographical conditions in some cases became very different from what they had been, and the Greeks strangely copied and recreated the same pattern of spatial organization.
Thus, the Greek city of 26 i.e. polis represents a unique model of statehood, the emergence of which seems to coincide with the beginning of colonization. In addition, these people27 opened the foundations of contemporary science and succeeded"Invention"History and philosophy28 are important foundations for us to build memory and think about humanity and the world.
They also created theater, the Olympics, and"Invention"Democracy 29. 30 With the rise of Macedonia and the conquest of Alexander the Great, classical Greece entered the Hellenistic period. Greek became the lingua franca outside of Greece. However, Hellenism undoubtedly marked the end of the Greek concept of political space, the end of the classical era, and the end of the freedom of existence and isolation.
It is the result of a long historical process of maturation, first manifested in the transition from the second millennium to the first. This alphabet spreads east and west. The Hebrews and Aramaics used it to transcribe their own language, while the Greeks adapted a non-Semitic language to their own needs around 800 CE and pronounced it.
This is what is between the Phoenician alphabet and the Greek alphabet"Heredity"Relationship. The former went their own way, and the latter, through the Etruscan and Roman alphabets, gave birth to our modern alphabet.
The time between the establishment of Rome's first province outside of mainland Italy32 and Rome's control of the entire Mediterranean was just over two centuries.33 Rome acquired the de facto character of an empire from the 130s BC onwards, acquiring Cesarpin, Gaul, Illyria, Greece, and Iberia, and explicitly gaining Yudaia, Asia, and Gaul in the first century BC.
During the period of the greatest expansion of the empire under Trayan (117 AD), Rome controlled the entire Mediterranean as well as parts of Gaul, Germania, and Britain, the Balkans, Dacia, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, and Mesopotamia. After the conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, the Mediterranean became a political unit for the first time - a large lake within an empire, one surrounded on all sides"Roman Lake"34。
The Roman Empire built the known world around the Mediterranean.
Its borders are only blocked by natural obstacles or defensible areas. In this vast land, the building blocks of our civilization were born: it created religions, adopted cultural values, tried to implement structures and materials, and presented all these aspects, which are part of our heritage.
It is no coincidence that in the history of Europe, whether it is the Carolingian Renaissance or the Liberal Revolution, the great moments of its revival coincide with the restoration of traditional values. Classicism has always been a return to the primitive values of the East, Greece and Rome.
All history is the history of ideas.
r. g.Collingwood, The Idea of History
Endnotes. 1、braudel, memory and the mediterranean, new york, vintage books, 2002; l. casson, the ancient mariners： c.Freeman, Egypt, Greece and Rome – Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.
2. The concept of Western civilization is often associated with the classical definition of Western culture: Western culture is a set of political, literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical principles that distinguish it from other civilizations.
3、m.h.t. lopes, estudos de egiptologia, lisboa, eds.Associa o Portuguesa de Egiptologia, 2003, pp. 41-47.
4. Arabian Desert and Libby Desert. They have been closely linked to life in the Nile Valley since the beginning of human history. See k w. butzer, "desert environments", in d. b. redford (dir.),the oxford encyclopedia of ancient egypt, vol. 1, cairo, the american university in cairo press, 2001, p. 385-389.
5. The openness to the world determines the beginning of the end of a civilization, and the eternal guarantee of this civilization in history is to preserve its traditions and ancestral values. See mh.t.Lopes, op. cit., pp. 45-46.
6. "The Epic of Gilgamesh". The Epic of Gilgamesh. a. r.George (ed.), The Epic of Babylonian Gilgamesh: Introduction, Critical Edition, and Cuneiform Texts - Vol ii, oxford, oxford university press, 2003.
7、c.Mossé, Alexandre, Lisboa, Publica es Europa-América, Lda, 2005, pp. 127-128. Under Alexander the Great, the most important centers of the Mediterranean became part of Alexander's empire. Alexander's conquest spread Greek wisdom and ideas throughout the region.
