On the Idea of "Cultural Enemies".

As I opened up the computer to write a post this morning, I found myself re-reading my Christmas post.  Which led me to consider why it is that, despite the fact that the Persian and Greek worlds were so deeply interconnected, that they continue to be presented as if they were always mortal enemies.  Yes, there was the fact of the Persian Wars.  But most of our material about Greek and Persian interactions comes from the Greek perspectives on these wars.  What about the Persian perspective?  What about those interactions before the wars?  We don't have much material from the Persian side because it was at this time that Persians began writing on leather scrolls, which while more efficient, did not stand the test of time.  Despite this, there is plenty of evidence, some written and some archaeological, of pre and post-war interactions that break down the notion that Greeks and Persians were "natural" or "cultural enemies".

Of course, one of the great gifts a history teacher gives their students is the ability to analyze multiple perspectives, accompanied by the habit of mind that, over time, intuitively knows to search out other perspectives and to contextualize them.  Another gift regarding perspective that history teachers give is helping students analyze how perspective changes over time.  The side of the Greek/Persian relationship that is often left out is their changing perspectives of each other.

Before their was conflict there was collaboration: Regarding this, here are a handful of fun facts from Walter Burkert's Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis:

- In the decades prior to the Persian wars, Darius, the great Persian emperor, hired many Greek artisans to bring Greek style architecture to the capital of the Persian Empire, Persepolis.
- In these same years, Greek pottery became somewhat trendy in Persia, as did the drinking of wine.
- Greeks coveted the coinage issued by Darius, which had his image on it.
- Greeks aided the Persians in Anatolia on a number of major building projects, including building an efficient transportation system: creating roads, digging tunnels, but most remarkably, in building a bridge across the Bosporus.  In other words, Greek builders agreed to help Darius build a bridge linking Asia and Europe.

As a teacher, or if you were a teacher, how would you use such facts?  At the very least I would want to present these to students, and ask questions such as: "Based on this evidence, what do you think the relationship between Greece and Persia was?"  (Of course, they will say friendly!  And then I would say...)  "Okay, so they seem to trust each other.  What piece of evidence proves this the most?"  (They would likely point out the transportation system, and I would then ask them more questions about why that shows us a deep level of trust.)  "If they trust each other now, does that mean they'll always trust each other?  Ah, I see you don't think so.  What sorts of things might happen between the Greeks and the Persians to cause them not to trust each other?"    

As they give their answers, I would want to show them an image of the Greek colonies, and another image of the Persian empires expansion into Anatolia, and ask them if they might see a reason for conflict.  (I.e., the fact that the Persian Empire took over the Greek colonies in western Anatolia.)  Following this, I would remind students that the Greeks and Persians did lucrative trade together: would it be worth it to go to war once those Ionians (the Greeks living on the Anatolian coast) rebelled?  Why or why not?

Examining how Greek and Persian collaboration morphed into conflict could be an opportunity to help students understand that conflict is not pre-ordained: all peace and all pain is historically rooted.  As history teachers, we can help students understand that it is never the case that certain groups just don't like each other.  Skills such as historical contextualization and the analysis of perspectives can help combat prejudice and other forms of harmful thinking in todays world. 

Finally, as always, I'm curious to know: how would you teach this? 

Merry Christmas! The True Gifts of the Magi

Merry Christmas to any readers on this day :)

Today, as I think of the spirit of gift-giving, I think of the three magi who visited Jesus as an infant and brought him gifts.  The gifts perhaps seem small: frankincense, myrrh, and gold.  In later tradition, the three wise men and the three gifts stand for the three continents: Africa, Europe, and Asia, as seen in this 15th century depiction.  However, I have a different take on the gifts of the magi.

Adoração dos Magos by Vicente Gil

I doubt that people reading the Gospel of Matthew at the time would have had this symbolic perspective of the men of all continents bowing down to the lord.  Magi to a Persian would have meant a Zoroastrian priest.  To a member of the world of Hellenism, it signified astrologers, alchemists, and magicians, as well as Zoroastrian priests.  Many in the Hellenistic world considered Zarathustra himself to be the inventor of magic and astrology.  The three wise men in the story certainly seem to be able to read the stars quite accurately.  As the Hellenic world transitioned to the Roman, I'm not sure how or if these perspectives changed.  I do know that Matthew is alone in interpreting magi as wise men: early church fathers including St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Justin, and Origen (who I have a special interest in), continue to refer to the three as magicians.

The word magi appears in ancient Greek sources from the moment Cyrus conquered Anatolia in 547 BCE, bringing the Persian empire to the Greek doorstep.  Within a decade, Empedocles introduced the first dualism into Greece in the form of the gods Love (philia) and Hate (neikos). According to Empedocles, all natural processes are caused by the interplay of these forces.  Is this his interpretation of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian gods of Light and Dark?  (By the way, Aristotle's student Eudemus later translates these names into Greek as Oromasdes and
Areimanios.)

So here are the true gifts the magi brought to Christianity: first, the growing popularity of dualism in the Greek world, and then the Hellenistic and Roman.  This clearly had an awesome impact on Christianity.  But perhaps the Magi gave an even greater gift to the tradition that would come to celebrate Christmas: Zoroastrianism shifted the idea of the afterlife in the Near East, Middle East and Mediterranean basin away from a bleak, colorless subterranean affair to a blissful, heavenly life.  The first Greek notions of the psyche rising to heaven after death occur in the 530's, just a decade after the Persian conquest of Anatolia.  By the time Jesus walked this earth, people were well prepared by the magi to accept key components of his message. 

Prehistory of Patriarchy: Why do Women Weave and Cook?

