You Can't Head West When The West Is In Your Head

Scholars, politicians and meme-slingers alike talk about Western Civilization as if it's something concrete. Since it's named after a compass direction, you might even assume it refers to some actual place. But even old-school, traditional Western Civ textbooks show that The West is a much, much messier concept than it first appears.

Find out why the West isn't just about Western Europe. Sometimes it's in the East, or the Middle East, or in Western Asia, or in North Africa.

And sometimes it's only in your head.

Join historian Doug Sofer for the first part of this exciting three-part mini-series that was a whole big fat year in the making! Part I (this one!) is about the ancient origins of what's called the West. It's also somehow about robots, a rabbit's nose, and way too much about kicking footballs around.

Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | Season 2: Episode 8 | ©2026, Doug Sofer

You Can’t Head West If The West Is In Your Head

Part I: Origins

Cold Open

•   [Fade in theme]

•   Howdy listeners and thank you for navigating your way back to this podcast about how history helps us make sense — 

•   Of the strangeness of now.

•   [long pause and exaggerated sigh]

•   Whew! It’s been a big fat stinkin’ while since my previous episode dropped.

•   What’s going on? Well part of it is just general life stuff—but that’s just literally a lot of c’est la vie—and it happens.

•   [pause]

•   But I think one big part of my long pause came out of the fact that I got a little freaked by how useful—or useless—a scripted podcast can feel when AI can do all of this work for you. There are already a bunch of podcast-o-matic show generators out there that can generate pretty good-ish-sounding content with professional sounding voice talent in just a few minutes.

•   I’ve shared my feelings about my freakout on my blog at findyourselfinhistory.com/blog so check it out! 

•   Hey, I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but it concludes with me saying that I decided I still want to make podcast episodes.

•   Like this one—which is going to totally be worth the wait!

•   In fact, it’s the first of a three-part mini-series of episodes that do something extraordinarily awesome!

•   [Dramatically]

•   They hold the keys to unlocking [pause, echo effect] The History of Western Civilization Itself! [/echo]

•   [pause]

•   You know listeners, it’s funny how often we hear grand-sounding—and even unnecessarily echoey—proclamations about Western Civilization.

•   In fact, many folks are heavily invested in this idea of [echo] The West [/echo, then clears throat]. Sorry: The West.

•   They talk about Western ideas, Western values, Western ways of thinking.

•   [pause]

•   Oh hey wait, hang on: By lucky coincidence, my two good pals Chatricia and Rob O, just so happen to be discussing the importance of the West right now!

•   Yessiree Rob: Just two regular totally biological-sounding human beings with feelings, and internal organs and noses and everything—just talking with their vocal chords in their totally real podcast.

•   Let’s cut to them now. Trish? Rob?

•   [Chimes sfx and fade in NotebookLM excerpt—90 seconds max.]

•   [transcribe Notebook LM bit here.]

•   [Doug resuming] Wow! That’s just so very kind of you to say, Trish and Rob.

•   I mean, sure, it wouldn’ve been an even bigger honor if the two of you weren’t disembodied artificial intelligence voices created with Google’s NotebookLM product and who are just creepilyfollowing an outline that I fed you.

•   But I’ve graciously decided to accept your fawning admiration anyway and talk about this important topic.

•   [pause & then thoughtfully]

•   Chatricia and Rob O. are correct in saying that “West” does not refer to anywhere, really.

•   You’d think you could just find it by pulling out your trusty compass, rotating it so that the little needly-guy faces north, and then turning your body to the little ‘W’ and then walking in that direction until you get there.

•   [pause]

•   But. You. Can’t.

•   And not just because our planet is just a big round ball—meaning that everywhere is pretty much west of somewhere

•   No, it’s because the West isn’t really a place at all.

•   [pause for emphasis] It’s an idea—a weird idea when understood in broader historical perspective.

•   That’s because many core Western concepts come from what folks call “The East” or “The Global South”—places often depicted as the opposite of the so-called West.

