Cairetw

The matter of whether or not the Greeks were the ‘barbarians’ of the prehistoric world, and in comparison with Egyptians and Mesopotamians, is a big question, which consists by two parts. The first part asks the truth in concern of the ‘start of the human civilization.’ That question involves historical and mostly archaeological evidences. A note for the historical evidences: before the Hellenistic times and especially at the time of the Greek kingdoms in Persia and Egypt, it was no word regarding the ‘first civilization.’ But that is another subject not to be relevant to be discussed here. The second part of the question is the anthropological and sociological. Here we are dealing mostly in matters of human’s spiritual and bodily involvement into the concept of natural environment and society.

The fact is that no other nation in its language used the word ‘barbarian,’ which is mostly a term with true meaning completely remote for what we use nowadays. So the statement ‘[t]he Greeks were the Barbarians in relation to Egyptians and their other mesopotamian neighbors’ sounds not well based. However, the Greeks did not deny any foreign influence for some religious practices.

But we can be confident that philosophy was born in Greece and not only ‘in Athens and its Colonies.’ Athens was not the only direct democracy before or after its existence. They were extremely numerous philosophical schools with different perspectives and thoughts. Though only 1/10000 documents –meaning nothing– of the ancient times are available for us today to be examined. History is based upon meaningless resources for the ancient philosophical history and thus we cannot atter a non-philosophical tradition outside the walls of Athens and its colonies.

The statement that ‘while Babylonians were already living in societies based on the city, the Greeks ancesters were still paleolithic tribes, which is quite barbarian,’ cannot offers a proper argument of the non-philosophical spirit in Greece in the later stages of its societies.

Yours,

Nikolaos Cleomenes