Greek and Roman Civilizations

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).

Archaeological evidence suggests that such characteristics originated in several different regions of the ancient world, namely, Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, Mesoamerica, Greece, and Rome. In this paper, we will compare and contrast the birth and growth of the Greek and Roman Civilizations.

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earlier Mycenaean era, an era but left no written texts in ancient Greek, it has given to date a written text with historical content.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.

With the latest surveys and studies of the findings of the Neolithic era documented that the development of the Cycladic and Minoan civilization there are cuts or sudden flashes, but continuity and culmination of the cultural evolution that begins as early as the Stone Age and despite the (uncertain) external effects inseparably connected with the Greek geographical space, since it is impossible to find unchanged and the same succession in neighboring stromal this area (Chavalas, 1998, Pp. 278).

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 ...