•   So let’s pick up that big round ball—and run with it—and see what we can learn about why, as the title of this episode suggests: The West is just as much a place in our heads as it is anything else.

•   [pause]

•   And look, I understand that sometimes, trying to sort out this mess might make you feel like you’ve lost your compass.

•   But it’s going to be okay. I’m a professional historian and I’ve been trained to point you in the right direction when you’re mapping out this big, zany world.

•   After all, my name is Doug Sofer. And I’m a weirdo—just like you.

•   [Theme]

Theme & Call for Sponsors

•   Like the direction we’re taking? Then orient your browsamicator to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to learn how you too can become a Certified Historical Weirdo, encourage more episodes or at least leave me with a lingering sense of guilt when I’m not producing them.

•   [fade out theme]

Western Origins in the East

·      Okay, so at first glance, the term West as it’s used in Western civilization—seems simple: It just means Western Europe.

·      Except that even the most die-hard advocates of the concept of the West say it’s not literally just there—it also includes other parts of the earth influenced or inspired by Western Europe. Like a whole ton of folks in the US-of-A claim we’re part of that tradition too.

·      So if it’s not just Western Europe, the point is that there’s a set of ideas / values / behaviors / attitudes / dispositions that come from Western Europe. These, in turn, have profoundly shaped—and continue to shape—our planet.

·      [pause]

·      So: Can we call those Western attributes a single thing?

·      Some folks do. There are people who’ll swear up and down that Western heritage is a thing that must be preserved at all costs.

·      But others say it’s just one of multiple things that influenced the modern world. Sure, it’s important, they say, but it’s not the only important thing.

·      And still others say it’s not a thing at all—and it’s definitely not a place.

·      [pause]

·      I’m not going to tell you what to believe; that’s just not how we roll here at You Are A Weirdo HQ. But I am going to present two evidence-based claims over this episode and the next twothat are in the works:

o   One: [bell] Yes, Western civilization is important to try to understand if you’re going to live in the modern world. Lots of folks continue to talk about it, and that fact alone makes it important to grapple with, one way or another—and whether we like it or not.

o   And Two [two bells]: Western Civ is, in fact, a thing—but it’s a whole heck of a lot messier a thing, and a whole heck less Western-European-a-thing, than it at first seems.

·      [pause—deep breath]

·      Okay, let’s do this!

·      The non-Western origins of the West become abundantly clear when you start at the beginning.

·      You’ll notice that every single History of Western Civilization textbook ever written by anyone who knows anything at all, begins the story Western Civilization in two places that are definitely NOT in Western Europe:

·      There’s Egypt—which is in North Africa—and Mesopotamia—more or less in modern Iraq—which, to make you feel even more directionally challenged is in a place called the “Middle East.”

·      [pause]

o   Look, we will eventually get to the reasons these directional terms are used—but if you’re just running into some of these concepts for the first time you’d be forgiven for assuming they must have been created by a bunch of drunken clowns just spinning their arms around and pointing in random directions.

·      Anyway, Western Civ narratives begin in these places because they’re highly influential to all these cultural and intellectual trends that end up defining Western Europe much, much later on.

·      [pause]

·      Let’s start with Mesopotamia. It’s home to lots of other major contributions to world civilization, including rigorous law codes—like the famous Code of Hammurabi—which I talk about in my episode called “Your Water’s More Valuable Than Diamonds.” Because Hammurabi’s ancient law code talks a lot about water.

·      And that’s because Mesopotamia refers to the land between those two life-giving rivers—the Tigris and Euphrates. And Mesopotamians were excellent water engineers! In fact, most Mesopotamian water control technologies are still used in updated forms today, in the West, East, North, South, Up, Down—you name it.

·      Diversion dams, weirs, sluices, canals with gate-and-sluice systems, shaddoufs and qanats [kuh-NATs] still help us get the water to where we want it going, and away from the stuff we want to keep dry.

