Overview 1: Beginnings through Ancient Greece
*Bold words within the text indicate important notes to remember
1. Before the invention of writing, stories and songs were transmitted orally from
generation to generation. Without written documents of this oral tradition, there was
always the risk of its literature being irrevocably lost due to cataclysms such as foreign
conquest or natural disaster. Writing was not invented for the purpose of
preserving literature; the earliest written documents contain commercial,
administrative, political, and legal information, and were created by the first
"advanced" civilizations in an area that Westerners commonly call the
Middle East. These ancient civilizations were agrarian, developing in the valleys of
the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates rivers. Cities began as centers for administration of
irrigated fields, but they soon became centers for government, religion, and culture.
The Egyptians built temples and pyramids in Thebes and Memphis; the Sumerians,
Babylonians, and Assyrians build palaces and temples in Babylon and Ninevah.
2. The oldest writing was pictographic, meaning that the sign for an object
was written to resemble the object itself; later, hieroglyphic and cuneiform
scripts were invented to record more complicated information. The oldest
extant texts date from 3300 to 2990 BCE and consist mostly of lists of foodstuffs,
textiles, and cattle. Though such lists were well served by pictographs, by 2800 BC
scribes began to make marks in a script that was later called cuneiform—the Latin
cuneus means "a wedge"—to record more complicated information such as historical
events. This form of writing survived more than two millennia. In Egypt, scribes
developed a different form of writing. Named at a later date after the Greek words for
"sacred" and "carving," hieroglyphs also developed in more cursive versions for faster
writing.
3. Begun in 2700 BCE and written down about 2000 BCE, the first great heroic
narrative of world literature, Gilgamesh, nearly vanished from memory
when it was not translated from cuneiform languages into the new
alphabets that replaced them. Gilgamesh was reintroduced to the world when a
portion of it, Utnapishtim's Story of the Flood, upon which the biblical story of the flood
is based, was accidentally discovered in 1872. Since then, tablets containing other
parts of Gilgamesh have been found at sites throughout the Middle East in various
cuneiform languages. Though the identity of its author and context are now lost, its
stories, with their astonishing immediacy, appeal to modern readers. With this
profound familiarity, there is also something infinitely strange and remote about
Gilgamesh. The narrative is concerned chiefly with Gilgamesh's friendship with Enkidu,
his quest for worldly renown and immortality, and his death.
4. Though the Hebrews left few visual arts (due in part to the prohibition against graven
images) and little secular literature, they did leave a religious literature. Its texts were
written down between the eighth and second centuries BC. The religion differs from
other ancient religions insofar as it is founded on the idea of one god, who is infinitely
just, omnipotent, and omniscient. The script that the Hebrews created consisted of
twenty-two simple signs for consonantal sounds and survives, in modified form, today.
Though the absence of written signs for vowels can confuse some readers,
the consonantal script developed by the Hebrews ushered in a new form of
writing that could be composed without special artistic skills and read
without advanced training. Adopting the consonantal script of the Phoenicians, the
Greeks added signs for vowels to form what is called the first real alphabet.
5. Unlike the rulers of the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile valleys, the Hebrews did not control
an area of economic or military importance. They were not an imperial people, but
began as pastoral tribes in Palestine who created Jerusalem as their capital. Their
history includes foreign occupations by the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans as well
as exiles in Egypt and Babylon, and the Diaspora. After a period of expansion and
prosperity under kings David and Solomon, the Hebrews were deported to Babylon in
586 BCE With their return to Palestine in 539 BCE, the Hebrews rebuilt the
Temple and created the canonical version of the Pentateuch, the first five
books of the Bible. By 300 BCE, the independent state of Israel was invaded and
was eventually conquered by the Greeks and later absorbed into the Roman empire.
After unsuccessful attempts to revolt against Roman rule under emperors Titus and
Hadrian, the Hebrews became a people of the Diaspora. It was not until the twentieth
century that Israel was reestablished as an independent state.
6. According to Hebrew religious attitudes, God created a perfect and harmonious order;
physical and moral disorder is a consequence of Adam and Eve's disobedience. As the
stories in the Bible expound, unlike polytheistic religions in which gods
often battle among themselves for control over humankind, the sole
resistance to the Hebrew God is humankind itself. The exercise of free will,
which may be used for both good and evil, is in some mysterious way a manifestation
of God's will. Hebrew teachers later carried on the story of the Fall and developed the
concept of a God who is as merciful as He is just, who brings about the possibility of
atonement and reconciliation. This concept is highlighted in the stories of Cain and
Abel, Noah and the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, among others. The stories of the
Bible teach lessons about humankind's proper relations to God, which themselves are a
generational process that concentrates on the origins and development of the Hebrews
as God's chosen people.
7. Though the origin of the Hellenes, or ancient Greeks, is unknown, their
language clearly belongs to the Indo-European family. Named after the
mythical king Minos, the Minoan civilization flourished on the island of Crete in the
second millennium BCE In the same period, the Myceneans developed a wealthy and
powerful civilization on mainland Greece. At some point in the last century of the
millennium, the great palaces were destroyed by fire. With them, the arts, skills, and
language of the Myceneans vanished for the next few centuries, a period called the
"Dark Age" of Greece. Much of what we know about them is based on the body of oral
poetry that became the raw material for Homer's epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey.
