 Welcome to Ancient History. I'm Dr. Hannah Elbianke, and today we're going to be going over the introduction to the course. Each of the lessons, I'm going to ask you to focus in on three terms. These three terms are going to be the basis of your vocabulary assignment, and these terms also potentially will show up on either the midterm or the final. So it's a good idea to focus in on these terms as you're listening to the lecture today. So I want to focus in on Ancient History, Western Civilization, and Christendom. So pay attention to those terms. Those terms are also important part of the focus question. The focus question is also part of your weekly assignments. You're going to be asked to write an outline based on it, and it also could potentially show up on the midterm and the final. Before I answer those questions and look at those terms, I want to tell you a little bit about myself and the course. So I'm Dr. Bianchi. I'm a historian, of course, and I have my degrees in history. So I got my undergrad degree from Franciscan University of Steubenville. I was a double major in history and philosophy. After undergrad, I went to the University of Connecticut. I'm originally from Connecticut, so I went there for my master's degree in modern German history. And then for my PhD, I went to the Catholic University of America in D.C., and I got my PhD in modern British history. Now you might be wondering why somebody focused on modern history is teaching a course on Ancient History. Well, over the years, I've been teaching for about 15 years on the college level history. I've developed a real love for Ancient History. I developed a study abroad program to Rome, so I've been really interested in Ancient Rome and early Christian history. So even though my academic background isn't in Ancient History, I've taught this course dozens of times, and I've developed a real love and passion for it. So in addition to my background as a historian, I should also let you know that I am a Catholic. I'm a devout Catholic. And whenever you're teaching history, you try to be objective, right? But you always bring your bias, and I'm teaching from a Catholic perspective unabashedly. So I have to be honest to the sources, but I am very much directing this course in a way to inspire individuals in the Christian and Catholic faith. So what are the objectives of this course? What do I want you to take away from it? I've got three objectives. The first is I want you to know the material. Anytime an academic teacher teaches a course, obviously that's the first objective. I want you to know the people, the places, the events. I want you to know their significance and why they're important. And the second objective is I want you to be able to see the connection between your life and ancient history. So if I taught you all this information and it wasn't meaningful to you, you'd probably find the course pretty boring and not important. So it's my job as an instructor to present all this information, but also to connect it to you. And so we're looking at, well, ancient history, Western Civ, Christendom, and I want you to be able to connect your education to the education in the ancient world. It's very simple for history, for example, we'll talk about in a second. It's a discipline that was invented in the ancient world. Now you're studying it, so I want you to make that connection. Politics. It's a huge topic, right? How do we have the American political system? Where did it come from? Well, you got to look at Greece and Rome to understand it. So I'm going to try to make that job. And lastly, culture. You know, about art, you know, literature. Where does that come from? Well, the ancient world. So we're going to try to make those connections. And my third objective, it's kind of related to the second one, but it's more precise, is what are the religious connections? So for me, this is the most important, right? If you're a Christian, if you're a Catholic, where did my faith come from? So we're going to look at the Jewish heritage. We'll look at the ancient Israelites. We'll tell their story. We'll look at the incarnation. The most important event for me as a Catholic is that God became man. We'll study that from historical perspective. And then at the end of the course, we'll look at the roots of early Christianity and the early church. It's a really fascinating subject. So it's a little bit challenging to teach this course. There's been incredible changes in technology and politics and in culture in the last, you know, 100 years. I think back to my grandfather. My father was very old when he had me and my grandfather was pretty old when he had my father. My grandfather was actually born in the 1880s. It seems like a long time ago, right? He grew up in a farming village in Italy with no electricity, and he was living under a monarchy. My grandfather, when he was born, had more in common with an individual in ancient Mesopotamia that I'm going to talk about next class than with me. So there's been more change in the last 150 years with cars, electricity, the internet, democracy, phones, all of that than in the rest of recorded history. So it's incredibly challenging for somebody today to really understand an individual in the ancient world. They're so different than us. This is particularly true, I think, in the religious sphere. I think we live in a post-religious era, a post-Christian era, right? We don't think like Christians. We don't