Why Study Ancient World Cultures :: Ancient World Culture

Why Study Ancient homo Cultures?Why analyze ancient cultures? You might feel that the question is delve students do analyze and will call for ancient cultures such study is an expected part of a tradition of intellectual development. The response to the wherefore of the initial question is a matter of tradition, if not fact. A study of the ROMAN EMPIRE, a reading of Greek philosophy and literature, a smelling at the PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT -- these are all accepted parts of a westbound education, arent they?Probably so even today, in the plurality of approaches to the study of write up and to the study of cultures, people talk active PLATO or DANTE or Krishna or Mohammed. But there is an important proviso How you approach ancient cultures (or some(prenominal) other culture, for that matter) and how you conceive of the people of such distant worlds are of dominant importance. At this point, you might ask yourself these two additional questions Do we study these cultures because, to some extent, all cultures share certain characteristics? Does our own culture mull over aspects of these other cultures?The answer to the first of the two questions has historically been found in a discussion of universality. Consider, for a moment, the case of Arjuna in The Bhagavad Gita. You might closely ask how the battle that Arjuna holds off while frozen on his transport relates, for example, to contemporary battles in World War II. Convinced that his relatives will stall in this life only to be reborn in another, Arjuna tail assembly reluctantly permit the carnage to begin. No such choice is odd to Schindler (featured in Spielbergs film Schindlers List), on the other hand, whose intervention on behalf of Jews salve many people in this life. The danger in looking for universals then consists in reformulating other, possibly alien, views to fit our own. We must always guard against the guess that other people think as we do -- or that they should. Arjuna speaks in spite of appearance the context of one culture Schindler acts within the confines of another.The differences among cultures are of greatest interest here, and reading about ancient cultures is thus reading about other people whose lives were surely different from our own. The social organization of Socrates capital of Greece -- where a gimpy-legged man could hobble around interrogating citizens at will -- differs profoundly from todays world beset with modern media whereby people rarely get to instruct or literally hear their critics.