The Ancient World: Introduction Our course divides into three
sections, and while there is much overlap between them, each era
is quite distinctive. In the ancient world, we are dealing with
a variety of civilizations over the course of a few thousand
years. I choose not to tell that entire story, though your
textbook does. The general drift of that story is westward. The
early civilizations are Near Eastern, centered in the Fertile
Crescent and in Egypt. The focus of a Western Civilization
course then moves westward to Greece and then westward again to
Rome. In my own presentation, I acknowledge a certain
inheritance from those Near Eastern cultures, but I emphasize
the greater influence of Greece and Rome. Whereas we can compile
a very long list of the contributions made by the Greeks and the
Romans, we can compile only a comparitively short list of
contributions made by Babylon or Egypt, and even less from the
Hittites or Assyrians. These were all important and extremely
interesting cultures, but I skip ov