Class 4: Before Europe (1)
- Okay everyone, greetings.
Nice to see you all.
Welcome to the fourth lecture.
As you'll remember, section starts this week.
Somewhat incredibly we have a Pole, a Ukrainian,
and a Lithuanian TF-ing in this class,
which honestly could not have been,
I mean, if I'd tried to do that,
there's no way that could have actually happened.
So your TFs will be the beautiful and talented,
Zhenia Monastyrskyi.
Zhenia, say hello.
There you go, that's Zhenia.
- [Zhenia] We already met. - Oh, okay.
The equally beautiful and talented Wiktor Babinski,
and the no less beautiful and talented Maksimas Milta.
These are your three TFs.
Get to know them, get to love them,
figure out what the bribery culture is
in their various countries, and adapt yourself to it.
Lots of laughter from the Ukrainians there, that's a clue.
(audience laughing)
That's a clue.
I do not have time for funny bribery stories.
If there's time at the end of the lecture,
I'll tell you a funny bribery story.
Okay, so welcome.
We are working our way now towards proper history.
I've been trying to set up some of the concepts
because the longer I've been doing this job,
the more it seems to me that we have to think about
what history is before we jump into doing the subject.
And so I've been using the fact
that we're in the moment in the middle of a war
to try to help the, I've been trying to use the war
to like shake up the concepts
and to help us think about how things are fluid,
and also help us to think about
how we talk and how we think about things
may influence the world more than we realize, right?
That the unthinking or half thinking ways
that we approach the past
will affect the decisions that we make in the future
by determining how we see things in the present.
But this is also really important,
because Ukraine is, you know, for many of you,
a new subject.
And even for those of you who it's not a new subject,
it's unlikely that you've actually had a class
that was just about Ukrainian history.
Did anybody check how many classes
in Ukrainian history there are?
- [Student] I couldn't find any.
- Okay, so I'm holding one lecture class
in the United States of America on modern Ukraine,
which is an extraordinary thing, right?
If you think about it.
It raises the question of what has gone wrong with us
in general, right?
Like, no, why is it that what we do
is so mismatched with the world around us, right?
Like don't you feel ill served?
If you're going to any, I mean,
okay, not everybody at Yale is in this class,
but isn't it odd to think that if you were at
any other university in the United States,
you wouldn't even be able to take a class in Ukraine,
even though, right?
And that raises the larger question of
why is it, in the 21st century,
where we supposedly have access to all this data
all the time, and we all know everything instantly,
why are we always surprised by things, right?
Why is it that things that happen in the world
always seem to catch us unprepared?
And so you know what my answer for that is gonna be,
my answer for that is gonna be
that you should all be history majors.
Because if you're a history major, or just take,
I don't care whether you're a major or not,
just take a bunch of history classes,
because you'll be less likely to be surprised
by the things that happen to you
over the course of your life.
Like, if nothing else, it'll help you not be surprised
by stuff that happens.
Okay, our job today is to set up Europe.
You know, if you're looking at it from
the point of view of today you could be thinking, well,
is Ukraine Europe, is Europe Ukraine.
We're not there yet.
We're thinking about the world before Europe,
because Ukraine, Kyivan Rus,
which we're gonna get to in the next lecture,
Kyivan Rus is coming into being at a time
when the notion of Europe doesn't really exist yet,
and wouldn't really make any sense.
So I'm gonna start by talking
about a couple of ways that people look at
the sequence of events that led to Europe.
Then I'm gonna move on to the things
which really were there before Europe.
I'm gonna talk about language for a bit,
I'm gonna talk about pre-Christian religion for a bit,
and then I'm going to move towards the story
of how this state came into being.
So there are, if you are in, broadly speaking,
the trajectory of Western Europe,
the United States, or North America,
the way that the trajectory of European history is taught
begins with ancient Greece.
And I'm not gonna change that here.
We're also gonna be talking about ancient Greece.
I'm just gonna be messing with it a little bit.
I did the whole thing with the olive tree
and the trident already, right?
Did I do that in an earlier lecture? No, I didn't do that?
Okay.
So I did or I didn't?
You're the only one who remembers it, okay.
Maybe the entire class has switched out since then,
and you're the only,
like this was a really aggressive shopping period,
they're all new.
Okay, so just to remind you, of Athens itself,
the founding story of Athens itself,
involves an olive tree and a trident.
It involves a contest between Athena, the goddess Athena,
and Poseidon, who gets to be the namesake.
You know the answer because the city is not called,
you know, Poseidon, it's called Athens.
So Athena wins because she gives the Athenians
an olive tree, and the Athenians say
this is very nice, shade, olive oil, right?
Poseidon strikes his trident on the ground,
and seawater springs forward, springs forth.
And the Athenians say that doesn't taste very good,
we're not really into that.
