Western Civilization

* E. Europe isn't Western

It's part of Western Eurasian Civilization. Western Civilization is technically distinct and defined by the cultural descendants of Carolingian France, Latin Christianity, and North Germanic law and government. It does not include Ancient Greece and Rome, but instead derives and adopts elements and aesthetics from them in a similar manner as Eastern Orthodox and Arab-Persian Islamic civilization does.

Europe/European is an arbitrary concept as well. Are Armenians European? Are Iranians European? Are street shitters European? Where does geographic Europe end and where does it start?

Russians are the incarnation of byzantium in the modern era
3rd rome

>I don't think any historian has ever said that. E. Europe is Western- just not Russia.
>Belarus(sia)? Totally Western. Russia? Nah.

>No. I do believe Russians are European but their civ is a mix of Western and Eastern. It's both but neither in their 'pure' forms.
Not this meme again

That user is right though

I mean if we're considering ancient Greece and Rome to be Western civilisation then sure, there's no reason not to also include Islam and why not Mesopotamia too while we're at it, into what is a completely meaningless category.

But if we use the definition of "civilisation" that actually has some meaning and usefulness, then the West is the civilisation that emerged in Western Europe around the 10th century.

I never said was wrong

>I mean if we're considering ancient Greece and Rome to be Western civilisation
Basically everyone considers Ancient Greece and Rome to be western m8

>emerged in Western Europe around the 10th century

Why this random date?

Yes everyone except actual historians. Kind of how basically everyone considers the Middle Ages to be the "Dark Ages".

It's not random. It's the time when the West started developing an independent religion, original art, and an original social model. Before that it had been in the cultural periphery of Byzantium.

>Yes everyone except actual historians
I've never heard of a single historian not classifying Ancient Greece and Rome as western.

Sounds like you don't know a lot of history or historiography.

Carolingian Renaissance

Us being ancient Greco-Romans is another Italian Renaissance myth that, much like the "Dark Ages", continues to survive in pop history. It's an extremely Western-centric view which ignores the rest of the world, and also deforms Greco-Roman civilisation into something it wasn't. In reality if Greco-Romans were Western then Muslims must be too, since they have been just as influenced by them as we have. And then you end up with a completely meaningless definition of the West like the one in OP. But the Greco-Roman world is dead and buried, and already had been for many centuries when our world emerged, far from Greece in both time and space, in Catholic medieval Western Europe.

Not quite. The 9th century Carolingian Renaissance was when Western Europe reconnected to civilisation, in this case Byzantine civilisation. But it was still just imitation, Western art and architecture were Byzantine art and architecture, and our religion was the same as well. It's in the 10th century that the West first started moving away from that and creating something new and authentically Western.

There's a difference between Classical Western and modern Western.

I think civilisations are useful categories that should be maintained. As Westerners (meaning West Europeans) we have a fundamentally different world view and a separate history from either Muslims or ancient Greeks.

That said there are several civilisation around the Mediterranean which have existed in close proximity with each other and significantly influenced ours, in form if not in essence: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greco-Roman, Near East, and of course the West. Pic related.

Fair points. I stand corrected. Sorry for being dumb

Western Europe would never advance in anything without the ancient Greco-Roman texts to be used as basis for the achievements though.The Muslims did it first and they were more advanced at the time, sure, but then they went full durka later.

No, western civilization started with ancient Greece.

The Middle East never accepted the values or culture of Greece. The Romans did and later so did the rest of Europe.

What a fool you are. Western civilization starts with Sumer, and there is no place on Earth more like Ancient Greece than the modern Muslamic world.

Stupidest post ever made on Veeky Forums
The ME is not part of western civilization but your reasoning for why is beyond moronic.

>The Middle East never accepted the values or culture of Greece.

Didn't it? A culture where women were regarded as lacking virtue and beauty, were made to wear headscarves when married, was prone to homosexual pederasty, and was patriarchal and restricted full membership to the civic cult to male family heads of good virtue sounds an awful lot like the Middle East.

Why do people like to talk out of their ass?

This dumb faggot deserves to be screenshotted.

This is literally true, and I agree but for some reason a lot of people don't consider Byzantium western either despite the fact that it's literally the Roman Empire.

...

literally why

Armenians and Iranians are not Europeans. Europe starts at the west of the Ural Mountains and north of the caucus mountains. It is also west of Anatolia. It ends after some minor islands west of Europe in the Atlantic that have historically had ties to the mainland.

No, that arre Greek larpers 'Wewuz'

so many muslims on this board nowadays

Is Cyprus part of Europe?

Because geographically it's not yet it's a member of the European Union.

>Greek larpers
>Roman
>feudal backwater slavniggers
>Roman

what did he mean by this?