have a Christian culture. So it's good. And I think really important for us to look back at this ancient civilization and see a civilization that had a true religious mentality. And also this course, especially the second half, will look at the birth of a Christian culture, of a Christian civilization. Look at the very beginning of it, how it was constructed. So yes, it's going to be very difficult to understand these individuals. Some of your assignments is to read primary sources. It's not going to be easy. These people wrote a very different style of language, even though it's translated to modern English. It's going to be hard for you to understand some of the events that happened. But even though it's a challenging course, it's going to be incredibly rewarding. Because you're going to learn a lot, and particularly you're going to learn about the birth of Christendom. So this course has a guide, in addition to me, and it's Warren Carroll. He's the author of the textbook that we're using, The History of Christendom, volume 1, The Founding of Christendom. Now a little bit about Warren Carroll. Warren Carroll was the founder and president of Christendom College. In addition to that, he authored many books on history, and particularly on the Catholic Church. He died in 2011, and he has a huge legacy when it comes to history in the Catholic world. And this is particularly personal for me. When I went to Franciscan University in Steubenville, I was actually a math major. I took a lot of computer science courses, physics courses, and then over one summer I read this book. I read the textbook, The History of Christendom. And it was one of the few causes that made me switch majors from the sciences and math to history. In addition to the other causes that I studied abroad in Austria for a year, and I got to see history firsthand. But Warren Carroll played a huge role in my development as a historian. So this is very personal for me. Maybe you don't know what you're going to major in. You don't know what you want to be, right? You're in high school. Maybe after this course, and after reading this textbook, you're going to think about becoming a historian. So there's a couple differences that I want to highlight between my lectures and the textbook. So I am not going to use Warren Carroll as a basis for my lectures. And you might be like, that's kind of confusing. Well, I would read a textbook and then have lectures and they're not the same. Well, number one, it would be a waste of time to just repeat what Warren Carroll says. You're going to read the textbook. That's part of your assignments, right? Secondly, out of pure humility, Warren Carroll is brilliant. He is a phenomenal historian. I can't improve on him. I'm not going to attempt to read Warren Carroll and say, I'm going to take this and then improve it and give it to you. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a slightly different approach. So I'm going to highlight some of the differences so that you understand it. So as you read the textbook and you hear the lectures, you're going to say, OK, these are different. It's intentional. I think it's kind of a waste of time to just repeat the words of Carroll. And I don't think that just out of sheer humility that I can improve upon him. So Warren Carroll is very much interested in personal stories. That's what makes him a great author and that you're going to really enjoy reading his books. So he focuses on the great men and women of history. I'm going to take a slightly different approach. I'm not going to be focused so much on individuals, but I'm going to look at more wider trends. Also, I have much less time. I've only got 30 minutes in these lectures. So I'm going to focus in on intellectual, cultural, and social movements, which Warren Carroll doesn't cover in his textbook. The second thing is that Carroll uses a very strong narrative approach. What does that mean? It means it's chronological. So if you look at his chapters, everything happens within a specific date range. I'm going to use themes. So each lecture is going to have a specific theme, and I might go back and forth in history. So in the chapters, you'll find that you might be in Rome, then you're going to be in Jerusalem, then you might go to Greece. Everything is happening within a specific time. For the lectures, I'm going to pick one area, one topic, one individual, and I'm going to focus in on one question. So it's going to be more thematic. Now those themes are going to be chronological, obviously. It wouldn't be a good historian if I was jumping all around. But I'm just going to focus in on Alexander the Great, for example, and do a lecture straight on Alexander the Great. Or I'm going to just look at Roman politics. Just talk about Roman politics. It might cover 600 years of Roman politics. And so your readings for the textbook might not be one chapter for each lesson. Or there might be even some lessons when I'm talking about culture movements, because Warren Carroll doesn't talk about culture movements where there's no textbook reading. And my last difference is that Warren Carroll is writing on Christendom. It's the foundations of Christendom. I'm going to look a little bit wider. I'm going to provide a wider lens, more context than the book. So where he's looking at the history of Christendom, I'm teaching a standard Western Civ ancient history course. It's going to spend a little bit more time, for example, looking