Why Study Ancient World Cultures

Why Study Ancient World Cultures?

Why study ancient cultures? You might feel that the question is moot: students do study and will study ancient cultures; such study is an expected part of a tradition of intellectual development. The response to the why 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 look at the PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT -- these are all accepted parts of a Western education, aren't they?

Probably so: even today, in the plurality of approaches to the study of history and to the study of cultures, people talk about PLATO or DANTE or Krishna or Mohammed. But there is an important proviso: How you approach ancient cultures (or any other culture, for that matter) and how you conceive of the people of such distant worlds are of paramount 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 reflect 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 well ask how the battle that Arjuna holds off while frozen on his chariot relates, for example, to contemporary battles in World War II. Convinced that his relatives will die in this life only to be reborn in another, Arjuna can reluctantly permit the carnage to begin. No such choice is left to Schindler (featured in Spielberg's film Schindler's List), on the other hand, whose intervention on behalf of Jews saved many people in this life. The danger in looking for universals thus consists in reformulating other, possibly alien, views to fit our own. We must always guard against the assumption that other people think as we do -- or that they should. Arjuna speaks within 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' ATHENS -- where a gimpy-legged man could hobble around interrogating citizens at will -- differs profoundly from today's world beset with modern media whereby people rarely get to see or literally hear their critics.