Tarih

(İng. history)

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Diğer

In the 1930s, the social scientist Frederick Teggart looked at the Eurasian connections between Rome and Han and their shared problem with “barbarians” on the frontiers; he wrote a book attempting to explain what he saw as correlations between Eastern and Western history. Wars in the Roman east and barbarian invasions along the Danube and Rhine were ultimately the result, Teggart argued, of policies of the Han government. How? Through trade and nomadic migrations. Wars in the Tarim Basin disrupted trade that would have passed through Parthia, which in turn made trouble on the eastern Roman frontier in Armenia. Likewise, Han policies to split the Xiongnu set tribes in motion across the steppe to Russia, who in turn drove other “barbarian” tribes before them, right up to the Roman northern frontier in Europe.

Both orientalism and Western civilization begin in the textualist position that civilizations have essences, and that these essences are best seen in the Great Books they have produced. (Who decides what's a Great Book, or what connection it might have to the lived lives of men and women in particular places and times is never satisfactorily explained.) The textualist position foreshortens history, annihilates change, and levels difference the better to represent an image of the past in dramatic form – either as tragedy, as in the case of Islamic civilization, or as triumph, as in the case of the rise of the West. In either case, it is a story whose rhythms are guided by the ineluctable working out of civilizational essences allegedly encoded in foundation texts. Thus we get the history of the West as the story of freedom and rationality, or the history of the East (pick an East, any East) as the story of despotism and cultural stasis.

An important aspect of Hodgson's reevaluation of modernity is his insistence that in historical time it is the discontinuities and not the continuities of Western history which are most striking. He notes that the ascending curve which runs from ancient Greece, to the Renaissance, to modern times is an optical illusion. In fact, he argues, for most of history Europe was an insignificant outlier of mainland Asia. Furthermore, he notes, the Renaissance did not inaugurate modernity. Instead, it brought Europe up to the cultural level of the other major civilizations of the Oikoumene. It did so in some measure by assimilating the advances of the other Asian civilizations. The list of inventions which developed elsewhere and diffused subsequently to Europe is a long one. It includes gunpowder firearms, the compass, the sternpost rudder, decimal notation, and the university, among others. Seen in this light, the European experience looks much less original. This is not to deny that there were original European developments. But in the context of three millennia of agrarianate citied life in the Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene, there was a tendency for civilizations to achieve a rough parity with one another as cultural innovations diffused throughout the Oikoumene.

Although the region of the Levant which became known as Phoenicia has a long history of human occupation which dates back at least as far as the tenth millennium BCE, scholars are generally of the opinion that it was during the Early Iron Age, in around 1200 BCE , that the Phoenicians first emerged as a distinct cultural entity.

Although the classical sources record that there were a great number of lengthy Phoenician treatises exploring a diversity of subjects (including history, philosophy, law, religion, natural history and economics), not a single fragment of these texts has survived in its original form.