Final Essay

I learned more than just ten new things in this class, I also gained new insight about things that I already knew and now feel that I have a much greater understanding of how civilizations build upon each other. The realization that many of the things in our own civilization were passed down from civilizations that existed thousands of years ago was amazing and surprising and has made me view things in a whole new way.

I have always enjoyed studying history and ancient Rome has always fascinated me, but I never really learned anything about their public works system until this class, what I learned was surprising and exciting. The video that was used for this part of the class was great, actually being able to see the remains of an ancient Roman city made it all really come to life. I had no idea that ancient Rome used a grid system to build their cities and definitely did not know that we use a similar system when building our cities today. They had many other innovations that would be passed on to future civilizations, including sanitary sewers, newly designed and well constructed aqueducts, roads, speed bumps and public bathrooms. Modern civilization owes a great deal to ancient Rome and every time I go over a speed bump in a parking lot or use a public bathroom I will remember that we might not have them if it were not for a civilization that came thousands of years before ours.

The ancient Roman civilization and their engineering skills leads me to the next thing that I learned in this class and that is architecture. Like most people I admired beautiful architecture before taking this class, but would not have been able to even guess at what type of architecture I was looking at. Modern and post-modern architecture d...

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...vations and changes that art, music and literature underwent to give us what we have today. The creation of sheet music, which became invaluable and new music instruments. The use of new materials and styles in art, literature that was once memorized finding their way to paper and the creation of the novel. What is interesting here is when we continued to make innovations and changes in these areas we did not simply cast the old away, we held onto it. We still read books by Homer, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and poetry from William Wordsworth and John Donne. We visit museums to admire art from ancient civilizations and orchestras still play music composed by Bach and Beethoven. I wonder if any of the books or music from today will become the classics of a future civilization or what if any art from our civilization will someday be marveled at in a museum.