·      And then there’s the Epic of Gilgamesh—which is one of the first and best-known bits of literature of any kind that we’ve got a more-or-less full copy of. I talk a bit about Gilgamesh in an episode called “Your Network Is Disconnected”—and it involves beer—the kind that might lower the inhibitions of a clown and get them to point in random directions.

·      But the big point here is that many different Mesopotamian peoples since around the year 2,900 BC made written laws, innovated new technologies to make their world more orderly—and less wet—and authored elaborate, beer-soaked fiction. And all of these cultural contributions ended up shaping the places we’d eventually call The West.

·      [pause]

·      And then there’s Egypt.

·      The ibis-eye’s view goes that Egyptians were extraordinarily good at many branches of knowledge and technology we’d later come to call Western. Egyptians were really good at math, for instance. They laid the foundations for a lot of geometry and algebra, and then along with the Mesopotamians even developed things like quadratic equations.[1]

·      They had a remarkably complicated and sustained political system and even if you’ve never even thought about Egyptian history before now, you already know that they built some the world’s most impressive, longest-lasting, and most pyramidal shaped and—um—sphynx-ical—structures on earth. 

·      Mummies and embalming too. And pharaohs and writing and complex religious traditions. And measurement of time, including a calendar system that became the foundation for the Roman one that helped shape our present understanding of time itself.

·      [pause]

·      And all that is just the tip of the pyramid!

·      After all, Egyptians have been writing down things since at least around the year 2700 BCE—nearly as far back as the Mesopotamians.

·      [pause]

·      Basically, the scale of time involved in understanding both ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt is just very hard to mummy-wrap our weird modern brains around: We’re talking literally thousands of years of uninterrupted, advanced civilizations, writing things down, learning, building off their ancestors’ works—not for centuries but for millennia—in both regions.

·      [pause]

·      Which is why these two obviously not-at-all Western European places have to be—and are—part of literally every reasonable conversation about Western Civilization.

·      You simply can’t understand Western culture without first acknowledging that it’s got tons and tons of other inputs from places outside Western Europe—like Mesopotamia and Egypt.

·      Oh hey, and in case you’re wondering, this is not some new-and-groovy “revisionist” take on history. It is absolutely, 100% the traditional understanding of Western Civ.

·      [pause]

·      So let’s take a sec and explore that traditional view—though in a decidedly nontraditional way.

·      I think those of us who teach history, make Western Civ out to be like it’s some sort of a football.

o   Stay with me now.

o   Picture your favorite kind: It could be a pointy-ended American football; or the rounded blimp they use in Aussie-rules football; or maybe that round one made up of pentagons and hexagons that you actually kick with your foot—which explains why most of the world calls it a football.

o   Ooh—now I want to kick one of those round ones right now.

o   [Grunt & ball kicking sfx]

·      Whichever one you’re imagining, pretend that this ball represents civilization—meaning a whole package of mutually reinforcing cultural things: Literature, music, math, drama, painting, architectural excellence, engineering knowhow, political philosophy, reflections on ethical reasoning—you name it.

·      This civilization ball gets passed—or lateralled—from one place to another at different points in world history.

·      And pretty much every history person who’s done the work to actually read about it, acknowledges that our football starts off in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and then it eventually gets passed [soccer kicked again] over to Persia—which is modern-day Iran where they created all kinds of political and institutional innovations—like a network of roadways! And mail delivery services! And a new kind of multi-ethnic professional military that would radically redefine warfare for a couple of centuries.

·      And even while the Persians were going postal and taking their mad military skills on the road, the ball got passed around some more [kick noises] to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean sea—to the Phoenicians in modern day Lebanon and Syria.

·      And the Phoenicians. Invented. The freaking alphabet!

·      [pause]

·      Look, you don’t need to know much of anything about anything’s-nothing to understand that these Phoenician-style alphabets eventually end up in many, many, many, many, many places around the world.

