| Our view of human history colors
the perception of who we are in a fundamental way. It creates the infrastructure
of ideas according to which we interpret the world. Like the limitations of our senses we
seldom question the limitations of our historical view, which we take as
a given fact, even though it changes with every generation. Each society
creates an idea of history through which it interprets civilization in its
own image.
In the modern age science, technology and rational materialism
have created an historical view that makes ancient Greece, in which the
seeds of modern culture arose, the basis of civilization as a whole. It
looks to the precursors of civilization in the ancient Near East, Sumeria and Egypt, from which the
Greeks derived the rudiments of their culture.
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