8、j. huskinson (ed.),experiencing rome - culture, identity and power in the roman empire, london, routledge, 2000, p. 213-244。
9. The Egyptians began to conduct the sea ** from 2000 BC. Their business partners were the Minoans of Crete and later the Phoenicians. See d p. silverman, au coeur de l'égypte ancienne (ed. original, ancient egypt), paris, larousse, 1997, p. 44-47。
10. Unlike other monarchs, the kings of Egypt have played two distinct but complementary roles in history. On the one hand, we can discover its historical personality:"Two plots of land"The unifier king, who competed for legislative and executive functions, administered all property, and, from the beginning of the New Kingdom, with the advent of imperialist politics, also played the role of supreme warlord. But at the same time, the king of Egypt also took on another characteristic: he was a clergy who acted through different rituals, taking away hostile forces and guaranteeing order and harmony in the world. See m h. t. lopos。m. h. t. lopes，egiptologia estudos，lisboa，ed. associação portuguesa de egiptologia, 2003, p. 107-134, and d. o' connor, d. p. silverman (eds.),ancient egyptian kingship, leiden, e. j. brill, 1995, p. 49-92。
11. The maat is a concept, an ideological supporter of Egyptian civilization: the national myth, the cosmic order, the social ethics and moral order. See J assmann, maat, l'égypte pharaonique et l'idée de justice sociale, paris, julliard, 1989.
12. In Egyptian civilization, everything was a religion. This phenomenon determines the concept of the state and the manifestations of gestures, customs, emotions, art and ideas. See: m m. h. t. lopes，o egipto faraónico - guia de estudo，lisboa，ed.Associa o Portuguesa de Egiptologia, 2003, pp. 61-83.
13. The evolution of the Egyptian language corresponds not only to the evolution of Egypt, but also to the major changes that have taken place internationally. theirs"Clear"It is the realm of knowledge and wisdom, and new words and foreign words are used"Abundant"It belongs to the political and cultural spheres. See. Id. at Pgs. 85-87.
14. See JAllen, Genesis in China, p. 2. j. allen, genesis in egypt, new h**en, yale university, 1988, p. 38-47 and, yet, b. e. shafer (ed.),religion in ancient egypt, ithaca & london, cornell university press, 1991, p. 96.
gn.1.15、m. h. t. lopes, o homem egípcio e a sua integração no cosmos, lisboa, teorema, 1989, p. 28-38.
16. See gn 2, 7. 2, 7.
17. See. a. a. t**ares, estudos de alta antiguidade, lisboa, p. 131-150 and, yet, s. quirke, ancient egyptian religion, london, british museum press, 2000, p. 46-48.
18. See a Epopeia de Atra-hasis s.Dalley, Mesopotamian Mythology. Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Beyond, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 1-38.
19、j.Assman: The Egyptian Thought. History and Significance of the Pharaonic Era, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2002, p. 282.
20、c. baurain, c. bonnet, les phéniciens, marins des trois continents, paris, armand colin, 1992, p. 12.
21. The Phoenicians, more than any other seafaring people, opened up the Mediterranean, establishing commercial colonies along the entire Mediterranean coast. m. e.Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West. Politics, Colonies and **, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 133-166.
22、r. k. logan, the alphabet effect: the impact of the phonetic alphabet on the development of western civilization, new york, william morrow and company, inc.
23. The most striking feature of ancient Greece was the almost corresponding state of numerous towns. See fBraudel, op. cit., p. 228.
24. In fact, when we examine"The Greek World", faced with small communities settled in narrow coastal depressions, which were accessible only to coastal areas.
25. Greece is the most perfect or the most"City-state"Characteristic is Athens, whose territory encompasses the whole of Attica, while its center is the city of Athens itself.
26. See f braudel, op. f.Braudel, op. cit., p. 251.
27、p. ricoeur, "filosofia: hacia la antigua grecia, de la nostalgia al luto", in g. duby (dir.),los ideales del mediterráneo, barcelona, icaria editorial, 1997, p. 259-282.
28. See S b. pomeroy, s. m.Burstein, Ancient Greece: A History of Politics, Society, and Culture, Oxford New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 343-348.
29. The conquest of this sea area accompanied the political history of the Greek world.
30. See f braudel, op. f.Braudel, op. cit., p. 271 and p horden、n.Purcell, The Corroded Sea: A Historical Study of the Mediterranean, London, Blackwell Publishing, 2000, pp. 27-28.
31. Sicily in 241 BC.
32. See cFreeman, op. cit., p. 383.
33. The Mediterranean Sea began to be called mare nostrum (literally"Our sea"）。