I'm glad it finally came and not too soon, if you don't mind me saying, but finally other civilizations became accounted for in these pages. Many times there is so much western civilization bias that there is no, or little, information about the other civilizations during that time period that significantly affected the world's turn of events. The allotment of women's ability to learn to read and write, the social impact of a certain laws, rules, dictum, speeches, or novels, and even the social stigma of reading in different cultures significantly effected the world in drastic ways.
A large aspect, to which great care was taken to note, was how it was the Islamic and Middle Eastern civilizations that maintained and transcribed the passages of Socrates, Plato, Isocrates, and many of the other Greek philosophers. To a great extent, without out this maintenance and dedication to the Greeks, we, as a Western civilization, would never have known who the Greeks really were, why they behaved the way the way they did, and how they were the first to significantly improve themselves past that of agriculture and herding through their ability to read and write. Without the exertions of the Islamic cultures, the Greeks would have gone the way of the Etruscan poets (185). There would have been marks, but all the marks would be found "silent."
The incorporation of the Chinese and Japanese cultures into this book historically resonates the mutual aggression between those two countries. As this book states, "in 1984--a hundred years after the founding of the new capital Heian-Kyo...the Japanese government decided to stop sending official envoys to China" and later Japan "began to [work] to develop a life-style of its own devising (228)." Although a necessary action, the development of a unified culture played a large role in destroying the bond between the Chinese and Japanese civilization, a bond that began with Japan strictly forbidding the use of many of the Chinese characters in their language, especially among females. This resolve to end Chinese and Japanese communication undoubtedly lead to future conflicts.
A large aspect, to which great care was taken to note, was how it was the Islamic and Middle Eastern civilizations that maintained and transcribed the passages of Socrates, Plato, Isocrates, and many of the other Greek philosophers. To a great extent, without out this maintenance and dedication to the Greeks, we, as a Western civilization, would never have known who the Greeks really were, why they behaved the way the way they did, and how they were the first to significantly improve themselves past that of agriculture and herding through their ability to read and write. Without the exertions of the Islamic cultures, the Greeks would have gone the way of the Etruscan poets (185). There would have been marks, but all the marks would be found "silent."
The incorporation of the Chinese and Japanese cultures into this book historically resonates the mutual aggression between those two countries. As this book states, "in 1984--a hundred years after the founding of the new capital Heian-Kyo...the Japanese government decided to stop sending official envoys to China" and later Japan "began to [work] to develop a life-style of its own devising (228)." Although a necessary action, the development of a unified culture played a large role in destroying the bond between the Chinese and Japanese civilization, a bond that began with Japan strictly forbidding the use of many of the Chinese characters in their language, especially among females. This resolve to end Chinese and Japanese communication undoubtedly lead to future conflicts.
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