Like many teachers, I wrestle with how to help students make sense of the near-omnipresence of patriarchy throughout history.  Even as I try to help students make sense of that fact, I continue to try to make sense of it myself.  I would greatly value any insights people may have when it comes to the history of male dominance, and how to teach it.

I hope this following piece I put together contributes a meaningful drop to that bucket.  I wrote it using information from Elizabeth Wayland Barber's wonderful book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years.  I think it helps to make sense of patriarchy in a prehistorical setting - and may also complicate the notion of patriarchy at that stage in human history.  I would cherish resources that present solid discussions of patriarchy at different stages in history.      

Why did Women Weave and Cook?

In prehistorical times, all over the world, it was usually the mans job to hunt and perform other dangerous tasks, such as practicing metallurgy.  Many people assume this is because men are faster and stronger.  While it is true that male and female bodies differ in important ways, women can hunt and perform other dangerous tasks quite well.  If we look around us, we can observe with our own eyes that although the fastest and strongest people in the world are men, there are many women who are faster and stronger than most men.  Very few men on this planet can outrun the fastest women or out-lift the strongest.  Why haven't fast, strong women been given the role of performing dangerous tasks throughout history?  Why haven't men who are less fast and strong been given roles such as weaving and cooking? 

The answer doesn’t have to do with one genders body being tougher than the other.  It has to do with raising children.  Before modern times, most women in the world breastfed their children for two years, and often three, which is far longer than we do today.  Women had to do types of work that allowed them to care for their children at the same time.

Scholar Elizabeth Wayland Barber, in her book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, describes four things that most women’s work had in common, all across the globe:
 

1)  Women’s work usually doesn’t require focused concentration over long periods of time.  Imagine that you’re out hunting. You would have to stay very still and quiet for a long time.  You couldn’t do this with children.  They might not stay quiet.  And if they needed help you would have to break your concentration.   

2)  Women’s work can be easily interrupted and easily resumed. This is true for cooking and sewing, but not for hunting or other dangerous tasks.

3)  Women’s work does not place children in danger.  This is why men would do work like casting melted metal into weapons and farm tools.  Notice that this kind of metal work is also not interruptible and requires a great deal of focus! 

4)  Women’s work usually does not require moving far from home.  This not only means that women did not hunt, it also means that women did not usually trade. 

These four features of women’s work were true all over the globe before civilizations, but also after.  Once civilization started, what kinds of work could women do, and what could they not do based on these four points?  How might women's roles in the world be limited by these four?  Do you consider some of them more limiting than others?  

Humanizing Religion: Teaching Religion as Practice

I truly appreciate the focus of Michael C. Weber’s article Teaching Religion in the World History Class.  Which is, in short, that when it comes to teaching religion, we've inherited a pedagogical tradition of focusing on the ideas, the laws and theological abstractions, while leaving out the people, and thus leaving out what religion actually looks like. 

So lets add the element of humanity to curricula on religion.  Weber urges teachers to present students with sketches of what devotees and practitioners actually do: how did kings and peasants practice Buddhism?  Villagers and urbanites?  Upper as well as lower class women?  How was their practice influenced by their life - was the practice, the devotion, the way of believing influenced by being a king, a farmer, a woman? How did their practices and beliefs shape their lives? 

Weber offers some resources in his article, but notes that they are not ideal.  A single source providing short biographical sketches of contextualized religiosity would be incredibly helpful.  Anybody know of something like that?   

In the blog post just before this one, I focused on the problem of religion often being taught as uniform and static – an ahistorical understanding of religion that Dianne L. Moore has called a world-wide form of religious illiteracy.  Teaching the diversity and dynamism of any one religious tradition is important because it humanizes the religion.  And vice-versa: teaching about actual human practice would be a great way to highlight the diversity and dynamism of religion.  

Weber gives a good snapshot of how reducing religions to sets of beliefs, while leaving out an understanding of what people actually do, makes religion and the people who practice it appear rather silly:

…books and teachers usually opt for a quick essential description of the belief system: with this essentialist approach Judaism simply becomes a series of beliefs about ethical monotheists, the covenant people of the one God who controls history; Buddhism about following the Eight Fold Path to Nirvana; Islam is reduced to being a radical, legalistic religio-socio-legalistic monotheism of the Arabs; and the Christian religion is summed up in the somewhat tragic narrative of the "life of Jesus of Nazareth" and the idea of love of God and fellow Christians.  

These oversimplifications are dehumanizing, in a very real sense that the human experience has been stripped away.  Without a focus on the religious experience and practice and the role of religion in society, these beliefs simply appear bizarre.  My feeling is that an essentialist presentation of religion is likely to cause students to perceive current as well as past religious practitioners as naive.  It may cause religious students to feel disconnected from school.  Presentations of religion that fail to present spiritual experience and practice also fail to provide students with spiritual nourishment, including the ability to understand and analyze themselves and others as spiritual beings.       

The focus on religious practice is in accord with recent trends in religious scholarship.  One resource that has interesting potential for us as teachers is the Princeton Readings in Religions series, which describes itself thus: “Princeton Readings in Religions moves away from an emphasis on philosophy and the religious expressions of elite groups to represent instead a wide range of current and historical religious practices”.  The website is well worth checking out...

The books are organized around themes that would be helpful for a world history teacher: for example, Religions of Japan in Practice has 45 short readings split in sections on "Ethical Practices," "Ritual Practices," and "Institutional Practices," and includes lists that categorize the readings chronologically, geographically, and according to religious tradition.  The readings are too dense for most secondary school students, but if we’re searching for rich, historically contextualized depictions of religion in practice, and are willing to write a few scenarios up ourselves at the appropriate reading level, this is a goldmine.     

As always, I would love to hear any ideas readers may have :)