That's the way the story goes, right?
That's the way the story goes.
And it brings you an image of Athens
which is peaceful and contemplative
and maybe tending towards consumer society.
It's a certain image of democracy, right?
Whereas Poseidon is offering, you know,
strife, and sea commerce, and war,
and navies, and things like that.
Now, underneath that story is a question.
Because, you know, all societies
in the way that they tell their story of founding
are hiding something, right?
And this little story, what's being hidden
is the answer to the question:
how can you possibly live just on olive oil, right?
You can't.
I mean, no, yes?
I mean, at least you need a little bread
at least with the olive oil.
And so where was the bread coming from?
I'm now gonna see if anybody was at this lecture.
Where was the bread coming from?
Where were the calories actually coming from?
The grain?
Yes.
- [Student] The Southern Ukraine, right?
- Right, what's now Southern Ukraine.
The northern coast.
So the ancient world, the ancient Greek world,
includes the Black Sea,
up to and including the north Black Sea coast,
which is now Southern Ukraine.
That's where the calories came from.
And so you can plant your little city state
full of olive trees,
because you're engaged in an international trade,
and you're getting your calories from somewhere else.
So this isn't just mark that, that's important,
because the connection of our part of the world
with other parts of the world by way of food and calories
is enduring.
So for the ancient Greeks,
what we're calling Ukraine was a place.
And if you did your reading of the Serhii Plokhy
you'll know that for Herodotus, who was a major source,
the ancient historian Herodotus,
along with Thucydides the two, you know,
the two people who found history, as such.
Herodotus maps what we call Ukraine in a certain way,
correctly, which is sea, coast, steppe, and forest,
moving from south to north, right?
Sea, coast, steppe and forest.
And the further north you go, the more exotic it is, right?
So from the point of view of that civilization,
northward means more exotic.
And so it's in the North
that a lot of the Greek mythology is located,
a lot of like the Elysian Fields are there,
and the Mountains of Hyperborea are there,
griffins are there, all kinds of stuff is there.
The Scythians, they locate,
I didn't write the Scythians, the Scythians are also there.
The Scythians are, in fact, real.
And they did inhabit what's now Ukraine at the time
and they did fantastic work in gold.
So that part, the part about Ukraine
being rich in gold is not entirely false.
The treasures of the Scythians still exist,
they're still in museums, they're being looted in this war.
So there are a lot of ways in which
what happens in the war actually reminds us of things
that were a couple of thousand years ago,
like the Scythians, for example.
There's a museum in Ukraine which was looted,
and the Scythian gold work has now been taken off to Russia.
Okay, so the Greeks are already looking at the territory
that we think of as Ukraine,
and they already have a certain geographical view of it,
which is south to north. And I want you to think about this,
because we are, you know, we are in the West,
and so when we look at Ukraine we're thinking, okay,
West Ukraine, East Ukraine.
But from the point of view of our story,
south to north and north to south
is actually much more important,
at least for the first few weeks of this class.
Okay, so if you're looking,
so taking ancient Greece as a starting point,
if you're now looking at this whole thing from today,
but from a Western point of view,
there's a certain way that ancient Greece connects to you,
and this will be familiar to you probably,
it goes like this:
there was Greece, and then there was Rome,
and then Rome fell, right?
Very dramatic, it fell.
Imagine all the buildings falling, right?
It's a very dramatic image, Rome fell.
It was overrun by barbarians, it ceased to exist, right?
Very dramatic.
And then nothing happened for a while,
and then there was a Renaissance,
or there were Dark Ages and then there was a Renaissance,
and then that Renaissance miraculously,
the clever Europeans discovered
all those things that were lost.
They discovered the Greek stuff, and the Roman stuff,
and they, so I told you before,
always be skeptical of this rebirth metaphor,
because if you think about rebirth for one second,
it's really creepy, right?
I mean, just birth itself, honestly.
Like, I don't know how many of you have seen one,
but it's a thing.
And then think about doing it twice with the,
I mean it's just, so be suspicious of rebirth metaphors,
including the Renaissance.
So anyway, this is a Western perspective, right?
Greece, Rome, Rome falls,
then there's a Renaissance where everything is rediscovered,
and then after the Renaissance comes nations,
and the nations, the French, the Italians,
the British, and so on,
all in some way look back to ancient Greece to this pattern.
If you're in our part of the world, this looks different.
You can still start with ancient Greece, as I say.
There's Rome, there's ancient Greece, there's Rome.
So far, so good.
Does Rome fall?
- [Student] No. - No, never falls.
Yeah, okay (laughs).
There's like one solid supporter of Byzantium over here.
I'm glad. (students laughing)
That's right, Rome does not fall, right?
Rome doesn't fall, the buildings don't all fall,
the Colosseum doesn't fall, it's still there,
you can visit it today, trust me.
