West European Studies

[Name of the institute]

Introduction

The earliest civilizations that are the life in cities emerged around 5,000 years ago. The word civilization occupies a precarious place in Western vocabularies as a result of the term's association with progress, rationality, and colonialist ideologies of racial discrimination. Nevertheless, at its most basic level, a civilization refers to the process of becoming civilized as a consequence of individuals' cohabitating in cities. Such a definition reveals the superficial impact of social networks on civilized life, as, it was precisely through agriculture, trade, war, language, religion, and cultural and technological initiatives that interdependent communities formed the basis of the earliest civilizations (search.proquest.com).

Discussion

Greek Civilization

Greeks regarded as the Homeric epics, mostly dating to the 8th BC century, but to describe several earlier Mycenaean era, an era but left no written texts in ancient Greek, it has given to date a written text with historical content. However, it widely accepted by all modern scholars, that Greek history begins somewhere in the late Bronze Age with the emergence and development of the first glorious Greek civilization, the Mycenaean (about 1600 BC - 1100 BC).

By researching and studying the other two great civilizations of the Bronze Age in Greece, the Cycladic and Minoan, gradually deciphered that the Mycenaean civilization largely below the other two cultures, although distinct from them in fundamental cultural and cultural characteristics (language, architecture, religion, etc.), the extension if it does not abolish, but based on these extended and gives momentum to spread from the area of the Aegean throughout the Mediterranean. Under this light, it is not uncommon to include in Greek history by many scholars and the Cycladic and Minoan civilization itself not as a Greek, but as a precursor and necessary for understanding, the first Greek civilization, the Mycenaean.

Roman Civilization

The term Ancient Rome describes a culture that had its roots in a small agricultural community founded on the Italian peninsula during the 10th century BC belonging geographically at the Mediterranean Sea, evolved into one of the most extensive empires in history. Over the centuries, the Roman political system changed from monarchy to an oligarchic republic and then to an increasingly centralized empire. The whole of Western Europe and the Mediterranean Sea came to rule through conquest and assimilation.

The decline of the Roman Empire occurred in the fifth century AD Mastizomeni by political instability and having received numerous attacks on migrant populations, the western part of the Empire, including Spain, of Gaul and Italy, divided into independent kingdoms in the 5th century.

Comparing and Contracting Roman and Greek Civilization

The essential features of Greek civilization (ethnicity, language, economy, religion "Olympic" and religious "mystery", political and constitutional structures). Basic elements of Greek history: Greek Persian wars, the rivalry between Sparta and Athens, the Macedonian hegemony and the figure of Alexander the Great. The items "original" of the Roman civilization (the formation of Rome, the primitive social structure "noble", the religion, the first parliamentary structures). The Greeks failed to see history in terms of a future. To put it ...