8. By serving as a basis for education, the Iliad and Odyssey played a role in
the development of Greek civilization that is equivalent to the role that the
Torah had played in Palestine. The irreconcilable difference between the Greeks
gods of Olympus and the Hebrew god led to a struggle from which only one survived.
For those raised under monotheistic religions or cultures, the Greek gods and their
relation to humanity may seem alien. Whereas the Hebrews blamed humanity for
bringing disorder to God's harmoniously ordered universe, the Greeks conceived their
gods as an expression of the disorder of the world and its uncontrollable forces. To the
Greeks, morality is a human invention; and though Zeus is the most powerful of their
gods, even he can be resisted by his fellow Olympians and must bow to the mysterious
power of fate.
9. Though united by their common Hellenic heritage, Greek city-states differed in
customs, political constitutions, and dialects. They were often rivals and fierce
competitors, establishing colonies in the eighth and seventh centuries along the
Mediterranean coast. The Greeks who established colonies in Asia adapted
their language to the Phoenician writing system, adding signs for vowels to
change it from a consonantal to an alphabetic system. First used for
commercial documents, writing was later applied to treaties, political decrees, and,
later, literature.
10. Inspired by their defeat of the Persian invaders, Athens and Sparta emerged as the
two most prominent city-states of the fifth century BCE With the elimination of their
common enemy; however, the two cities became enemies, culminating in the
Peloponnesian war, which left Athens defeated. Before its defeat to Sparta, Athens
developed democratic institutions to maintain the delicate balance between
the freedom of the individual and the demands of the state. By the time of
Sophocles, Athens had become an empire, establishing a league of subject cities,
which it taxed and coerced.
11. Professional teachers, called Sophists, educated affluent male citizens of Athens in the
techniques of public speaking and in subjects such as government, ethics, literary
criticism, and astronomy. The secular and humanist spirit of Athenian culture is best
expressed in the words of the Sophist Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things."
Unlike the Sophists, Socrates proposed a method of teaching that was
dialectic rather than didactic; his means of approaching "truth" through
questions and answers revolutionized Greek philosophy. Socrates exposed
illogicality in old beliefs but did not provide new beliefs. His ethics rested on an
intellectual basis. Due to his insistence that it is the duty of each individual to think
through to the "truth," resentment against Socrates built, culminating in a death for
impiety. In the next century, Athens became a center for schools of philosophy based
on his ideas, especially as espoused by Plato and Aristotle. Founder of the Academy in
385 BCE, Plato's literary and philosophical contributions often explored ethical and
political problems of his time featuring his teacher Socrates as speaker. The first
systematic work of Western literary criticism, the Poetics, was written by Aristotle, a
member of Plato's Academy.
12. Except for his name, we know nothing about the poet Homer, and there is no trace of
his identity in the poem. The basis for Homer's Iliad and Odyssey was an
immense poetic reserve created by generations of singers who lived before
him. Homer made use of an intricate system of metrical formulas, a repertoire of
standard scenes, and a known outline of the story. Unlike most oral literature, the
poetic organization of the two works suggests they owe their present form to the hand
of one poet.
13. Focused around the events that transpired in a few weeks of the ten-year Trojan War,
the Iliad tells the story of the Achaeans and Trojans in war. Both genders—the men
who do battle and the women who depend on them—are affected in this tale of war.
Starkly unsentimental, Homer's tale suggests that human beings must implicitly deal
with both destructive and creative impulses. The Odyssey deals with the peace that
ensued and places emphases on the lives of the surviving heroes of the war. It tells the
story of Odysseus on a quest to return to his homeland, Ithaca, and be reunited with
his son and wife. Along the way, he has many adventures and must rely on his
intellect, wit, and strength to extricate himself from perilous situations. Neither the
Iliad nor the Odyssey offers easy answers; questions about the nature of
aggression and violence are left unanswered, and questions about human
suffering and the waste generated by war are left unresolved.
14. Though Sappho's lyric poems give us vivid evocation of the joys and sorrows of love, it
is the drama that emerged more than a century later that is most closely associated
with classical Greek literature. Greek comedy and tragedy developed out of
choral performances in celebration of Dionysus, the god of wine and mystic
ecstasy. Thespis was probably the first to add a masked actor, who engages in
dialogue with the chorus, to these performances; later Aeschylus added a second
actor, creating the possibility for conflict and establishing the prototype for drama as
we know it. The seven plays of Aeschylus are the earliest documents in the history of
Western theater. While Aeschylus' plays reflect Athens's heroic period, those by his
younger contemporary Sophocles, especially Oedipus the King, reflect a culture that
was reevaluating critically its accepted standards and traditions. Even more so,
Euripides's Medea is an ironic expression of Athenian disillusion. The work of the only
surviving comic poet of the fifth century, Aristophanes, combines poetry, obscenity,
farce, and wit to satirize institutions and personalities of his time. Though parodic in
tone, the work often carries serious undertones, thus adding to the rich diversity of
writings from the ancient Greek world.