·      And the fact is that you don’t really have any Western Civilizations without them. Phoenician alphabets show up literally millennia before the invention of the Times New Roman font—but also centuries before the times of the old Romans.

·      [Pause]

o   Yeah, let’s see a Google bot write gibberish like that sentence.

·      [pause]

·      Not just the Romans but the Greeks too; it’s only after the Greeks pick up and adopt the Phoenicians’ alphabet that the B-is-for-Ball of Western civ ends up in Greece. [kicking sounds]

·      And we will get to Greece in this episode, I promise.

·      But if we’re going to understand the origins of Western Civilization, it’s worth finishing up our quick Mediterranean tour:

·      Right in the middle of these North African, Middle Eastern and Southern European civilizations, there are the people known as the Ancient Hebrews who lived in the very easternmost part of the Mediterranean Sea—

·      Due to that very easternmost-ness, they were also not from any place reasonably called the West, despite the fact that you can’t talk about Western Civilization without mentioning the Hebrew bible.

·      And the Hebrew peeps and adopted their own flavor of the Phoenician alphabet, and then got their chance to show their stuff with the ball too. [quick kick sounds]

·      The people we today call the ancient Hebrews had started off as a herding society organized into extended kin groups—that is, into the twelve tribes of Israel.

·      By around the year 1000 BCE, those tribes eventually settled down and created a single, centralized government—a kingdom. There’s much, much, much more we could do in talking about these folks, but for our purposes here, the main point is this:

o   Yes, the ancient Hebrews were definitely innovators in all kinds of areas.

o   But they were also very much in the orbits and influence of the other peoples of their day.

·      Much has been made after-the-fact about how different the ancient Hebrews were from any other peoples around them. And they were! There’s a lot of evidence to bear that out.

·      BUT there’s just as much evidence to show that they were also deeply influenced by their Mediterranean neighbors; it wasn’t a one-way street, and they didn’t just show up one day out of nowhere.

·      In other words, there’s a very legit case to be made that the ancient Hebrews, the authors of the Torah—the Hebrew Bible—borrowed heavily from Mesopotamians, Phoenicians, and Egyptians. That is, these other civilizations kicked the Western Civilization ball to the Hebrews every bit as much as they or anyone else had it kicked to them.

·      Just a couple of examples:

o   In terms of Mesopotamian connections, there’s mention of an earth-soaking flood in the epic of Gilgamesh that’s similar—but definitely not identical—to the flood mentioned in the Hebrew Bible’s depiction of Noah and his very large animal boat. [Very quick zoological sounds]

o   Then there’s the law of equal punishment to suit a crime—that is, “an eye for an eye”—reciprocal justice or even “Lex Talionis” for people who like to say lawyery-sounding things in Latin.

o   It shows up in the Mesopotamian law code of Hammurabi and once again, it’s similar but not identical to the line in the Hebrew Bible.

o   Again, the Phoenicians influenced the Hebrews too. The Phoenicians invented writing with an alphabet. The Ancient Hebrews, like a lot of other nearby peoples, made it their own—they’re the People of the Book after all.

o   And Biblical descriptions of the Temple of Solomon, depict it as very close to a Phoenician-style temple—including even the use of Cedars of Lebanon which we know were used in many Phoenician holy sites that were—not surprisingly—in the place we today call Lebanon.

o   And the Egyptian influence was everywhere too. There’s even some Egyptian precedent for monotheism—that is, the belief in just one god that would come to define the ancient Hebrews, and set them apart from their neighbors.

o   But there had already been a movement started by the pharaoh Akhenaten who had urged his subjects to worship only the sun god Aten. And his reign dates all the way back to the 1300s BCE—a few centuries before the Hebrews wrote down their ideas in the Torah.

·      [pause]

·      This is NOT to say that the Hebrews plagiarized any of their ideas of civilization from their neighbors—or even vice-versa for that matter.

