Class 4: Before Europe (1) Classe|| Klasse 4: Vor Europa (1) Class 4: Before Europe (1) Clase 4: Antes de Europa (1) Classe 4 : Avant l'Europe (1) Classe 4: Prima dell'Europa (1) 4 klasė: Prieš Europą (1) Klasa 4: Przed Europą (1) Aula 4: Antes da Europa (1) Занятие 4: До Европы (1) Sınıf 4: Avrupa Öncesi (1) Заняття 4: До Європи (1) 第 4 课：欧洲之前（1） 第四課：歐洲之前（一）

- Okay everyone, greetings. ||salutations

Nice to see you all.

Welcome to the fourth lecture.

As you'll remember, section starts this week.

Somewhat incredibly we have a Pole, a Ukrainian, |||||Polaire|| to some extent|incredibly||||Pole|| |неймовірно||||||

and a Lithuanian TF-ing in this class, |||transfer student||||

which honestly could not have been, |honestly||||

I mean, if I'd tried to do that,

there's no way that could have actually happened.

So your TFs will be the beautiful and talented,

Zhenia Monastyrskyi. Zhenia|last name

Zhenia, say hello.

There you go, that's Zhenia.

- [Zhenia] We already met. - Oh, okay.

The equally beautiful and talented Wiktor Babinski, |equally||||Wiktor Babinski|Wiktor Babinski

and the no less beautiful and talented Maksimas Milta.

These are your three TFs.

Get to know them, get to love them,

figure out what the bribery culture is ||||Bestechungskultur herausfinden|| ||||corruption practices|| ||||культура хабарництва||

in their various countries, and adapt yourself to it.

Lots of laughter from the Ukrainians there, that's a clue. |||||||||Hinweis ||laughter||||||| ||сміх|||||||підказка

(audience laughing) |laughing

That's a clue. ||un indice ||clue

I do not have time for funny bribery stories. |||||||histoires de corruption|

If there's time at the end of the lecture,

I'll tell you a funny bribery story.

Okay, so welcome.

We are working our way now towards proper history.

I've been trying to set up some of the concepts

because the longer I've been doing this job,

the more it seems to me that we have to think about

what history is before we jump into doing the subject.

And so I've been using the fact

that we're in the moment in the middle of a war

to try to help the, I've been trying to use the war

to like shake up the concepts

and to help us think about how things are fluid,

and also help us to think about

how we talk and how we think about things

may influence the world more than we realize, right?

That the unthinking or half thinking ways ||unbedacht|||| ||mindless||||

that we approach the past ||approach||

will affect the decisions that we make in the future

by determining how we see things in the present.

But this is also really important,

because Ukraine is, you know, for many of you,

a new subject.

And even for those of you who it's not a new subject,

it's unlikely that you've actually had a class

that was just about Ukrainian history.

Did anybody check how many classes |||||класів

in Ukrainian history there are?

- [Student] I couldn't find any. ||konnte nicht||irgendetwas

- Okay, so I'm holding one lecture class

in the United States of America on modern Ukraine,

which is an extraordinary thing, right?

If you think about it.

It raises the question of what has gone wrong with us

in general, right?

Like, no, why is it that what we do

is so mismatched with the world around us, right? ||nicht übereinstimmend|||||| ||out of sync||||||

Like don't you feel ill served? |nicht|||| |||||погано обслужений

If you're going to any, I mean,

okay, not everybody at Yale is in this class,

but isn't it odd to think that if you were at

any other university in the United States,

you wouldn't even be able to take a class in Ukraine,

even though, right? |bien que| sogar|obwohl|

And that raises the larger question of

why is it, in the 21st century,

where we supposedly have access to all this data ||allegedly||ability to use||||

all the time, and we all know everything instantly,

why are we always surprised by things, right?

Why is it that things that happen in the world

always seem to catch us unprepared?

And so you know what my answer for that is gonna be,

my answer for that is gonna be

that you should all be history majors. |||||Geschichte studieren|Hauptfach ||||||field of study

Because if you're a history major, or just take,

I don't care whether you're a major or not,

just take a bunch of history classes, |||bunch||| |бери|||||

because you'll be less likely to be surprised

by the things that happen to you

over the course of your life.

Like, if nothing else, it'll help you not be surprised

by stuff that happens.

Okay, our job today is to set up Europe.

You know, if you're looking at it from

the point of view of today you could be thinking, well,

is Ukraine Europe, is Europe Ukraine.

We're not there yet.

We're thinking about the world before Europe,

because Ukraine, Kyivan Rus,

which we're gonna get to in the next lecture,

Kyivan Rus is coming into being at a time

when the notion of Europe doesn't really exist yet,

and wouldn't really make any sense.

So I'm gonna start by talking

about a couple of ways that people look at

the sequence of events that led to Europe. die||||||| цей|||||||

Then I'm gonna move on to the things

which really were there before Europe.

I'm gonna talk about language for a bit,

I'm gonna talk about pre-Christian religion for a bit,

and then I'm going to move towards the story

of how this state came into being.

So there are, if you are in, broadly speaking, |||||||в загальному|

the trajectory of Western Europe, die|der Kurs von|||

the United States, or North America,

the way that the trajectory of European history is taught

begins with ancient Greece.