at the Greeks. Or a little bit more backstory on the Romans. Now I'm very influenced by Warren Carroll. So if you go to a standard college and take a Western Civ course, you're not going to have six lectures on the Israelites. You might have one. So I'm going to provide a lot more on that story, particularly have a lot of lectures on the early church that you wouldn't get in a regular history course. But I am going to go in a little bit more detail on some of the secular history, particularly with Greece and Rome, and give you the backstory. Because if you're taking an ancient history course and you don't get a healthy dose of Greece and Rome, then you're going to be a disadvantage when you go to another school and they expect you to have that background knowledge. So those are some differences. It's not that my approach is better than Carroll's. It's just that we're using a different approach. And I would say hands down, Warren Carroll is a vastly superior historian to me and you're really going to enjoy reading that textbook. And there's many more volumes after that first volume. I'm saying when you're done with this course to read those as well. And if you do, I'm most going to guarantee you'll be a history major when you go to college. So where am I going to start? Where am I going to start? Okay, now that I've got that background information. Well, I'll begin with a little story. I was teaching a medieval history course. And about halfway through the course, a student raises his hand and I go, yes. And he says, when are we going to get to the Nazis? I hope you get that joke. It's a true story, but I read a hard time not laughing. Because there's no Nazis in medieval history course. And after that happened to me when I was starting as a teacher, I said, you know what? On the first day, I'm going to go over the title of the course. So if you sign up for a medieval course, you know what the medieval period is. I just assumed you knew what the medieval period was. And that you're not halfway through the course being like, what are the Nazis coming? So there's no Nazis in ancient history. That's what you're interested in. I'm sorry, you signed up for the wrong course. So let's talk about those three terms in a little bit more detail. What is ancient history? History of Christendom? And what is Western civilization? All right. What's ancient history? What is history? It seems so easy. But it's really a difficult concept. The simple answer is that history is the study of the past. But we got to be more precise. We got to be more nuanced. Particularly when we're talking about the academic discipline of history. What did I have for lunch? That was in the past. But it's not part of the discipline. So everything that happens in the past is not part of the discipline. So let's go back to the Greeks. They invented history. We'll talk about these individuals. We'll talk about Herodotus and the father of history. The word history is Greek, Historia, and it means inquiry, as well as the knowledge that results from inquiry. So it's an investigation. It's not just about the past. It's listing things. It's an investigation. In particular, the modern discipline is we are trying to answer questions about the past. It's more than random events. More than the list of things I ate for lunch. It's formulating an argument. This is hugely important. This is why every lesson has a focus question. We're trying to answer a question using history, using past events. What caused World War I? It's a great question about the past. So how would you answer that question? What would be your method? One method would be to look at a history book or ask your history teacher. We'll call it World War I. I'm going to pick up a book on World War I. Those are secondary sources. What do I mean by secondary sources? They didn't experience the events that happened in question. If you asked me about World War I, I can give you an answer, but I didn't fight in World War I. So it's good, but it's not the best. If you want the best answer for what happened in the past to answer your question, to formulate an argument, you're going to look at primary sources and good secondary sources. If I'm a good historian, I'm going to be sharing primary sources with you. So that's why every single lesson, I'm going to share primary source. In the guidebook, every lesson has a primary source. If you take a history course and you don't look at any primary sources, it's a pretty bad historian and it's a bad history course. So the best answers are primary sources, written during the time period, and that is the key to history. These primary sources that we're going to look at are the tools of the historian. In the first written documents, we have to go about 6,000 years ago, and so that's the beginning of history. We have these first old-right written documents in Mesopotamia and in Egypt. So in summary, history, if you want a clear definition, it's a discipline that answers questions about the past by analyzing written documents. Got it. That's our first term. We need it to define, I feel good, we're moving in the right direction. So now let's go to ancient. Again, we're taking an ancient history course. We've got history down, now let's go to ancient. Ancient, thank goodness, is a little bit easier to define. It's a period of human history. And the key word here, again, is history. It's about written documents. And I would say that ancient is the first period of human