Iranians constructed these deep structures that engineered in a such a way to grow ice in the winter and keep the ice for the entirety of summer. They made a kind of sorbet as a dessert.
To my knowledge, a countries education tends to focus on the country itself.
American education teaches a lot about the US but little about the history of specific European countries and in turn EU countries teach little about American history ( IIRC during my education we covered the entirety of the US history in half a year and then went back to more local history )
It's always quite amazing to realize that other countries mostly have just as much of a rich history as your own.
Understandable, but also somewhat proportional? There's 250 years of US history vs thousands of years for many European countries. Of course you need more time to cover that.
On topic: Iran is an absolutely stunning country. Second to none with respect to its nature, people and history. What happened there with the Arab conquests (and especially since the Islamic Golden Age), their sad and unsuccessful struggles for independence, is a crying shame. But still one of the proudest, most beautiful regions of the world.
Aside from the fact that Columbus sailed over in 1492... This only serves to highlight the problem even more - 250 years represents what you might call "modern" America, i.e. the post-Columbian era.
Native American history is tens of thousands of years old and we learn very little at school (in Europe) aside from the stereotypes that the film industry and other cariacatures afford. I think we learned a bit about Columbus in the UK (I assume Spain does a better job)? We never learned about South America at all, save that it was something to do with why we kept looting Spanish ships. Neither did we learn about the Middle East which seems bizarre, given its role in early civilisation.
Europeans are (largely) either descendants of one of the ancient empires or were significantly affected by them through conquest. The native Americans (in both hemispheres) were on the receiving end of European conquest and had their culture decimated or plundered. There's also a lot of very visible (and impressive) Roman, Egyptian and Greek culture lying around to visit, not to mention extensive written histories of all three. While there are similar sites in the Americas, there are fewer and they're often less visible or are quite inaccessible.
While there's certainly a gap in the teaching of other cultures in most (all?) modern education, do note that (here from Wikipedia): "History (...) is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory. It is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events."
To the best of my knowledge, there's a limited written record from the North America prior to the invasion (" discovery") - apart from in Norse sagas chronicling the viking arrival around 1000 AD (and while the sagas are an important source, they're hardly known for their reliability, in part because of the often long gap between events and when the sagas were first written down).
Both south and north American indigenous civilizations were AFAIK largely without a written record.
That is a controversial definition that many academics criticize because of the ridiculous questions it raises. Most Archaeologists and anthropologists use broader definitions of history that encompass a whole host of non-literary sources precisely because it's stupid to discuss whether Americans became historic the second someone happened to write about them in 1492 or if linear-a tablets need to be translated before Minoans are considered historical.
Focus of education can be split even further than country. My step brothers and I went to different schools, and I remember being surprised to discover my history lessons focused on the historical relevance of one city, theirs on the history of another. Public vs private schools.
The US has a much longer history than 250 years. Our education covered everything starting from ancient civilizations. Most of modern US state history was squished in at the end.
I would consider it part of US history, it's simply what was there before the US as today was established.
European history doesn't start where the last government was established either, it goes back all the way, regardless of who happened to think it was their country at the time.
It's interesting that you place the U.S. and Europe at equivalent points in a hierarchy. Perhaps it might be better to consider American history. Or perhaps North American history.
But then, organizing by geology might not make the most sense, either. Then, where does European history end and Asian history begin, or African history? Where does North American history end and Mesoamerican history begin?
Geographic context makes more sense to me than geologic. I'm not sure why we should draw history lines along tectonic plate boundaries unless we are specifically studying geology.
I think the strictest definition of U.S. history is the history of the state.
But history is a bit fluid in that it's not beholden to specific national borders. And we might study the history of the land the U.S. occupies and colloquially call it U.S. history even though most of it happened before there was a U.S. and may not always follow the current borders.
And I think there is a clear distinction that can reasonably be made if someone is referring to the history of the state or the history of the land and be conscious that they're not always mutually exclusive.
I think more the Roman history. From my impression the greek lost their influence due to excessive infighting. The Roman history hits much closer to the heart of the issue, likely Volume V of V "History of the Roman Republic" and you can see the Chapter Title "End of the Republic" shining through the pages already.
In the end, all those that learn history are doomed to watch history repeat itself.
The first section of US history is usually a unit on Native Americans. That said, pre-Columbian Americas is a topic where we're still rewriting swathes of it as we find new evidence, and the wheels of rewriting history books grind very slowly.
This wasn't true in the UK when I was at school 20 years ago.
Admittedly, the 'general' history we did in the first 3 years of secondary school (11-14) we covered mostly western history, but it covered Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, etc. We did some English history (Boudicca, Alfred, is all I can remember now).
