TITLU în română: Contribuţia elenismului la bogăţia istorică şi culturală a regiunii Levantului
Subiect: The Levant has represented a unique human-historic space from as early as 50 centuries ago. Comprising the Holy Lands of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, it continues to exert enormous influence on our world’s evolution to this day.
The contributions of earlier Levantine civilizations to the evolution of Hellenism and then, in turn, Hellenism’s own contribution to the continued evolution of the region, constitute strong evidence of the region’s historic and cultural richness. As the Levantine peoples began to trade across the seas, Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations emerged in Greece at the end of the Bronze Age (3rd millennium BCE). During the 6th century BCE, the Ionian philosophers of the city of Miletus were the first to seek empirical explanations from their observations, and to reject the myths and fanciful beings to whom the origin and operation of the Earth were attributed. Their thinking continued into Roman times, resurfacing during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In the 4th century BCE, the rising power of the Macedonians overcame the Hellenic city-states, culminating in Alexander the Great’s eastward expansion. Alexander’s conquest of the Levant was a crucial point in its history: thereafter, Hellenic language and thinking inducted the region into the Greek and Roman worlds.
Classical Hellenism’s greatest contribution to the Levant’s cultural evolution was the Greek language. With its alphabetic writing, Greek became a driving force behind sociocultural evolution, much like the later Arabic numerals; these two contributions would drive philosophic and scientific evolution via the Great Islamic Age, having lasting effects well into the 18th Century Enlightenment and beyond.
