Talk:Ancient Greece/Old talk page history

Note
This is old page history that used to be at Talk:Ancient Greece. The content is below this message. Graham 87 11:15, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Miscellaneous comments

 * Erm what on Earth does this "sentence" mean? Archaeology revealed civilizations covered in mythology has forced a re-evaluation of every surviving text from the ancient world.  I can see various possible intended meanings but I'd rather someone knowledgeable decided on something that made sense, and changed it to that. Nevilley 17:16 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)
 * Before I make any drastic changes to the article, I thought I should save the original stub text here for reference.... --Gerald Farinas 18:01, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Ancient Greece is one of the oldest fields of academic research in the modern university, and reflects centuries of traditional humanist scholarship before that. With the revival of interest in the study of the Greek language and Greek literature in Italy during the fifteenth century, the literary remains of Greek civilization from Homer to the Greek Church Fathers of early Christianity were made available to scholars. However, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the sceptical attitudes applied to the Bible in scholarly biblical criticism came to be applied to Greek literature, so much so that scholars dismissed everything before the first Olympic games in 776 BC as legend.  The excavations of Heinrich Schliemann, who began excavating Troy in 1870, changed all that.  Archaeology has recovered information that enables scholars not only to treat every surviving text from the ancient world in a critical way, but also allows students to find a middle ground between uncritical acceptance of the legends and mythology of Greece on one hand, and dismissing them entirely.


 * In the article History of Ancient Greece it says "...Ancient Greece is taken to end with the reign of Alexander the Great, who died in 323BC". Someone is making an error of over 1700 years! (Are you sure about 323BC? BBC have the AG timeline ending at 146BC! http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ancientgreece/timeline)
 * I'm using a timeline constructed by the Classical studies department here at Loyola University Chicago. There is a recognized dispute as to the proper end of the period called "Ancient Greece" and I have added a note on the article referring to that dispute.  --Gerald Farinas 18:57, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The problem with this article
Any date used to describe the "end of Ancient Greece" will of course be arbitrary. But the History of Ancient Greece article, which I largely wrote, uses the traditional convention of ending the Ancient (or Classical) Greek period with the death of Alexander, and treats the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods as separate. I have never seen the whole Byzantine period classed under "Ancient Greece." This is not just a matter of historiographical convention. The civilisation of 12th century Constantinople clearly had almost nothing in common with the civilisation of Minoan Crete or Periclean Athens, except that they all spoke a form of Greek. Lumping them all in together as "Ancient Greece" is meaningless and unhelpful. The 15th century is not classed as "Ancient" for any other part of Europe.

More broadly, I question what purpose this article is serving, now that the History of Greece series has been worked up to a fairly satisfactory state, and now that we have articles on Greek art, Greek architecture, Greek theatre and Greek philosophy. My suggestion is that this article, whose content is (without disrespect) very general, be turned into a redirection page, refering readers to those various articles. Adam 04:37, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Or maybe it should be more like a disambiguation page, mentioning the articles you listed. Adam Bishop 15:49, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)