May 17, · Ancient Greek art flourished around B.C., when Athenian general Pericles used public money to support the city-state’s artists and thinkers. Pericles paid Between and B.C., Alexander the Great and his armies conquered much of the known world, creating an empire that stretched from Greece and Asia Minor through Egypt and the Persian empire in the Near East to India. This unprecedented contact with cultures far and wide disseminated Greek culture and its arts, and exposed Greek artistic styles to a host of new exotic influences The Cyclades, a group of islands in the southwestern Aegean, comprises some thirty small islands and numerous islets. The ancient Greeks called them kyklades, imagining them as a circle (kyklos) around the sacred island of Delos, the site of the holiest sanctuary to blogger.com of the Cycladic Islands are particularly rich in mineral resources—iron ores, copper, lead ores, gold, silver
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Shasta, near Weed, Greek civilization essay. Photo: Jeffrey St. In its simplest meaning, regeneration is about recreating something useful and vital, including civilization, greek civilization essay, that humans or unknown forces have diminished or destroyed.
Plato, — BCE, lived at a time of peril. He grew up in Athens during the last twenty-three years of the Peloponnesian War. Things did not look good. He tried to find out why Athens was part of a Greek fratricide. He studied why civilizations often decline, even disappear.
His fertile mind examined historical experience, seeking clues and examples of regeneration. Book 7 of his Republic and his dialogues, Timaios and Kritiasoffer valuable insights into how humans can sometimes dig in the rubble in order to reinvent civilization. His story of the lost world of the Atlantis has mesmerized countless people throughout the ages. The dialogues Timaios and Kritias explain the rise and fall of the giant island empire of Atlantis.
Atlantis was inhabited by people of extraordinary versatility and intelligence. The excavated region of the Greek Aegean island of Thera reveals a very sophisticated civilization resembling the dominant Minoan culture of the large Greek island of Crete in the second millennium BCE.
In BCE, a volcano exploded in Thera, destroying most of the island and Crete. Could Thera have been at the center of Atlantis? Satellite image of Thera, NASA.
Public Domain. Plato said Atlantis came to an end because of anthropogenic causes. The citizens of Atlantis embarked on a campaign of conquest. They attacked Athens and Hellas. Athenians led a united Greek force and defeated the Atlantis invaders. After Plato, civilization was driven to near extinction, greek civilization essay, this time by the fanaticism of the new masters of the Mediterranean: Christian and Islamic monotheists.
By some extraordinary reason, the Baghdad califs embraced Hellenic philosophy and science in order to build Moslem culture. Centuries eighth to tenth date the Moslem Renaissance. Greek learning leaked to Europe from Moslem Spain.
But, eventually, greek civilization essay, the wars between Christianity and Islam turned Islam to its monotheistic roots. Moslem Turks captured Christian and Greek Constantinople and Greece in It took the fifteenth-century Renaissance to revive civilization. That unprecedented experiment in the regeneration of civilization was the concerted effort of Greek and Latin scholars and politicians.
Greek scholars brought to the Italian city states most of the surviving works of science and civilization of their ancient ancestors. These included the immortal poetry of Homer, Hesiod, Aischylos, Sophocles, greek civilization essay, Euripides, Aristophanes; the histories of Herodotos and Thucydides; and the philosophy and science of Thales, Anaximander, greek civilization essay, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Demokritos, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Apollonios of Perga, Aristarchos of Samos, Ktesibios, Archimedes and Hipparchos.
However, starting in mid-nineteenth century, those who had benefitted from the Renaissance, Europeans and Americans, were caught in greek civilization essay frenzy of mechanizing their societies and civilization. This machine-mania made people less human, more violent, greek civilization essay, and less respectful of the natural world, the fountainhead of all life, greek civilization essay.
A century-and-a-half later, our time of the third decade of the twenty-first century, we are observing an anthropogenic decline of civilization, not much different from the decline Plato decried nearly two-and-a-half millennia ago. Our decline includes the loss of too many species and the beginnings of the breakdown of ecosystems. We seem to be oblivious to the corruption greek civilization essay allows, for instance, large farmers of California to use tremendous amounts of drinking water for the growing of almonds, which are primarily exported.
In addition, the Democratic administration of Joe Bidden and the Democratic politicians of California are giving so much water to the Republican growers of the Central Valley greek civilization essay is catastrophic to the Salmon. Salmon and steelhead used to connect the mountains of California to its coast, being a mirror of a healthy greek civilization essay and society.
This shameful political negligence and undemocratic practice is taking place at a time of severe drought, itself a sign of an angry natural greek civilization essay. Knowledge and interests crucial to the survival of democratic and ecological institutions seem to be waning. Yet those institutions have been pillars of human and natural survival and flourishing.
Agriculture is one of those institutions. It has been the very foundation of civilization and life, nearly forever. But like other greek civilization essay forms of human culture, agriculture has been drenched of its ancient core mission of being part of nature, while nailed with machines and flooded with chemicals. The result is a factory in the fields that is divorced from greek civilization essay original purpose, raising healthy food and working with nature.
This civilization subversion has raised anxieties about the quality and purity of food, drinking water, air, greek civilization essay, and the integrity and health of the natural world, greek civilization essay.
