They shaped our world

Everything has an origin – the moment of time, the place, the reason, the creator. It is sometimes surprising to discover that many things and ideas we take for granted have their origin in the ancient and even prehistoric times. The knowledge of the origin and the history of the ideas and things help us better understand our time and our own world view.

Here is my short list of the people that shaped the modern times:

1. Those who built Goebekli Tepe, then Sumer and all Mesopotamia region, Egypt, Indus Valley, and China.

2. Those who appeared in the period from the 8th to 3rd centuries BC, called by Karl Jaspers an Axial Age of civilization: Confucius and Lao-Tze in China, the Upanishads and Buddha in India, Zarathustra in Iran, the prophets of Old Testament in Palestine, the giants of Ancient Greece – Homer, the tragedians, Thucydides, Archimedes, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato.

3. Starting with Ancient Greece, we can even see the personal connections that allowed the direct transfer of the knowledge and building upon it:

Socrates – the father of Western philosophy – was Plato’s teacher.

Plato – one of the founders of Western philosophy, religion, and spirituality – was Aristotle’s teacher.

Aristotle – the father of science – was the teacher of Alexander the Great.

Alexander the Great brought together eastern and western worlds – Ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, India, Egypt.

Then the tenuous personal connections expanded into flows between cultures and regions:

Roman Empire solidified Alexander’s achievements based on the industrial grade infrastructure and spread the results all over Europe, Asia Minor, and Egypt.

Constantine the Great established Christianity as the dominant western religion.

Christianity, born in the Fertile Crescent, sustained Europe during Dark Ages and spread all the way to the north and to Russia.

Charlemagne and German Ottonian dynasty with the help of the Catholic church created Europe politically as we know it.

Islamic Golden Age helped to preserve the otherwise lost achievements of antiquity and bring them back to Europe via Spain, thus seeding the Renaissance, thanks in big part to the efforts of Pope Sylvester II.

Then the Renaissance in Europe opened the doors to the Modern Age, and we got what we have.

The list is far from being complete, but even this short version shows how little our views have changed since then and how true was what English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said: “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

From Philogelos (The Laughter Lover) – a book compiled in Greek
in the fourth or fifth century AD.

A young man, who was away from his home for a long time, consulted an incompetent astrologer about his family.

“How are they?” he asked.

“They’re all fine, especially your father.

“But he’s been dead for 10 years!”

“You obviously don’t know who your father is.”