Israel

1
Israel

• The Israelites had 2 difft kinds of religious
  experience, intensely personal encounters with
  God such as the experiences of Abraham and Moses
  and sacrifices performed on behalf of the people
  by the priests
• The God of Abraham and Moses was called Yahweh
• Hebrews were a nomadic people.
• Took the name Israelites later when they settled
  down and became a nation

2
The Emergence of Greek Civilization

• Importance of the sea
• No national identity as Greeks but people did
  identify with their cities
• Europe and the Middle East did not develop in the
  same way.
• No Mesopotamian cities, temples, palaces, no
  Egyptian bureaucracy in Europe

3
Emergence contd

• In Europe, possessions meant social status
• Warrior culture. Chiefs ruled small territories,
  fought each other, hunted, engaged in athletic
  competitions, feasted
• Burial customs chiefs buried under mounds of
  earth and/or stone

4
Amateur Archaeologists at Troy (Turkey), Mycenae
(Greek mainland) and Crete (Greek island)

• A.D. 1870s Heinrich Schliemann discovered the
  sites of Troy and Mycenae.
• A.D. 1900 Sir Arthur Evans discovered the palace
  at Knossos, Crete.
• Palace is his word. We are still not exactly sure
  what role this structure played in the economic
  and religious system of the area.
• Around 2000 B.C. the structures which Evans
  called palaces started to be built.
• Palaces included residential and storage space.

5
Writing I

• Egyptian hieroglyphs holy carvings
  pictograms, pictures represented ideas
• Sumerian cuneiform script wedge-shaped
• Hebrew required less symbols to be learned and
  was supposely easier than Egyptian and Sumerian.

6
Writing II

• Linear A 1700 B.C.
• Linear B 1450 B.C. (the arrival of the Mycenaeans
  on Crete)
• Linear A and B were not like the Ancient Greek
  which we study today.
• They were used for palace inventories. Most
  samples have been destroyed because they were
  written on perishable materials like clay
  tablets, animal skin and tree bark.
• Linear A has never been deciphered.
• Linear B is recognizable as an early form of
  Greek.
• New Greek alphabet borrowed from Phoenician
  alphabet circa 750 B.C. our Ancient Greek but
  with unusual Homeric forms
• Adopted later by the Romans and some letters
  become part of our alphabet.

7
Linear A and Linear B
8
Archaic Age

• 8th century B.C. start of democracy in 509 B.C.

9
Polis city-state

• Concept appears 8th -7th cent. B.C.
• Independent self-sufficient city with its
  attached rural territory
• Closely guards rights to citizenship
• Great internal strife

10
Literature in the Ancient World

• A small amount has survived.
• Latin literature usually imitated Greek models.
• Defined their civilization, still affects our
  own.
• Other cultures produced literature but only the
  Greeks and Romans had large literate segment of
  society as audience.

11
Homer 1

• 8th century B.C.
• 1 man or a collection of unknown people.
• Did not tell the reader anything about himself
• Did not claim that he was the author of the
  story. Asked Muse to inspire him so that he could
  tell the story.
• Oral tradition illiterate minstrels kept alive
  the tales of Mycenaean times such as the Trojan
  war (1200 B.C. if it existed at all).
• Minstrels used repeated epithets for characters,
  beat of the metre, repeated scenes such as
  banquet scenes as memory aids.

12
Homer 2

• Homer is reputed to have written both the Iliad
  and Odyssey
• Odyssey covers time after Iliad so it was
  probably written after Iliad
• Legend has it that Homer was blind
• Many cities claim him as their son
• The Epic Cycle was the name given to the work
  produced by other authors which explained what
  happened after the Trojan War.