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The Ancient Mediterranean World

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No culture can be completely isolated; a culture that refuses to learn and share with the other cultures around it becomes stagnant and may die out completely. The cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world were certainly far from isolated. The willingness of these cultures to adopt and adapt from each other is part of what makes them so rich and complex.
Even as most ancient Mediterranean societies were just beginning, Egypt and its culture were flourishing. As the Chalcolithic Age gave way to the Bronze Age, the Upper and Lower Kingdoms of Egypt joined together and began expanding. This expansion spread the culture and art of the Egyptians around the ancient Mediterranean world. Many cultures adopted the common Egyptian image of a winged sun disk, representative in their culture of the sun god Ra; once adopted into other cultures, its meaning changed, but its general shape remained the same. Archaic Greek art, as well, was highly influenced by Egyptian art; many early Greek statues mimic the stiff posture and striding pose of Egyptian pharaoh illustrations (Purcell; Gilders). The Egyptians helped to shape a somewhat unified Mediterranean culture.
Cultures aside from Egypt began to grow and flourish in the …show more content…

Stamped and minted coinage is directly taken from Greek culture, and the columns found in many government buildings can be attributed to Grecian architecture. However, the Greeks did not simply develop their culture from scratch. They, too, allowed other cultures to influence their own, taking things such as Egyptian art styles and Phoenician alphabets and making them their own. It is this culture, developed from the cultures surrounding Greece and later spread through Alexander’s imperial expansion, that would one day become the baseline for much of modern society and

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