The Contributions to the Western Civilization Essays

The Contributions to the Western Civilization Essays The Contributions to the Western Civilization Essay The Contributions to the Western Civilization Essay The Contributions to the western civilization Ashley Stewart 5/1/11 Professor Hammond Strayer University The Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, have made great contributions to develop the Western Civilization. The legacy that they’ve left was religion, knowledge, and government. The Hebrews contributed the religious aspect, the Greeks contributed knowledge and government, and the Romans contributed one must have an understanding of the ancient Greek culture, or else considered governing methods to Western Civilization. Its said that to understand our culture ignorant. sherer44). The Hebrews shaped the very core of Western Civilization. Author Thomas Cahill has recently produced a historical account, The Gifts of the Jews, which explores in depth the contributions of early Judaism to the thought patterns and social structure of present-day orders. A review of his work states that Within the matrix of ancient religions and philosophies, life was seen as part of an endless cycle of bi rth and death; time was like a wheel, spinning ceaselessly. Yet somehow the ancient Jews began to see time differently. For them, time had a beginning and an end; it was a narrative, whose triumphant conclusion would come in the future. From this insight came a new conception, that of men and women as individuals with unique destinies a conception that would inform the Declaration of Independence and our hopeful belief in progress and the sense that tomorrow can be better than today. ( The West would not have been the same without Jewish contributions that celebrated concepts such as absolute morality, self-improvement, and the striving to comprehend the forces that shape ones existence. These innovative notions permitted the Hebrews to endure throughout millennia of oppression and foreign dominance and reform their state into todays Israel, one of the top ten nations in the world in terms of military might and economic sophistication. The Greeks was creating colonies around the coast of Greece. /Instead of constructing the columns to be straight, they built them using gentle curves making everything appear more symmetrical. The two different architectural styles in ancient Greece were the Doric and Ionic. The earliest of the buildings were designed in the Doric style, such as the Parthenon. The Doric columns are rather sturdy yet plain. The ionic Columns were built thinner and more elegant. The tops of them had a scroll like structure, unlike the flat Doric style. Buildings such as the Erechtheum and the small temple of Athena were built in the Ionic style. Its to the Greeks we owe for their architectural innovations to western civilization The Greeks were very passionate about athletics. They took pride in the perfect human physique: strong, fit, cut, graceful human bodies.