Goat fuckers detected

If Anatolia was still Greek/Byzantine/Roman it would be considered a part of Europe prove me wrong
protip: you literally, unironically, cannot

>literally the roman empire
>isn't

>Unironically believing that Islamic Civilization didn't heavily copy Roman and Greek culture
Are you retarded?

>isn't
>it literally is

They didn't.

Not in the slightest. Ottomans may have borrowed some, but that is about it.

Since the Bronze Age collapse the Near East have been considerably different from the west.

I actually had no idea this forum was filled with so many cultural relevatists. feelsbadman

>Roman Republic/Empire started with the Latins and had a Latin culture and language
>ERE abandons Latin in favor of Greek in 610 AD, at this point, no traces of Latin culture remain
>massacres Latin people 600 years later and whine when they retaliate against you

Byz*ntines are fucking pathetic.

AFAIK the hellespont has always been the separation between Europe and Asia. Western Anatolia was the province of Asia Minor, for example.

>There has been no Hellenic influence in the Middle East since the Bronze Age collapse
>Arguing otherwise is 'cultural relativism'

Your bait game is on point.

AFAIK the Greeks considered the Don to be the separation between Europe and Asia as well, it doesn't mean it should be

>political legitimacy is dependent on what language you speak

Everything East of the Elbe isn't Western

Not an argument.

The East did not adopt Greek ideas or culture, the west did.

The East did not adopt Roman law, the west did.

Persia, Egypt and the rest had few similarities with Greece/Rome.

While the west adopted Greek culture and Roman law, the Middle East adopted Islamic law and culture.

Yes you are a moral relevatists if you can't see a clear distinction between Europe and the Middle East since the Bronze Age collapse.

All of Islamic philosophy is derived from Greek philosophy. Avicenna, Averroes, etc... The vast majority of Middle Eastern architecture is Greco-Roman inspired.

The fact that you don't realize that Islamic civilization is heavily influence by Greco-Roman civilization means you have virtually no knowledge of the history of the region.

The reason why the Middle East is not part of "Western Civilization" is because the term refers to modern western civilization which began during the Carolingian Renaissance. Both Europe and the Middle East have origins from Classical Western Civilization.

Is America, Canada, and Australia Western countries? Alexandria was definitely Western in the sense it was a Greek enclave.

It was a part of the Roman Empire that had split from it early on and then it developed a different culture over time. Different language, different architecture, different religion, different art, etc. By this logic, the HRE is Roman as well.

>From a global historical perspective, should Middle Eastern civilizations be considered part of Western Civilization?
it truly depends on what specific defining qualities you imply towards western civilization

greece and persia saw a period of great economic and cultural exchange during antiquity, which makes both of these nations culturally tied and equally important
in this context? yes, they are both western as "it takes two to tango"

however, if you define the western world by the enlightenment, republicanism, patronage of european art, etc?
then no, the islamic world and the "western" world were clearly divided in both ideals and cultures.

The HRE is literally a meme though, zero political power, it was effectively a non-entity.

>muh 200 years of Islamic Golden Age this one time
Not an argument.

>Both Europe and the Middle East have origins from Classical Western Civilization.

WE WUZ A FAMILY N SHIEET

That wasn't his argument, correct.

Islamic law and culture is derived from not only Greek culture but Roman law and many other Near Eastern sources - all of which had been heavily influenced by centuries of Hellenism and Roman rule.

>Oh no! He blew me the fuck out!
>Better call him a Mudscum!

>civilization which had some meaning and usefullness

So mesopotamia?

Islamic law is derived from Sharia and Islamic Culture is derived from the Arabian peninsula.

Kek

You know what I mean.

There were also huge numbers of Syrians writing in Greek as well, as well as Jews until they got IMPERIUMed

Islamic law is derived, in order, from the Quran, the Hadith and Sunna, legal consensus of judges, and local tribal and customary law.

The Quran was, if not originally revealed, at least written down in Roman Arabia Felix and Syria. The Hadith and Sunna were compiled in Roman Syria and Iraq. The founding judges of early Islamic law all lived and worked in Mesopotamia, with only one making any sort of deference to the customs of the Arabian Peninsula, and you can guess what local customary law means when talking about a culture and polity based around Syria.

>The East did not adopt Greek ideas or culture
>What is Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch,

>should Middle Eastern civilizations be considered part of Western Civilization?
Have they been using a Latin or Greek alphabet for more that two centuries? Do they speak Indoeuropean languages? Do they not distinguish themselves from the West?

>belief system and well as religions
Monotheism ultimately does. But before monotheism there was a polytheistic religion that was not Semitic.

Read Indoeuropean Poetry and Myth and The Horse, the Wheel and Language.

I'd be more willing to agree with OP if the West was made of only Hittites, but the Middle Eastern and Egyptian civilizations are simply part of a series of Mediterranean cultures that the West interacted with - more than any other region, surely.

What we call "West" is what is left of a massive, massive language community that was north of the Mediterranean.