·      The point is simply that all these different populations were actually talking to one another—through scholarly exchange but also through commercial trade, through diplomacy, and—amazingly enough—through warfare.

o   One of the extraordinary things you learn when you study the history of war is that it involves a lot of sharing of ideas and culture—sure between allies—but also between enemies—at least in the downtime when they weren’t actively killing each other.

·      [pause]

·      Either way, it’s obvious that the initial foundations of so-called Western Civ don’t come just from Western Europe at all. Yes, there were some Phoenician colonies in what’s now Southern Spain, but for the most part, Western Europe is not where the big ball of civilization was being dribbled around.

·      [pause]

·      So how and when does this fascinating philosophical football end up in Europe? 

·      Well in a typical Western Civ history, out of all of those places and peoples we just mentioned, it’s Greece that really gets that football rolling.

·      Let’s Get Us To The Greeks in the next section.

·      [Separator Music]

Passing to Greece—which also isn’t Western Europe

·      Most Western Civ classes and textbooks devote the largest part of their early chapters to Ancient Athens—in Greece. And Greece definitely is in Europe!

·      [ball noise, followed by applause]

·      [pause—understated]

·      But it’s also still definitely not in Western Europe.

·      [muted applause]

·      No, it’s actually pretty much right smack in the center of Europe, and all the way to the South.

·      Oh and hey, Greece’s centrality is how most of the places we’ve talked about so far became ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern’ in the first place.

·      That is, in terms of early history, when scholars say “East” and “West” they were starting fromGreece and then talking about places in reference to Greece. So stuff to the east of Greece is the East or “Oriental” and stuff to the west is the “The West” or sometimes “Occidental.”

·      So hang on: Why do we start with Greece in the first place?

·      We’ve got the Greeks to blame for that. Athenians and other Greeks were completely convinced that they were, in fact, in the center of the world. 

·      So let’s take these literally self-centered folks at their word and consider all the cool things that came out of Greece while they were bouncing that ball between their inner shins and foreheads—and what the case is to be made for centering our concept of civilization there.

·      Greece was not a single political thing. It wasn’t what we in today’s weird world call a country.

·      Instead it was a bunch of what we call city-states—the Greek word for a city-state is a “polis”—plural “poleis.” And the Greek people in the polis of Athens were extremely good at doing cultural things: They wrote a lot, built a lot, thought a lot, and talked a lot—about a whole lot of things.

·      That was especially true during Athens’ heyday—from very roughly from 500 BC through the death of Alexander The Great in the year 323 BCE. Historians and archaeologists call this the Classical period or even the late “Hellenic” Period because Hellenic pretty much means Greek.

·      The accepted wisdom states that Hellenic Greece is the foundation that [echo] Western civilization [/echo] stands upon.

·      It’s where Western philosophy got going—with the works of Plato and Aristotle among many, many others.

·      It’s the origin point of Western theatrical arts too.

·      Hellenic Athens is where democracy started too—check my episode on democracies and republics for more.

·      And best, of all, it’s where the academic study of history comes from! Particularly the historians Herodotus and Thucydides who in different ways established the foundations of history, this critically important tool to make sense of the human condition and keep us from doing the same impossibly stupid things over and over again.

·      Hellenic Greece is also the home of some of the most important ancient mathematicians: Pythagoras of Samos [SAY-moss] is probably the most famous, especially for his triangle theorem that you had to memorize in school. 

·      But there’s also many more like, for example, Thales of Miletus [my-LEE-tus], who along with Pythagoras is squarely one of the most important founders of the study of geometry. Maybe even more important, Thales greatly influenced later mathematicians through the methodical ways he reasoned through problems.

·      But even thinking about those two guys shows us how messy the idea of Western Civilization can be.

·      Both Pythagoras and Thales were from Ionia—basically the western coast of what’s today Turkey— east of today’s Greece. Samos is an island just off the Turkish coast, and the ruins of Miletus are right near a Turkish beach, close to seaside resort called Didim [DEE-dim], and not too far from what’s today called Rabbit Nose National Park—which is such a cool name that I’ve only barely resisted the urge to spend twelve hours diving nose-first down that rabbit hole to learn more about it.

