what is "Western Civilization"?

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>>2287955
>The notion was long before Christendom
Not really. Western civilization is the civilization that grew out of Rome's Latin West after the fall of Rome, basically Catholic and then Protestant Europe. It is distinct from Orthodox Christendom, derived from Rome's Greek East. The West is basically an area that went through a series of common developments, which weren't experienced by the likes of Greece, Russia, Romania, Armenia, etc, which had their own separate development. After Western Rome fell, the West went through the 'Dark Ages', the Carolingian Renaissance, the rise of feudalism and Romanesque in the 11th century, the crusades, medieval communes, the 12th century intellectual renaissance, the rise of Gothic, the Printing Revolution, Humanism, etc. These resulted in shared legal, literary, political, artistic, philosophical, technological, economic, demographic, and other traditions. All of this made the West its own unique 'world', just like Islam, Orthodoxy, East Asia and Greater India were.

The Greco-Roman world was its own civilization, and the West is only one offshoot of it. To call them 'Western' is anachronistic, unless you're just referring to their geographical position in relation to eastern civilizations.

>>2288002
i follow, this makes sense

so why then do we still use the term in reference to pre-Christendom ad the Orthodox/Catholic split?
So was Ancient Greece western, and modern Greece not?

>>2288530
Basically it's because Westerners, especially after the Renaissance, saw/see the Greeks as the foundation of their civilization, which is true to a certain extent. They were thus the 'founders' of Western civilization in a sense, though they weren't Western themselves. In the same sense they could be called the founders of Orthodox and Islamic civilizations, though obviously they weren't Orthodox (in ancient times) or Islamic. From a Western perspective this lead to the Greeks being retroactively seen as a Western civilization, contrasted with the orientalist idea of 'the East'. Sometimes this is projected back even further, to the Mycenaeans and Minoans, though I don't think Western civilization owes much to them.

Another reason is simply the fact that the Greeks and Romans were geographically located in the west in relation to other contemporary civilizations, so it makes sense to call them 'western' in that sense, which reinforces their association with later Western civilization.

>>2287955
Western civilization started with the Greeks and spread to the Romans. The Germanics and Celts of classical antiquity were Central Asian, culturally, not Western. Christianity was a vector for Western culture to spread to the Germanics and Celts that were outside the bounds of the Roman Empire.

>>2287955
Western Culture began with the proto-indo-europeans such as yamna people and indo-iranians of sintashta culture. Therefore, pre-Islamic Iran and Vedic India are integral parts of Western ethos.

The former literally gave rise to Christianity with Mithraism and Zoroastrianism. The Wests did not begin with fucking Greece, and they too had a lot of intellectual relations with Iran/Persia, same thing.

"But I must begin with Europe, because it is both varied in form and admirably adapted by nature for the development of excellence in men and governments, and also because it has contributed most of its own store of good things to the other continents; for the whole of it is inhabitable with the exception of a small region that is uninhabited on account of the cold. ... The Romans, too, took over many nations that were naturally savage owing to the regions they inhabited, because those regions were either rocky or without harbours or cold or for some other reason ill-suited to habitation by many, and thus not only brought into communication with each other peoples who had been isolated, but also taught the more savage how to live under forms of government. But all of Europe that is level and has a temperate climate has nature to coöperate with her toward these results; for while in a country that is blessed by nature everything tends to peace, in a disagreeable country everything tends to make men warlike and courageous; and so both kinds of country receive benefits from each other, for the latter helps with arms, the former with products of the soil, with arts, and with character-building."

Strabo 2.5.26

>>2287955
>ethnic
*linguistic

>>2289437
i think many people seriously misunderstand how closely those too are related