Just because a Western power invades a country and steals shit from it, it doesn't mean the peoples there become Westerners.

Many resent the invaders.

>latin alphabet for more than two centuries

Why the arbitary date?

>do they speak an indo-european language

Iranians,kurds and armenians do. Zoroastrians were also the first monotheists and they are pure indo-european

Greece has more in common with the middle east even today than to Germany or other savage lands.

Modern West Europeans are just larping and claiming achievements as their own.

>sand niggers
>sand niggers whos identity got cucked
>poo in loo

>white
Lol no.

>Is Cyprus part of Europe?
It's inhabited by mostly European descent however.

It doesn't matter what people say. The fact is most Iranians/Armenians look like Arabs and that's why they'll never be seen as European. It's childish but it's true.

"Arab" isnt just one ethnicity. Its a diverse group with different phenotypes. Ive also seen enough greeks who look like middle easterners. Are they non-white too?

Europe is just a tiny peninsula of Asia

>"Arab" isnt just one ethnicity. Its a diverse group with different phenotypes.
Maybe you're talking about the people of the levant who are arabs in all but blood. Pic related is what an Israeli man looks like:

And if you want a serious answer, the average Iranian male wouldn't fit into my country. In fact none of the bottom row really would desu.

> Ive also seen enough greeks who look like middle easterners. Are they non-white too?
I've seen it too. But I've also met more Greeks who look like your average Europeans than anything else.

This is gong to sound autistic, but being a 'white' ethnicity is comparing your shitskin looking population to your white one. Iranians have some white looking people but they're overwhelmingly brown.

fucking obviously. western civilization descends directly from sumerian civilization, drawing any kind of line within is entirely arbitrary. the only civilizations that seem to have developed independently of sumer are the YRA civilization and american civs, and even the YRA could have easily been influenced by the middle east.

>Why the arbitary date?
Because you don't become part of the West just by changing alphabet overnight, a cut-off is needed.

>Iranians,kurds and armenians do. Zoroastrians were also the first monotheists and they are pure indo-european
So did Indians, but they're not part of the West. Which is why I used more that that criteria alone.

Linguists say they broke off very very early, so early that the role of devas and asuras is inverted between Hinduism and Zoroastrianism.

Now, that Zoroastrians would get monotheism started is a very good point.

not the guy you're responding to, but there is no reason to create an arbitrary cut-off point. everything from the mediterranean to india has a clear historical basis in sumer. it is the same civilization, branching off into different areas over millennia. breaking it into pieces is entirely arbitrary. it's simply inaccurate to claim otherwise.

You now have been made aware that the Greek alphabet is derived from a Phoenician writing system. In fact, the very words alpha (from "aleph", meaning "ox") and beta (from "bet", meaning "house") stem from a Northwestern Semitic language. The symbols stem from Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

>What we call "West" is [...] a [...] language community that was north of the Mediterranean.
What we call "West" is mostly arbitrary and easily changes through context.

"Western" can refer to a cultural sphere like that influenced by a set of languages, as you do, but that language could be the larger Indo-European language family, it could be the spheres influenced by Latin, those influenced by Greek, or those influenced by French or English.
It can refer to an economic sphere, like the G8, the G9, or the G20, in which case even Japan would be part of the "West".
It can refer to an existing political entity, like the European Union, in which case the "West" ends at the EU's border, so Belarus and the Ukraine wouldn't be part of the "West", or the NATO, in which case the USA, Turkey and Japan would be part of the "West".
It can refer to a historical political entity, like the Western powers bloc during the Cold War, in which case the Soviet Union wouldn't be part of the "West", or the Western Roman Empire, in which case Greece and Byzantium wouldn't be part of the "West", or Byzantium, in which case Rome wouldn't be part of the "West".
It can refer to ethnicity in Europe, which could lead to Hungary and Finland not being part of the "West".
It can refer to religions like Catholicism, in which case Orthodox regions wouldn't be part of the "West", or Christianity, in which case Turkey wouldn't be part of the "West" - or to Abrahamic religions more generally, in which case all Muslim countries would be part of the "West".
It can refer to a shared set of values like those of the Enlightenment, in which case many countries all over the world would be part of the "West".

But why two centuries specifically? Why not one or three centuries?

Latin and greek alphabets ultimately derive from the semitic phoenician alphabet.

>everything from the mediterranean to india has a clear historical basis in sumer.
Read pic related.

My criteria are three and simple:
>Have they been using a Latin or Greek alphabet for more that two centuries?
>Do they speak Indoeuropean languages?
>Do they not distinguish themselves from the West?

I simply find mine to detect the greatest possible consensus over what is "Western."