·      Anyway, yes, Pythagoras and Thales were Greeks—but they like others from Ionia were also heavily influenced by the Persian Empire to the east.

o   Note that Turkish-speaking people wouldn’t end up in large numbers in Turkey at all until around the year 1,100 CE or AD—roughly a millennium-and-a-half later after Pythagoras & Thales, so that’s another history entirely.

o   But Persian influence in Ionia was major.

·      [pause] And to complicate the situation further, when the philosopher Democritus talked about who the wisest mathematicians were, he cited the importance of Egyptian scholars.

·      And even Aristotle—probably the single most famous Greek thinker in Western European history—referred to Egypt—not Greece—as the “cradle of mathematics.”[2]

·      So Greek thinkers acknowledged that they were building off of what from their perspective in time was ancient wisdom. They’d totally have agreed they’d only gotten the football  of civilization after it’d been tossed around for a while by the Egyptians.

o   That is, if they had football back then.

·      [pause]

·      And once they had it in their hands—or like between the insoles of their feet—the poleis of Hellenic Greece—especially Athens—have as good a claim as any to having been the center of civilization.

·      In fact, they said as much—calling anyone else from anywhere else uncivilized.

·      [pause]

·      Actually, the word they used to describe outsiders was barbaros—which is where the Latin-speaking Romans eventually got the word barbarus which ended up in Old French as barbarienwhich eventually crossed The Channel and ended in English as barbarian—which still basically means ‘uncivilized foreigner.’

·      Phrased in a much nicer way, Greek writers saw Greece—this chaotic, decentralized array of city-states and peoples—as the center of the world.

·      Which once again answers why it’s your position relative to Greece that determines whether or not you’re Western or Eastern. Because later civilizations took Greek classical writings as their starting point, and those Greek writers saw themselves as being in the middle.

·      [pause]

·      To be fair to the Greeks, they weren’t the only people who believed themselves to be at the center of the world. Chinese folks followed the same logic when they’d refer to China as the “Middle Kingdom.” And the peoples of Central Mexico where the Aztecs are from seem to have claimed something similar—that there’s the civilized folks in the middle who have domesticated corn—and then there’s all those other people from elsewhere who are barbarians who are too dumb to have done so.

·      Either way, back in early 300s BCE, the Greeks believed that Greece was the GOAT.

·      [pause, then dramatically and slowly]

·      Or at least they did, until someone from sort-of-elsewhere came in and conquered it all.

·      Let’s take that on in our next section.

·      [Separator Music]

Hellenism—kinda Western, Kinda Eastern, Really Neither

·      In 338 BCE, everything changed for Greece, when a powerful alliance from the city-states of Athens and Thebes lost a massive battle to a king who wasn’t from a Greek city-state at all.

·      Was he from the West of Athens? Are we finally talking about the West?

·      Nope, still not yet! He was from the north of Athens. And his name was King Philip II of Macedon, who ruled from 359-336 BCE.

·      Civilized city-dwellers in Greece saw the Macedonians as only kinda Greek at best—[quote effect] “nearly barbaric” [/QE] in the words of one recent Western Civ textbook.[3]

·      Despite getting no respect from neighboring Greek poleis—or maybe because of it—Phillip II of Macedon took his nearly barbaric army and spanked the combined entirely-non-barbaric Greek forces in that 338 BCE battle; it’s the Battle of Chaeronea [Kie ROH nee ah] if you want to look it up.

·      At that point, Phillip had no more nearby Greek rivals and he got an unfeta’d—sorry: unfetteredopportunity to expand his new empire.

·      But it was Phillip’s son, Alexander—eventually known as Alexander the Great, who took his dad’s empire-building to a whole new level.

·      In fact, Alexander ended up conquering not only Greece, but also the entire, murh-more-enormous Persian empire—through a very clever combination of crushing enemies, finding new friends, and then intimidating other potential enemies into surrendering. By the time he was done, he’d conquered Greece, Egypt and pushed as far east as the Indus River—that’s the river they named India after.

