Gelenek

(İng. tradition, custom)

Göndermeler

Diğer

The culture of agrarianate citied society can be characterized as a distinct type in contrast both to the pre-literate types of culture that preceded it and to the Modern technicalistic culture that has followed. In contrast to precitied society —even to agricultural society before the rise of cities— it knew a high degree of social and cultural complexity: a complexity represented not only by the presence of cities (or, occasionally, some organizational equivalent to them), but by writing (or its equivalent for recording), and by all that these imply of possibilities for specialization and large-scale intermingling of differing groups, and for the lively multiplication and development of cumulative cultural traditions. Yet the pace of the seasons set by natural conditions imposed limits on the resources available for cultural elaboration, moreover, any economic or cultural development that did occur, above the level implied in the essentials of the symbiosis of town and land, remained precarious and subject to reversal —in contrast to the conditions of Modern times, of our Technical Age, when agriculture tends to become one 'industry' among others, rather than the primary source of wealth (at least on the level of the world economy as a whole).

By the middle of the Early Bronze Age, burial customs seem to have changed considerably and there is a move towards rock-cut chamber tombs which were located outside of settlements.

Comparisons between the political activities of Phoenician kings and those undertaken by their Near Eastern counterparts reveal little difference in the patterns of thought and behaviour and thus there can be little doubt that Phoenician royal ideologies were inspired and influenced by Mesopotamian and Canaanite traditions.

According to Philo, the Phoenicians associated the notion of death with the god Muth, a primordial deity that presided over the muddy, putrid netherworld to which spirits were believed to descend. Philo’s account appears to reflect a wider religious tradition which held that after death the soul of the deceased transitioned to an unknown, bleak and desolate place where it joined the spirits of its ancestors.

Although the earliest examples date to the third millennium, the popularity of, and demand for, ivory objects increased significantly during the Late Bronze Age. Thus the period c.1600–1200 witnessed an explosion of competing ivory carving traditions stretching from Greece in the west to Iran in the east.