• Initially, the Chinese and Mesopotamias dominate the world… then the Sinic and Indic civilizations become the most powerful for centuries, along with some competition from MidEast civs (Babylon, Persia, Islam). Europe is a backwater for a long time, Africa is too heterogeneous and hot to be successful, the Americas are isolated from other cultures/civilizations
  • Africa is very heterogeneous
  • India/China are very homogeneous
  • Mid-East and Europe are a mixture – good for civilization turnover throughout history, bad for stability – not as bad as Africa, not as good as China/India

Europe is the most aggressive battleground on earth during the Middle Ages – which makes it a fertile proving ground for ideas.

What does being Western even mean?

  1. Before recorded history, all humans were hunter-gatherers
  2. Horses were tamed around 40,000 BC in Anatolia (modern-day Türkiye)
  3. The first civilizations starts up around 10,000 BC
  4. Proto-Indo-Europeans spread out around 3,000 BC
    1. Barbarians are always better fighters
    2. Horse-mounted archers crush foot-mounted spear men
  5. PIEs setup shop all over modern Europe, in the Middle East, and down into India (hence the Indo-European name)
  6. Modern westerners descended from the PIEs

I think modern Westerners are heavily defined by three distinct groups of people that lived over the years.

First, the Greco-Romans created a dominant civilization starting with the Greeks, enlarged by Alexander, and finally made dominant by the Romans.

During Roman times, a little lad by the name of Jesus got axed and started a whole new religion, whose in-fighting has defined modern Western culture.

And finally, after the fall of the Romans to the Germans, the Germanic peoples just kept churning out new ideas and fighting over land, to the point that they became the most dominant empires in the world after the Renaissance. The Germans, Dutch, and British started to dominate the world, and that has continued into American global hegemony.

Roman

  • +Greek, Persian

Christian

  • +Islamic, Jewish, Zoro, etc…

Germanic

  • +Viking/Nordic, Slavic, Turkic, etc.