history. So we're going to go back 5,000 years ago to that's the very beginning of ancient history, one of the oldest written documents. This is the beginning of ancient history. Before that date, before we have written documents, it's a period called prehistory. Now, so that date is a little fluid. It's the very beginning of written documents. We go back to 3,000 or so BC. So we're going to start there. We're going to start at that period. We're not going back to the very, very beginning. We're going to the beginning of written documents. What's the end date of ancient history? It's a little bit more complicated and contested. So we could say that the end of ancient history is the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. That's a little date that we can use for 76 AD. We'll use that. Now, there's some people that call for a period in between ancient history called late antiquity, but we're not going to get into that debate. So 476, we could say ancient history is over. The Roman Empire is over. That's the beginning of the Middle Ages or the medieval period. Our book ends with Constantine, so that's where we're going to end. Again, just to summarize, we're going to begin with the beginning of written records, about 3,000 BC, and go all the way to Constantine. So if you really want a true, complete ancient history course, I would say go all the way to the end of the Roman Empire around the year 476. All right. Before I next class, I'm going to go into the beginning of history, but I think it would be worth just to say a word about the movement or the period called prehistory. So what happens before history? There's a date, there's a period before the academic discipline of history begins. And again, I've mentioned this numerous times. The date is when written documents begin. And it's before that, it's prehistory. So this is extremely important for our understanding of periodization. So if you want to study prehistory, you have to look to other disciplines. So you can look at archaeology, for example, material culture. So if I'm looking at like axes or arrows or pottery before this period, I have no skill to do that as a historian. An archaeologist would do that. If you showed me a bunch of pottery, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I've studied history for 13 years post-secondary. I've never looked at pottery. That's an archaeologist, okay? If you bring me human bones and ask me questions about it, that's not my discipline. That's anthropology, particularly physical anthropology. They could tell you about these bones and how old they were and what they ate, okay? If you wanted to study hunters and gatherers, and you went to the Amazon and you studied hunters and gatherers to understand about this prehistory period, that's not historians, that's cultural anthropology. Another truly fascinating discipline is genetics. So people that study genetics, you can look at the mutations in your DNA. Again, I don't know how it works, and you can know a lot about history, human migrations. There's a huge business that's exploding by looking at your DNA and telling your family history. But there's fascinating results. For example, they've been able to determine that all humans have come from one female. Kind of supports the Catholic view of Adam and Eve. Linguists, they study different languages and how they've changed over time. This was incredibly popular about 100, 150 years ago. When people studied ancient history, they studied languages, and they grouped people together by what language group they were. So we're going to talk a little bit about that as our course progresses. But those are linguists. So all of these people could study the period before written documents like looking at bones, genetics, pottery, all this stuff. But historians, we're not looking at it until we have a written document. I like the clarity of history. I like when you have that first document, you see that clay tablet with the cuneiform on it, and it says there was a guy, Bob, who was a farmer who owned a cow. And I'm like, I know that. I know that there's that Bob. He has a farm, he's got a cow. It's got a lot of clarity. All right, let's talk about Western civilization. I'm going to spend a lot of time looking at civilization next class. So I'm going to be very, very brief here. So it's root is the word civitas, which is Latin for city. What makes cities possible? Well, the Neolithic Revolution, which is also called the agricultural revolution. So it's farming, which makes cities and civilization possible. So we'll talk about this next class in the importance of agriculture. But it's different from the period before that primitive civilizations, which had hunters and gatherers, which had very small groups, which used only stone tools, limited culture, no writing, and thus prehistory. But next class we'll get to that word civilization and really develop it and look at all the characteristics of a civilization. But for now, it's just civilization is based on cities and cities is based on farming. Now let's look at that other part of civilization. I mean Western civilization, Western. So ancient is not regional. There's ancient history all over the world. But we're looking at a specific ancient civilization we call Western. So it's not West, lower case like directional. It's West with a uppercase W, the West. It's a specific region, but it changes over time. So when we start our story of Western civilization, we