> Modern Western culture as we know it is only about 500 years old, though it arguably takes influences from the Greeks and Romans back another 2500 years.
That would be a difficult argument to make; classical Greece only goes back to about the eighth century BC. Mycenaean Greece goes much further back, but we can't observe most of the cultural continuity (though obviously there was a decent amount of it), because between Mycenaean Greece and classical Greece there was the Greek Dark Age of about 400 years when they forgot how to read and write. A cultural legacy of 2500 years total is a much fairer estimate than one of 3000 years.
As you note, though, the legacy of the classical world was itself interrupted and then purposefully reimported into Renaissance Europe. This is rather different from how, in the 4th century AD, there were still priests of the old religion in Babylon, reading tablets written thousands of years before them thanks to a historical tradition that had, at that point, never been interrupted.
Something I found charming from the wikipedia article on Sargon the Great is that the Babylonian king Nabonidus (6th century BC, "ancient" by any modern standard) sponsored archaeological research into his life. And well he might, since Sargon preceded Nabonidus by about 1800 years. But you just don't think about one ancient king supporting archaeology concerning another ancient king. Ancient is ancient, right?
Hm, I think we have to be a bit careful about the legacy of the classical world being "interrupted". This may be true in part (wasn't it that central heating was lost to Britain even though it had been known in Roman times?), but contrary to popular belief, the middle ages were in many respects also a continuation of the classical world.
For one thing, the Eastern Roman empire continued to exist until the 15th century and it is there that e.g. the Justinian code of law was devised, which, as far as I know, is still the basis of many modern legal systems, while itself being built upon ancient Roman law.
But even in Western Europe, Christianity can be seen as a continuation of the Roman Empire: It's not as if the religion hadn't been substantially changed and "romanised" after Constantine made it state religion. Also, in terms of scholarship, many key classical philosophers / scientists were never forgotten; Aristotle in particular remained a key influence. And, contrary to popular belief, middle ages scholars knew perfectly well that the earth was round, as had been shown by Ptolemy and others before him (they thought it was at the center of the universe, but as far as I know, nobody had successfully proven otherwise in antiquity either).
> Hm, I think we have to be a bit careful about the legacy of the classical world being "interrupted". This may be true in part (wasn't it that central heating was lost to Britain even though it had been known in Roman times?), but contrary to popular belief, the middle ages were in many respects also a continuation of the classical world.
I agree with you. We have to be careful, and the middle ages were in many respects a natural development out of the classical world.
But they were a natural development that saw a radical upheaval in the culture. The organization that the Romans put in place largely fell apart, forgotten. Industrial production crashed. There was not a continuous transmission of tradition -- a large part of the Renaissance really was reading ancient texts to discover what they said. They had vanished from the living tradition.
> (they thought it was at the center of the universe, but as far as I know, nobody had successfully proven otherwise in antiquity either)
That's not something that -- to the best of our knowledge today -- it's possible to prove or disprove. (Similarly, if you conceive of "the earth" as the spherical surface rather than the solid ball, you'll be perfectly correct if you say that Rome is at the center. You'll also be correct if you say any other point is the center.)
What evidence we do have, interestingly enough, points towards the earth really being at the center of the universe. Redshift in every direction! We reject that conclusion for philosophical reasons, not because it's been disproved.
Yup, you're totally right, I misspoke—I meant to say that the furthest you can trace back Western history is 2500 years [total] back to the Greek "golden age" ~500BC.
> Something I found charming from the wikipedia article on Sargon the Great is that the Babylonian king Nabonidus (6th century BC, "ancient" by any modern standard) sponsored archaeological research into his life.
Wow, never knew about this. I really want a term to come into the vernacular to describe history before ~800BC, because things really were completely different across Eurasia. In the Mediterranean and Middle East it was the revival of civilization after the Bronze Age collapse, in India it was the beginning of the Upanishadic era, and in China it was the beginning of the Spring and Autumn period. This [1] is sort of relevant.
One of the things I find really interesting about Chinese history is that Sima Qian, writing in the second and early first century BC, recorded a number of Shang kings reigning almost a thousand years before his time. For quite a while they were considered legendary, lacking any other corroborating sources -- but the Shang oracle bones eventually confirmed that kings matching the names Sima Qian gave reigned in the order in which he listed them.
(The Shang kings' names are actually ordinal markers -- something like Shang Fifth, Shang Second, etc -- but they did not reign in the order suggested by their names.)
Sima Qian, like Herodotus, receives a lot of credit for establishing history as a thing people kept track of. But he must have been working from some now-totally-lost fairly faithful sources.
And speaking of the coincidence between the recovery from the Bronze Age collapse and the Spring and Autumn period, I'm intrigued by the rough coincidence between the beginning of the Bronze Age collapse and the fall of the Shang dynasty. In that case, the coincidence is much rougher, though -- the Shang dynasty appears to fall about 100 years after the collapse.
That would be a difficult argument to make; classical Greece only goes back to about the eighth century BC. Mycenaean Greece goes much further back, but we can't observe most of the cultural continuity (though obviously there was a decent amount of it), because between Mycenaean Greece and classical Greece there was the Greek Dark Age of about 400 years when they forgot how to read and write. A cultural legacy of 2500 years total is a much fairer estimate than one of 3000 years.
As you note, though, the legacy of the classical world was itself interrupted and then purposefully reimported into Renaissance Europe. This is rather different from how, in the 4th century AD, there were still priests of the old religion in Babylon, reading tablets written thousands of years before them thanks to a historical tradition that had, at that point, never been interrupted.
Something I found charming from the wikipedia article on Sargon the Great is that the Babylonian king Nabonidus (6th century BC, "ancient" by any modern standard) sponsored archaeological research into his life. And well he might, since Sargon preceded Nabonidus by about 1800 years. But you just don't think about one ancient king supporting archaeology concerning another ancient king. Ancient is ancient, right?