WIDER.

Ancient civilizations

In this essay, I want to start with the points that transcended in human history and to this
day continue to be continuous effects in our lives. It is important to divide the main events that
marked History until the end of the Roman Empire. Marc Bloch makes a small but important
statement about what history is: "becoming human on time", but it is important to really remember
that we do not know everything completely and that we ignore parts of it. Aristotle’s talks about
history in this way: "History tells what happened, poetry what should happen". In our study of
History (Until the part we go to) it is important to consider two moments (according to what we
have studied):

1. Origins of civilizations:

Towards the year 6000 a. C. the first superior civilizations arose in the Near East and in South and
East Asia. These formed in the oases and in the valleys of the great rivers where water and fertile
land offered man favorable conditions that allowed him, through his intelligence, his imagination
and his work, to extend his dominion over nature and reach higher forms of material and spiritual
culture. In History class we analyzed this origin with four important points according with
Philosophical Account of Civilizations in general, Aristotelian-Thomistic:

A. Human societies develop first as families.

B. They develop into clans (groups of families, again as a natural result of multiple generations of
children, mixed marriages, etc.). This is very important because it is at these moments when all the
people need to do common things and this involved to do a system.
C. Some societies become villages (around 10,000 B.C) as a natural result of the members' search for
new products, which can best be obtained by staying in one place. Here man realizes that sedentary
lifestyle helps to help each other in the search for the basics.
D. The first properly political communities naturally arise when human beings discovered that
multiple village (or clans).How each village (or clan) pursues all the other goods that the village each
pursue, in particular, the pursuit of common goods profoundly affects.
1.1 The Wisdom:
It is good to underline the point that for me surrounds all civilizations and the common factor of all
and is the Wisdom. I would like to summarize it in two points, resuming the tutoring of Brother
Matthew:

a. Theoretical wisdom, the knowledge of the highest principles in themselves.

b. Practical wisdom: the knowledge of the highest principles relieves the highest good for man
(happiness). This is why wisdom includes the ability to judge and order according to principles.
2. The Ancient Age is the historical epoch that coincides with the emergence and
development of the first ancient civilizations or civilizations. Traditionally, the invention of writing
has been considered as the starting point of ancient history around 1900-1200 B.C. We have as main
six civilizations, among them: Sumer, Babylon, Israel, Acadians, and Mycenae. But the common
denominator of them is: Agriculture, Writing, Architecture and Commerce, around 3000 BC, from
this moment on, the flowering, successive interaction and decline of numerous cultures takes place
in the Mediterranean basin, this being a time in which the sciences and the arts reached a parallel
development to the economic achievements and politicians of different cultures. In parallel, other
cultures developed in very remote regions (China, India ...). Although practically all cultures have
made contributions to medical science, in this review we will refer exclusively to the cultures of our
geographical environment and the history of Western surgery.
But I want to focus on Greek and Roman culture. I want to expose my ideas about how these
cultures came together and basically we can reduce them in these: gods, religion, state religion,
family religion, devotion and piety, morality, history and cities with kingship.

A. Gods: Creation of the gods is not from nothing, rather it seems to be functional separation
or distinguishing; desert and limitless waters are parts of the waste and nothingness; what
we would call a thing without a place or function, they would not recognize to be a thing all.
The multiplicity of Greek gods and their mythologies totally influence the Roman culture
since the taking 146 B.C. But it is more remarkable that the whole Greek society revolves
around the gods.
B. Worship: Worship occurs at temples, but they are not primarily places of worship; they are
houses for the god, and each one has a name "Bond between heaven and earth", temple is
earthly shadow of heavenly home, place of rest for deity.
C. State Religion: The priest and the king made sure that the cult statue was worshiped by
being awakened, washed, clothed, fed and laid down, all in order to maintain the presence
of the deity in the image; ritual traditions developed around doing this, but they were done
in a more or less ordinary way by a rich Mesopotamian; The gods had various forms. But
also, it is important to consider how cultures had a close relationship between the human
and the divine and this relationship makes society and its culture full of myths, rites and
traditions.
D. Family religion: families used to have their own minor gods, not state ones, who did not
need to worship, these gods were close, they said they wanted their worshipers to have the
fullness of life, but it was often difficult to discern. A failure to God himself or if one has
offended another god. It is important to consider that the relative is the initial nucleus of the
society that already began to forge civilizations.
E. Walton thinks that there is a transition in Israel from social ethics to morality due to the
discovery of a standard outside of society, namely, God; but this also happens in Greece in
the hundredths to the centauries. With the beginnings of philosophy and the thinking of
man in reason, he realizes that good and evil must derive from classifying them according to
a morally objective thought.
F. History: the historiography tended to be teleological (from the Greek end, objective): it does
not aim to reveal objectives and effects, but it does not aim to reveal objectives. But since
 the invention of writing made by the Chinese, it is a totally change for humanity because it
goes from the traditional (oral), to the written, which tells the most relevant events that
happened in humanity such as: battles, kings, conquests, daily life etc.
G. Cities and Kingship: Wisdom literature is either for kings and crow princes or it is for scribes
and nobles; its goal is to lay out ways of acting that are most conducive to or illustrative of
justice and order; some also feature laments about justice and order; here texts do become
a little more principle based.
How has the concrete form of the past influenced, or helped these ideas to be
formed in the first place, and changed them over time?
To solve this question we have many topics to choose from but in the way it has influenced
history has been to take from the past events and how they have been influencing each
stage subsequent to the thought of the first civilizations.
Of course, for our moral, concepts of divinity, government, about change in families and
religion. All although with differences by the concrete facts of each culture and ways of
thinking it can be said that they have been evolved through reason.
For me in particular, the most important moment we have considered throughout the class
is when some societies become villages (around 10,000 BC). This may not be something
trance for philosophical, cultural, political, moral, etc., but it is the beginning of a society
that seeks system of food production, mining, metalworking, breeding and raising of certain
animals, textile production (tissue) search create a system of common interest.
Given my concept I want to explain why this influenced the life of all the ancient civilizations,
so much so that the aspects that I highlight were these:
a. The societies united in groups helped so much in the production as in the commerce, like
base of all civilization.
b. Although they were progressing, they reached a point where theology was not sufficiently
developed to be able to sustain the bases of the needs for the production of common goods.
c. In effect of this they had to resort to plans such as putting a more general government
that had a head, also resort to trade (import and export) of the goods that abounded in each
sector, are all influenced by seeking the wisdom for the reason of human productions: social
groups such as: institutions.
We could think why I have gone deeper into these points about why this happened in the
history of civilizations and we could start from the very fact that the same man is a social
being by nature and this means that in order to have more resources and a better quality of
life had to use the means that it had to exchange them among all by means of commerce.