Page 113 - Encyclopedia Of World History

cultural and geographic areas 463

It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you
through magical places. • PAUL THEROUX (B. 1941)

As the ancient Greeks borrowed extensively from both raphy of the entire area. Some scholars argue that the
the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, one can place the main cultural divide in Europe today is that separating
classical Greek world within the ambit of an “Eastern the West of Catholic and Protestant Christian heritage
Mediterranean” cultural sphere. At a finer scale of analy- from the East of Orthodox background—a division that
sis, however, the Greeks occupied their own cultural is sometimes dated to the fourth-century partition of the
area. They were unified by a common language and lit- Roman empire.
erature, by common religious ideas and cultic practices,
and by common institutions, such as the Olympic games. Asian Cultural Areas
Although they often stressed their own division into In East Asia, an extensive cultural area emerged through
dialect-based subcultures (Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians, a combination of political might and the diffusion of lit-
and so on), supposedly descended from separate ances- eracy and ideology. Confucianism, Mahayana Buddhism,
tral groups, the Greeks also emphasized their cultural and a belief in the preeminence of the Chinese imperial
unity.The cultural area associated with Greek civilization system were key features of this emergent sphere. As the
was, from a land-based perspective, geographically dis- Chinese state expanded south of the Chang (Yangzi) Val-
continuous, spread over much of the northern and part ley during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), these cul-
of the southern Mediterranean littoral, as well as the tural patterns spread with it, as far south as northern
Black Sea.The territorial boundaries of the Greek world Vietnam. Although Vietnam was to reclaim its independ-
were never without controversy. Debates raged, and still ence in the tenth century CE, it remained within the orbit
occasionally flare, over whether nonurban peoples speak- of “Confucian Civilization,” continuing, for example, to
ing Greek dialects, such as the Macedonians, should employ the Chinese ideographic writing system until col-
really be considered Greek. The position of non-Greek onized by France.To the east, Korea came under the influ-
but extensively Hellenized areas, such as Caria in Asia ence, both political and cultural, of China, especially
Minor, also remained ambiguous. during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). Although Japan
The Greek world, for all of its cultural bonds, was never succumbed to Chinese rule, it too adopted many
never politically united.Virtually all of it, however, would aspects of Confucianism, the Chinese writing system, and
later be subsumed within the Roman empire.The Roman a host of other ideas and practices of Chinese prove-
empire in its heyday lacked the linguistic, cultic, and quo- nance. The cultural commonalties so generated have
tidian features that unified the Greek sphere. But com- proved long lasting.Today, many scholars depict an East
mon political institutions, culminating with the granting Asian cultural area composed of China Proper (excluding
of Roman citizenship to all free males across the empire Tibet and Xinjiang), Korea, Japan, and—in some versions
in 212 CE, did forge a kind of unity, and it would do —Vietnam.
injustice to the empire to deny it status as a cultural area. In South Asia, by contrast, an extensive cultural area
Cultural union deepened with the spread of Christianity emerged in the absence of political unification. During
even as political cohesion faltered in the fourth and fifth the first millennium BCE, the complex of religious ideas
centuries. At the same time, the diffusion of Christianity and practices now known as Hinduism began to coalesce
outside of the empire, and its subsequent adoption as the in the Ganges Valley and then spread across the rest of
religion of state in Nubia, Ethiopia, Armenia, and Geor- the Indian subcontinent. By the early centuries of the
gia, enlarged while simultaneously diluting this cultural Common Era, South Asian forms of high culture had dif-
domain. The division of the empire into Eastern and fused through much of Southeast Asia as well.This evolv-
Western segments in the fourth century, followed by the ing cultural region was fused together by common
divergent political and religious trajectories of Rome spiritual ideas (such as the transmigration of souls), caste
and Byzantium, gradually reconfigured the cultural geog- ideology and practices, and the use of Sanskrit as a