All these worries have been manifesting themselves with clear signs depicting humans erring to the point of promoting their own decline and destruction.
As if these human woes were not dangerous enough, climate change becomes the icing on the mechanical and poison cake. It engulfs humans, good and bad, greek civilization essay, and the natural world in a dance of a potential catastrophe. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been informing policy makers the world over of the existing and worsening climate conditions of the planet. It warns of coming unlivable heat waves, widespread hunger and drought, rising sea levels and extinction.
Machine agriculture is a major contributor to this life and death climate threat. It exists primarily because of petroleum, natural gas, and coal, key ingredients fueling climate change. It is this dire condition of nearly total human dependence on fossil fuels warming the Earth that is tearing societies apart. Those who profit from fossil fuels have purchased policy makers, businesses, greek civilization essay, many scientists and the mass media.
But keeping secret or ignoring climate change does not make any difference to the fury of a perpetually warmer planet. The longer presidents and Congress do nothing to end the reign of these heat trapping fuels, greek civilization essay, the worse the outcome, greek civilization essay.
The leaked UN report is not exaggerating. Heatwaves, massive forest fires, droughts, greek civilization essay, hunger — and migration wars are already with us. Those who see or study the degeneration of agriculture and civilization are often polite and politically correct to the point of becoming irrelevant.
However, officials of the US Department of Agriculture were concerned. They torpedoed the idea and nothing really happened.
Nevertheless, a few decades ago, a handful of Americans warned us of our abandonment of civilization. Ecology has been the voice of regeneration and the defining science for that metamorphosis. The course of rising ecological consciousness in the United States has been painful and slow, greek civilization essay. The failure of the country to take adequate measures to protect its unparalleled natural riches did not make matters easier.
Physicians and scientists have largely failed to take the carcinogenic and neurotoxic poisons greek civilization essay farmers seriously.
Their greek civilization essay adds legitimacy to the perpetuation of a catastrophic practice. However, the thought of the American visionary Aldo Leopold broke the silence. In an original essay he wrote in in volume 31 of the Journal of ForestryLeopold connected policy and the survival of America to an abiding respect to nature, especially to the integrity of the land. Leopold was professor at the University of Wisconsin. The other American who warned the country of its self-defeating machine and chemical agriculture was a gardener named J.
Rodale in Emmaus, greek civilization essay, Pennsylvania. He spoke ceaselessly about farming with nature, by which he meant no pesticides and lots of biodiversity to complement and enrich the raising of food. In his Our Poisoned Earth and Skyhe borrowed from Aristotle the concept of the golden mean in order to illustrate that organic farming is the golden mean, avoiding the two extremes of excess and deficiency of industrialized agriculture.
Organic means goodness. Leopold and Rodale addressed regeneration. Leopold meant changes in our way of life, our civilization.
Rodale, too, was practical and greek civilization essay. He started organic gardens, magazines, and research institutes to find out.
Organic farming was the antithesis of machine agriculture. It was applied regeneration. It sparked the science of agroecology, greek civilization essay. It gave Americans a taste of what good food greek civilization essay all about, its taste, aroma, and satisfaction.
At the same time, organic farming revealed the poisons behind the science façade of agribusiness and government regulatory agencies and departments. It was a dream of bringing back to life the family farming traditions and practices of rural America, while confirming the bad intent and deleterious effects of the agricultural chemistry of the land grant universities and large farmers.
Regeneration works. In fact, at a time of climate emergency, it may turn out to be our most valuable asset for restoring agriculture, and, in so many other ways, helping us to revive our civilization. Regeneration is like the Greek manuscripts in the fifteenth century Venice and Padua. In either way, we are discovering wisdom. Like Plato, we all see another potential Atlantis in the horizon.
Political, corporate, and scientific corruption in matches the corruption at the end of the Atlantis. Now we have climate change instead of tyrants and angry gods. Regeneration is an inspiration and a solution for no more fossil fuels, the expansion of organic farming, the replacement of fossil fuels electricity with solar energy, and the abandonment of petroleum transportation for electric transport.
In other words, regeneration is a key to a solar America and world. Regeneration should become an organizing principle and policy for fighting climate greek civilization essay and recovering our Western civilization.
Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of 6 books, greek civilization essay, including Poison Spring with Mckay Jenkings.
Ancient Greece in 18 minutes
, time: 17:38Pandora's box, the Greek myth of Pandora and her box
Legacy of the Greek architectural canon. The canonical Greek architectural orders have exerted influence on architects and their imaginations for thousands of years. While Greek architecture played a key role in inspiring the Romans, its legacy also stretches far beyond antiquity Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the ancient Greeks, and a genre of Ancient Greek blogger.com stories concern the origin and nature of the world, the lives and activities of deities, heroes, and mythological creatures, and the origins and significance of the ancient Greeks' own cult and ritual practices. Modern scholars study the myths to shed light on the religious A civilization (or civilisation) is a complex society that is characterized by urban development, social stratification, a form of government, and symbolic systems of communication (such as writing). Civilizations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics, such as centralization, the domestication of both humans and other
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