start in the Middle East. That's where Western civilization begins. Then North Africa. So that's where we're going to spend the first couple of lectures. And then Western civilization moves. It moves to Greece. That becomes the center of Western civilization. And then Rome. That's where our course will end. But after that, the center of Western civilization becomes France and Britain. And now the center of Western civilization is the United States. So that's why we're studying Western civilization. Because if you're American and you want to know the roots of American society, democracy, capitalism, then you want to look at the origins of Western civilization, see where it came from. As a Catholic, it's hugely important. The most important event in human history, the incarnation, the rise of Christianity or faith, it happened in Western civilization. God became man in Western civilization. We need to tell that story. That's why I'm focusing on it. There isn't a lot of other civilizations doing this ancient period that are part of history. So if you look at the Americas, Sahara, Africa, there's not a lot of written documents during this time period. So I'm not ignoring other histories that just doesn't really exist. There's only one other civilization that is as ancient as Western civilization that I'm really not going to talk about. And that is Chinese civilization. They had these oracle bones, which are animal bones, which scribbled Chinese characters on it. They'd eat them, they'd crack, and they'd be able to predict the future based on these. So these are the oldest examples of Chinese writing. It goes back thousands of years. So they had a history. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to talk about it because we're focused in Western civilization. China, as United Kingdom, comes into existence around 200 B.C. under the chin. And then you have the Great Han Dynasty, which was at the same time period as the Roman dynasty in the West. Now there's interesting trade back and forth in the Silk Road. Again, extremely interesting, but we're not going to talk about it in this course. Our last term that we're going to discuss is Christendom. Christendom is the visible sign of Christ on Earth. What does that mean? It means there's an alliance between Christianity and the public sphere, between Christianity and politics. Christendom starts with Constantine. He's the founder of Christendom. And that's our last lecture in the course. So we're working there. We're getting there. The whole 30 lessons is getting to this point. Now after Constantine, there's ups and downs. There's the glory, the high point of Christendom and the high Middle Ages. Now, unfortunately, we're in a valley. We live in a post-Christian world. So this course is about the foundations, building it. And I think it's important to look back at how Christendom was built months before, to look at the examples of the early church when the church was hidden and persecuted. And I think that there's some pertinent lessons that can be learned about that period. For your primary source today, I want you to look at St. Augustine City of God. It was written 100 years after Constantine. And Rome is falling. So he's trying to answer some of those questions. And he writes about these two cities. I quote, Two cities have been founded by two loves. They're earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God. They're heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former in a world glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory for men, but the greatest glory of the other is God. So the city of God is similar to Christendom. And where the city that focuses on oneself and one's own glory is similar to a secular society. So there's a struggle between the city of God and the city of man that's very relevant. All right, before I end this lecture, I just want to make a couple points about dates. Modern historians use CE common error and BCE before common error. I'm going to use the traditional dates, AD, onodomony in the year of our Lord, and BC before Christ. So I just want to get that out there. The second thing is that ancient dates are extremely contested. It's very hard to know when Abraham lived. It's tricky. Carol's dates in the textbook are not universally accepted. There's been a lot of debate back and forth. So don't panic about the exact dates if I use different dates than Carol does in the textbook. Because there's no agreement on the exact dates. I'm going to use, particularly in the first third of the course, just estimates centuries or even centuries. It's not really until Greeks and Romans that we have exact dates that everybody agrees upon. So in the first couple of lectures, if I say a date that's a little different than Carol, don't panic. You go online. You're going to find 10 other different dates. So wait until we get into the classical period with Greece and Rome, or we're going to have exact dates that everybody agrees upon. Alright, so in conclusion, today we covered the objectives of the course. I talked a little bit about the instructor myself in the book. We focused on these three terms, ancient history, western civilization, and the history of Christendom. And your focus question is going to ask you to look at all three together. So next class we're going to get into content. We'll look at Mesopotamia and the beginning of civilization. I hope you enjoyed the lecture and I'll see you next time.