·      At the end of Alexander’s life, he controlled an empire that was thousands of miles wide.

·      If you go to Google Maps and tell that robo-lady Googlia that you’re driving from Athens, Greece to Karachi, Pakistan—very approximately the widest stretch of land that Alexander controlled, it says it’s a 6,101 kilometer drive—that’s 3,788-and-a-half miles for U.S. folks.

o   For size reference, New York to L.A. is 2,789 miles via I-80—4,488 km if you’re somewhere other than the United States whose difficult-to-convert measurement system might be described as [QE]“nearly barbaric.”[/QE]

o   The main point is that it’s an insanely long drive even if you’ve got a 21st century car. And it feels even longer if your fastest vehicle has four hooves and munches grass.

·      [long pause]

·      But you’ll notice that none of that impossibly enormous territory includes Western Europe.

·      [pause]

·      So: Do we call Alexander the Great a Westerner? The question seems absurd. And maybe it gets even more absurd when you understand what came next.

·      When Alexander died at the ripe old age of 32 in the year 323 BCE, there was nobody around who could manage this entire, preposterously enormous empire. So it got divided up among three of his best generals: 

·      There was Seleucus [se-LOO-kus] who took over the Asian holdings—basically the old Persian Empire. And there was, eventually, Antigonus [An-TIG-on-uhs] who controlled Greece and Macedon; and finally there was Ptolemy [TOLE-uh-mee] who ended up holding Egypt.

·      These three “successor kingdoms” all used Greek as an administrative and governmental language, and these kingdoms’ leaders were generally educated in Greek learning—reading those Greek classics that clever people still read today.

·      This Greek-influenced era is called the Hellenistic Period; since Hellenic means Greek, Hellenisticroughly means the scholars of the day are Greek-ists, or Greek-influenced, or even Greek-ish—because a lot of thinking and writing got done in the Greek language, but the people doing the thinking and writing weren’t necessarily from Greece at all.

·      And that Hellenistic period had staying power—like longer than there’s been a United States: It lasted from Alexander’s death in 323 BC all the way to the year 31 BCE.

·      [pause]

·      Where was most of the learning and civilization happening during the Hellenistic period? SurelyTHAT must have been in Western Europe, right?

·      Still not yet! The big centers of what we today might weirdly call Western learning were Alexandria, back in Egypt again—named after Alexander—and then in Pergamon—sometimes Pergamum—which once again is in the modern borders of Turkey.

o   You can tell these were the two most important centers of learning because its where the biggest and second-biggest libraries were in all of this enormous territory that had been conquered by Alexander.

o   The Library of Alexandria was part of a big learning institution and which supported the work of some of the smartest folks—basically ever. People who lived and/or worked there included such notable celebrity smart-people as: Euclid—the Geometry guy; Archimedes—the physics guy; Hero of Alexandria who invented a freaking steam engine nearly two thousand years before anyone really made use of one; and that’s just a few of the highlights.

o   Pergamon, meanwhile was home to the second biggest library in Alexander’s enormous former empire. Just as impressive were the archaeological innovations there. Cooler still, the Citadel of Pergamon and its surrounding area is an architectural marvel. There’s this giant amphitheater bult into the side of a mountain, and some of the streets there were paved—with marble!

·      All of which is to say this: What we call “Western Civilization” for the three hundred years of the Hellenistic period, was centered in North Africa and the part of western Asia we call the Middle East—not in Western Europe by any reasonable definition of Western or Europe.

·      [TRAILER EXCERPT HERE:] “…In other words: the absolute best representatives of what we today call the legacy of ‘the West,’ actually lived in what we now call ‘the East’ or—in the case of Alexandria—in what’s today known as ‘the global south.’

·      “So how do we explain all this geographical confusion? Did all these self-proclaimed westerners manage to simultaneously turn off their location services on their metaphorical phones, or is there something else going on here?

