World History
The Greeks
“The West” as a concept is rooted in the geography of Greece, but “civilization” is not. The word is linked to the Latin word for city, civitas, and it suggests a way of life centering on the products of an urbanized culture. Likewise, as noted above with the Greeks, civilization was usually seen as the opposite of barbarism, and historically it was nomadic, non-urbanized peoples who were most likely to be labeled as “barbarians.” For the sake of historical analysis, however, we can set aside the pejorative distinction between civilization and barbarism and instead consider civilization as a set of essential technological advances and examine how those technologies altered human life on an enormous scale. That process began in the Middle East thousands of years before the first cities of ancient Greece existed.