In the optional GCSE History I did (14-16) we did little English history as far as I remember and covered inter-war Germany + rise of Hitler, Vietnam war, Chinese Communist Revolution, formation of Israel, Cuban Missile Crisis and probably some more I've now forgotten.
EDIT: I actually now remember we did cover Cromwell + English Civil war as well as William the Orange and the Suez crisis, probably at least one of those in GCSE. Slightly modified to reflect this.
A lot of those do directly impact the UK, although when we covered China, it was still fairly weak compared to its present position in the world.
Left school 4 years ago now. At primary, it's mostly kings and queen's, magna carta etc. Secondary it's mainly WWI/II (including "roaring 20s US" and Weimar). For sixth form it's the USSR, America, and I think China (I didn't do A-level history). (This was the AQA course anyway)
Weirdly we learnt almost nothing about the British Empire, which I think is sad because some people have a rose-tinted view of it. You can't begin to form an actual opinion until you know the history, the good and the bad etc.
If the exam boards still work the same way, different boards have different historical subjects, and I think they might even have a range of historical subjects that the teacher can be pick from, so not every school is the same.
I've learnt a lot of my English history from Bernard Cornwell historical fiction books.
I always think the European border would have extended all the way to Iran (and thus more fairly represented in western cultures) if it hadn't fallen to the Arabian conquest.
Before the Arab invasions, there was a state of constant hostility and sometimes outright war between Byzantium and Persia. I think that even had the Arab conquests not happened, Christian Europe would still have seen Persia as "other".
And even the West as it is treated the Greeks (and Russians!) as Oriental others. The former between 800s-1400, the latter between 1700 to now.
[] Started with Charlemagne being crowned as Holy Roman Emperor when the Eastern Empress (Mother?) Irene still lives. Even to the point of friendly relationship between the Roman Emperor on Aachen and Arab Caliph on Baghdad, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbasid–Carolingian_alliance
Yakhchāl is also used in Dari (Afghan version of Farsi) to refer to ordinary household refrigerators. Or if you were going to be really specific, Yakhchāl barqee which means electrical fridge.
There's also these, which are marvels of desert engineering:
To avoid confusion, it is also used in the same way in standard Iranian Farsi too. And while Yakhchāl barqee makes sense, I've never heard that before, at least in an informal setting anyway.
There will be a comment about how Persians didn't really come up with the concept and the basic idea was created by <some culture that _is_ covered in western education>
The walls of Benin were earthworks; the Great Wall of China is a massive, impressive stone fortification. The latter tends to captivate people's attention much more (most people don't realize that the modern, stone walls of the Great Wall of China are not how it existed for most of history).
>I'm surprised the longest wall in the world is not even mentioned in western education
It's no surprise it's not mentioned in the US. Thanks to a bunch of college students and religious extremists (granted they look like the Amish compared to more recent extremists but in the day they were certainly extremists) 40yr ago Iran went straight to the bottom of the priority list and there's never enough time to teach everything so only the highest priority items get covered.
Fascinating, I had never heard of this wall before. There are also numerous impressive and under-explored archaeological sites north east of Golestan, in modern day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, see this overview of them that I wrote a few years ago: https://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2014/10/forgotten-realms-of...
Personally I have felt that the fascination of Western archaeologists with Roman History is explained by the necessity of the American "aristocracy" to establish a cultural heritage of exceptionalism. This has led to an extremely detailed view of Roman History.
The history of other regions and civilisations serve no such similar purpose and have been ignored.
This is not something particular to America. Europeans have always stressed the continuity from antiquity. The pope uses the title "Pontifex Maximus" which was one held by Ceasar. Emperors (like the Holy Roman Emperor and the Zar) claimed to be the legitimate emperor of Rome. The Enlightenment thinkers were also heavily inspired by Rome and Greece, although preferred republican Rome to the time of the emperors.
The reason we know so much about Rome and Greece is that we have a lot of written material - histories, literature, poetry, letters, laws etc. Archeology is a relatively new science, while history (the study of written accounts) have existed since antiquity.
History is not just a question of what happened, but also about the effect of what happened. For example the Egyptian or Sumerian literature and philosophy might be just as magnificent as the Roman, but since those languages were lost it simply did not have the same effect on subsequent culture as Rome had.
And not only Romans! According to the Icelandic historian Snorre Sturlason, Thor and Odin (the Norse gods) were actually Trojans nobles which ended up in Scandinavia, and the Danish royal family descends from them. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the first settler in England was a descendant of Aeneas, the Trojan prince which founded Rome. And of course, the Trojan royal family ultimately descends from the Gods, and the mother of Aeneas was Venus.