·      [pause]

·      The fact is that we only finally start to get further west when the Romans show up, and trap the football with their ancient boots [kicking noises] and eventually start to foot-smack it around Western Europe for the first time.

·      Roam with me over to the next episode in this three part mini-series—and once again, we’ll find it’s still not as simple as it sounds.

·      For now, let’s take a shot at ending today’s episode so I can publish it already and stop all those podcast tracking algorithms from assuming my show died and auto-generating condolence e-cards to all my halves-of-dozens of loyal listeners.

·      Separator music, get us to the final section!

·      [Separator music]

Conclusion, outro & credits

·      Just a short conclusion for now. We’ll save the really big conclusion for the last of this three part miniseries.

·      But it’s worth considering today that we just went over a big chunk of what’s usually covered in an traditional, early [echo callback] Western Civilization [/echo] course—and we haven’t even really gotten to anywhere in Western Europe yet!

·      Instead, we hung out in Western Asia, including the Eastern Mediterranean region called the Levant, and also Mesopotamia and Persia—and pushed eastward with Alexander’s armies all the way to India.

·      We visited multiple parts of North Africa.

·      And Southern – Central Europe.

·      But we’re not even really finally visiting Western Europe itself—the place they named the West after—until next episode!

·      Keep your ear holes locked to the open position; it should be coming a LOT sooner than this one came after the one before it.

·      [Chatricia] Woowww.

·      Exactly, Chatricia, exactly.

·      [Fade in theme vamp]

·      And if you are a human being—or a sentient facsimile, or even a very clever ocelot: I’d love to hear from you!

·      Sail your electronic trireme over to the page connected to this episode over at findyourselfinhistory.com . Or just pass your football over to doug@findyourselfinhistory.com and email me directly.

·      [pause]

·      You may find the references to the historical sources, sound files, and other information used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

·      Are you one of my amazingly patient listeners I’m so thankful to that I actually want to give you an uncomfortably-long hug while I ugly-cry on your shoulder? Thank you if so!

·      But no matter who you are, if you want to support this program and also get cool swag, head over to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to find out how. 

·      Oh, and hey in case you’re wondering, I teach about all kinds of fun history at the place where my day job lives: Maryville College, in East Tennessee, USA.

·      That’s Maryville College: Everyday Unexpected. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu .

·      [Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of Maryville College, its administrators, faculty, staff, students, board of directors, or any hapless Appalachian Trail hikers whose compasses demagnetized and who ended up by accident in the College Woods—since we’re just a half hour down the road from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park which the AT runs through.

·      This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, narrated, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are Copyright 2026 Doug Sofer. Thanks to Google for making the intensely weirdand disturbingly realistic-sounding NotebookLM available to jerks like me! Note that I used the excerpts I generated for educational purposes under fair use principles; I also edited those excerpts for content and brevity and I hereby assert that it’s akin to an artistic collage rather than a complete work taken uncritically, wholesale or as any other thing I might have missed when I was scrolling through the eighty thousand page user agreement and clicked ‘okay’ to.

·      Check it out for yourself at notebooklm.google.com and try not to have your own freakout when you realize the simultaneous potential for good, evil, and everything in between that this technology represents.

o   Using it for good requires full disclosures of when you’ve used it, like I just did.

·      My theme song, like all of my other content unless otherwise specified—is human made—in this case recorded by two actual human beings to the best of our knowledge. One of them is me, and I was accompanied by Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. Learn more about Matt at trimboli.com .

·      Thanks everyone for listening!

--
[1] See, e.g., George Gheverghese Joseph, “The History of Mathematics: Alternative Perspectives,” In The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics, Third Edition—STU-Student edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1–29. at https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7sdsb.5.
[2] Joseph, 6.
[3] Joshua Cole and Carol Symes, Western Civilizations, Brief combined volume (New York: W.W. Norton, 2023), 125.