Although most Western Civilization textbooks begin with the rise of the first major agricultural societies in the ancient Middle East—the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations around 3,500 BCE (Before the Common Era)—the origins of Western culture and thought are closely identified with the emergence of ancient Greek civilization, especially its flowering in the Classical Period from around 500 to 100 BCE (Spielvogel, 2014). It was during this time that the famous philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides emerged as seminal figures in the birth of a new and vital intellectual culture.

Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer by Rembrandt Hermensz van Rijn, 1653.

The word civilization comes from the Latin word civitas, which means “city.” The rise of Western Civilization is closely tied to the development of the ancient Greek city-state or polis (Spielvogel, 2014). One of the most important and famous of these city-states was Athens, where commercial prosperity and the first experiments with democracy (for male Roman citizens) provided fertile ground for intellectual life and the development of the arts.

Geographically, the West is a somewhat loose concept that has evolved over time. Originally it encompassed the geographical reach and influence of Ancient Greece and Imperial Rome around the Mediterranean basin and included parts of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. With the fall of the Roman Empire (476 CE) and the rise of Medieval Christendom, Western Civilization became centered around the Holy Roman Empire in Europe. However, the Byzantine Empire and the rise of Islam to the East played an important role in preserving the learning and intellectual life of the ancient Western world. The centers of learning and culture in Western Europe were indebted to both Byzantium and Islam, where learning and the arts had long flourished (Essa & Ali, 2012).

Finally, as Europe emerged from the high Middle Ages into the period known as the Renaissance (meaning rebirth), the growth of commerce and exploration expanded the influence of Western Civilization to the “New World” of North and South America and many other parts of the world that were conquered and colonized by various European nations.

Above all, the West is really an idea that refers less to a specific place than to a coherent set of ideas and attitudes that have come to characterize what we refer to as Western Civilization. This is perhaps most clearly expressed in the notion of the “Western Canon,” which is a set of writings—philosophical, literary, political, and religious—that have come to reflect and define this culture. The history of Western Civilization is, above all, the history of its culture and ideas and how these have profoundly influenced human civilization as a whole. This view is necessarily limited by our sources, which are legal documents and records, myths, and stories.

We must always remember that this history has been presented to us by the “culture keepers,” who have traditionally been educated males of the elite class (Kahn & Onion, 2016). We have to dig more deeply to imagine how this representation both reflects – and distorts – the human experiences of others not in power.