In other words, the Danish royal lineage descends from both Norse and Greek gods.
Interest in roman history predates the US by a couple cennturies... I doubt there is much exceptionnalism here besides trying to explain everything with US motives.
Interest in Roman history was never lost. Access to Greek writings was lost to some extent in western Europe in medieval times, but even then it was known through Roman sources and retellings.
> the fascination of Western archaeologists with Roman History is explained by the necessity of the American "aristocracy" to establish a cultural heritage of exceptionalism
That seems a very US-centric viewpoint. Plenty of Western archaeologists aren't Americans. For many European countries, the Roman Empire is an important chapter of their own history, so it is unsurprising that archaeologists in those countries would be interested in it-and their interest has nothing to do with the United States. (Even many of those parts of Europe which never were subject to Roman rule were nonetheless enormously influenced by Roman culture, through the spread of Christianity.)
Romans left a lot of writings so you get a detailed history of some periods where other population like the Dacian that did not have writing we get just a few details about them and some of those details are from Roman or Greek writings.
Yes, this is exactly it. We have tons and tons and tons of documents from ancient Greece and Rome. On the other hand, we have much more writings on Persia written by Greeks and Romans than we do on Persians written by Persians: most of our knowledge of ancient Persia is via the Greeks and Romans!
The sad reality of history is that having contemporaneous writings by the people involved adds a lot more color and detail to history than archeology, so people are naturally more interested - there's more that can be known!
I fail to see the relevance of Iran's example although drawing moral equivalence with a country which has often been decried to belong to "axis of evil" seems counter productive
Iranians are well aware of the length and depth of their history. They’re also very proud of their literary and especially their poetic tradition. The high culture of the Mslim world was Persian speaking for an extremely long time. Urdu, the Muslim register of Hindustani takes its scientific, governmental and administrative vocabulary from Persian. Ottoman “Turkish” is unintelligible to speakers of modern Turkish because of the massive amount of Persian and Arabic vocabulary that was removed under the Young Turks’ language reforms. The language of high culture from Delhi to Baghdad to Konstantiniyye (Constantinople) was Persian. Persian was at least as much the language of the Islamic Golden Age as Arabic.
Maybe in case of Iran due to Islamic fundamentalism people are unwilling to look far back into the history, but the history of India, China, Central Asia, Russia etc. remain woefully unexplored as compared to Roman history.
Russia, not sure what you refer to here, but few written documents and sparsely populated areas explain the lack of historic research much better than american intent.
As for central asia, which civilization are you talking about ?
Central asia was pretty developed and civilized, when the Silk Road was the central artery of global east-west trade. And before Genghis flattened the Khwarezmians.
Are Americans allowed into Iran to do historical research? I know it is only possible to visit as a private citizen with some very restrictive rules(ie have a hired baby-sitter the entire time).
It is kind of interesting how you can find people who know are not history majors, that know way too much about the Roman empire, but they know dick about the Mughal empire. Or even if you say "Travancore" to them, they have no idea what you're talkin gabout.
Why can't people have interests? We all like certain activities, programming languages, etc. -- can't we think certain cultures are interesting too?
My (WASP) uncle learned Japanese and moved to Tokyo because of a personal interest in that specific culture. I'm happy for him, glad he had a good experience. Should I now chastise him for not doing that with other cultures?
This `personal interest == bigotry` attitude is a problem.
It is so much easier for a casual fan of history to learn about Rome than most other areas. For an example of this, browse the history audiobook section someplace like Audible.
I remember looking for books on the history of Japan a while ago there. Fifty books about the glorious defeat of Japan in WWII, a few hour long books on their complete history, and a great courses lecture series.
I think that (know too much about Roman Empire) applies to me :). For Europe, it was the main "event" that defined the culture, religion and scholarship of the entire continent for 2000 years. Law, medicine and biology still use latin, Christianity continues to be the main religion in Europe. Apart from the north-east, all countries have some Roman history. After Rome, each country becomes more isolated. Of course it's the period/Empire that is the most interesting to read and learn about.
If you enjoy that, you may like "a masterpiece of creative genius", the [Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System][0] as well, it's one of its kind and I'm still amazed how and using what technology they were able to make tunnels and canals into the rock under the city, of course how they did stop the stream until they finished the construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l
Iranians constructed these deep structures that engineered in a such a way to grow ice in the winter and keep the ice for the entirety of summer. They made a kind of sorbet as a dessert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faloodeh
Thanks for sharing this! Great read!