>but that language
Hence me using language and alphabet together
>economic sphere
It never did
>political entity
It never did
>ethnicity
>religion
Culture
>Finland
Finns and other surviving non-Indoeuropean communities in Europe are part of the reason I say "speak" in the present tense in my criterion. Finland is a bilingual country according to its constitution, Finns are no strangers to learning English and Swedish.
>Byzantium
>Orthodox
This is exactly where the whole "West" came from
>Turkey
They don't considers themselves Westerners and changed their alphabet too soon, I'll give credit to Ataturk for modernizing and attempting the Westernization of the country, but presently they're not here yet, in fact they are going further away.
>shared set of values
It never did

And thank God we use a 20-something letter alphabet instead of thousands of signs.

Western culture involves stealing a lot of shit, particularly ideas that work, yes.

Because I believe it is the best.

The oldest country in Europe to get its present form of government, and which is still a world power, is the United Kingdom. The two century cut-off is closest to the Acts of Union @ 1800.

Lots of things that would define what the West is, and can do on the global scale, happened since, so if you are a country and want to Westernize, in hindsight you probably would want to join us in that very moment, because the Great Divide is imminent.

>This is exactly where the whole "West" came from
I mean this in the sense that we call West what's on the West side of these guys

>Read pic related.
did they invent written language? you might not understand the anthropological definition of the word "civilization" if you think what you're suggesting is true at all.

also, by the argument you are making, africans are responsible for civilization, because that's where humans come from. the question here is "what defined western civilization?". as your steppe riders did not have written language, they cannot be civilization. influenced, sure. just as much as african hunter-gatherer ancestors influenced civilization, and notharctus tenebrosus, an early human ancestor. they had an effect on, but ultimately are not, western civilization.

to re-define the word "civilization" is a semantical argument.

>why?
>"Because I said so!"
Behold, the arbiter of what is true and what is false! We have discovered him! Give us more of your objective opinions.

WE

Egypt>Babylon>Persia>Greece>Rome

That's the origin of western civilization. Turkshits are not part of it.

WE

Roman Empire is the father of Western civilization, Shitskins could take the rest

>It never did
Strange, because I listed only examples of definitions of "the West" that I had actually have read before. You must either know me better than myself to claim that I have never read this, or you agree that I have read this and claim that the definition was somehow "wrong".

>Finns and other surviving non-Indoeuropean communities in Europe are part of the reason I say "speak" in the present tense in my criterion. Finland is a bilingual country according to its constitution, Finns are no strangers to learning English and Swedish.
There are a lot of bilingual countries. Is Korea western? They learn English and stopped using pictography in favour of an alphabet.

>This is exactly where the whole "West" came from
So, Western Rome wasn't Western then? Ancient Greece wasn't Western either?

>did they invent written language?
There was proto-writing going on in Neolithic Europe, see the Vinča symbols and Dispilio Tablet, it has nothing to do with the cuneiform script of the Sumers.

Then what was to become the West found an alphabet that worked for them, and reshaped it according to their uses and needs, which may have included selling shit to the Phoenicians.

>by the argument you are making
No, my argument is that West today is a collection of nations, the people of which presently meet these criteria:
>Have they been using a Latin or Greek alphabet for more that two centuries?
>Do they speak Indoeuropean languages?
>Do they not distinguish themselves from the West?
And no, the Great Divergence did not happen during the days of Sumer.

> I listed only examples of definitions of "the West" that I had actually have read before
Find me some scholars that think a civilization is an economic sphere.

>Is Korea western? They learn English and stopped using pictography in favour of an alphabet.
Hangul is not Latin nor Greek, nor do Koreans see themselves as Western, your efforts in convincing me you're retarded are paying off.

>So,
You didn't read the post below. But let's try again.

Without a Byzantine Empire and Orthodox Christianity people other than me would simply have said "Europe" and not came up with the word "West."

My criteria go out of their way to avoid the mistake of excluding Greece since present-day Greeks see themselves as Westerners (we wuz democracy n shiet), use the Greek alphabet and speak Greek, an IE language.

What everyone that is replying to me fails to notice is that, while the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations laid the foundations for what the consensus would call Western civilization without too much protest, there was no "West" at the time.

A "West" we speak of today, because of all the historical processes that led to this kind of cultural and economic hegemony that caused historians, economists and others to distinguish a "West" from other parts of the Old World.

>Hangul is not Latin nor Greek, nor do Koreans see themselves as Western, your efforts in convincing me you're retarded are paying off.
Hangul is a writing system, not a language. Latin and Greek are languages, not writing systems. Your insulting me is rude and counterproductive.

>Without a Byzantine Empire and Orthodox Christianity people other than me would simply have said "Europe" and not came up with the word "West."
Which time are you talking about there?
The present? Then I have to assume that you don't think that the Americas, Israel, Australia and New Zealand are "Western".
The Middle Ages? Then there would be places such as Scandinavia in Europe that nobody would've considered "Western" before Christianization.