And I'm not gonna change that here.

We're also gonna be talking about ancient Greece.

I'm just gonna be messing with it a little bit.

I did the whole thing with the olive tree |||||||Olivenbaum|

and the trident already, right? ||Dreizack|| ||trident weapon||

Did I do that in an earlier lecture? No, I didn't do that?

Okay.

So I did or I didn't?

You're the only one who remembers it, okay.

Maybe the entire class has switched out since then,

and you're the only,

like this was a really aggressive shopping period,

they're all new.

Okay, so just to remind you, of Athens itself, |||||||Athen selbst|

the founding story of Athens itself, |Gründungsgeschichte||||

involves an olive tree and a trident.

It involves a contest between Athena, the goddess Athena,

and Poseidon, who gets to be the namesake. |||||||homonyme |||||||Namensgeber sein |||||||name origin

You know the answer because the city is not called,

you know, Poseidon, it's called Athens.

So Athena wins because she gives the Athenians |Athena||||||

an olive tree, and the Athenians say

this is very nice, shade, olive oil, right? ||||right|||

Poseidon strikes his trident on the ground,

and seawater springs forward, springs forth. |Meerwasser sprudelt hervor.|||quillt| ||emerges||emerges| і морська вода витікає вперед, витікає.

And the Athenians say that doesn't taste very good, ||Athenen||||||

we're not really into that.

That's the way the story goes, right?

That's the way the story goes.

And it brings you an image of Athens

which is peaceful and contemplative ||||friedlich und besinnlich ||||thoughtful and reflective

and maybe tending towards consumer society. ||leaning towards||| ||||споживач|

It's a certain image of democracy, right?

Whereas Poseidon is offering, you know, |Poseidon bietet an|||| |||пропозиція||

strife, and sea commerce, and war, conflit||||| Streit, Seehandel, Krieg||||| conflict|||trade activities||

and navies, and things like that. |Flotten|||| |naval forces||||

Now, underneath that story is a question. |unterhalb von|||||

Because, you know, all societies

in the way that they tell their story of founding

are hiding something, right?

And this little story, what's being hidden

is the answer to the question:

how can you possibly live just on olive oil, right?

You can't.

I mean, no, yes? |veux dire||

I mean, at least you need a little bread

at least with the olive oil.

And so where was the bread coming from?

I'm now gonna see if anybody was at this lecture. |||||||||conférence

Where was the bread coming from?

Where were the calories actually coming from?

The grain? |зерно

Yes.

- [Student] The Southern Ukraine, right?

- Right, what's now Southern Ukraine.

The northern coast.

So the ancient world, the ancient Greek world,

includes the Black Sea,

up to and including the north Black Sea coast, ||||||||узбережжя

which is now Southern Ukraine.

That's where the calories came from.

And so you can plant your little city state

full of olive trees,

because you're engaged in an international trade,

and you're getting your calories from somewhere else.

So this isn't just mark that, that's important,

because the connection of our part of the world

with other parts of the world by way of food and calories

is enduring. |andauert |lasting or persistent |тривалий

So for the ancient Greeks,

what we're calling Ukraine was a place.

And if you did your reading of the Serhii Plokhy

you'll know that for Herodotus, who was a major source,

the ancient historian Herodotus,

along with Thucydides the two, you know, ||Thukydides|||| ||the historian||||

the two people who found history, as such.

Herodotus maps what we call Ukraine in a certain way, Hérodote|||||||||

correctly, which is sea, coast, steppe, and forest, |||||steppe||

moving from south to north, right?

Sea, coast, steppe and forest.

And the further north you go, the more exotic it is, right?

So from the point of view of that civilization,

northward means more exotic. nach Norden||| toward the north|||

And so it's in the North

that a lot of the Greek mythology is located,

a lot of like the Elysian Fields are there, |||||Elysischen Felder||| |||||heavenly paradise|||

and the Mountains of Hyperborea are there, in addition||||of Hyperborea|| ||||Гіперборея||

griffins are there, all kinds of stuff is there. Greifen|||||||| mythical creatures|||||||| грифони||||||||

The Scythians, they locate, |Die Skythen, sie|| |Scythian people||

I didn't write the Scythians, the Scythians are also there.

The Scythians are, in fact, real. |Скіфи||||

And they did inhabit what's now Ukraine at the time |||населяли територію||||||

and they did fantastic work in gold.

So that part, the part about Ukraine

being rich in gold is not entirely false.

The treasures of the Scythians still exist, |valuables|||||

they're still in museums, they're being looted in this war. ||||||being stolen||| ||||||грабують|||

So there are a lot of ways in which

what happens in the war actually reminds us of things

that were a couple of thousand years ago,

like the Scythians, for example.

There's a museum in Ukraine which was looted,

and the Scythian gold work has now been taken off to Russia.

Okay, so the Greeks are already looking at the territory

that we think of as Ukraine,

and they already have a certain geographical view of it,

which is south to north. And I want you to think about this,

because we are, you know, we are in the West,

and so when we look at Ukraine we're thinking, okay,

West Ukraine, East Ukraine.

But from the point of view of our story,

south to north and north to south

is actually much more important,

at least for the first few weeks of this class.

Okay, so if you're looking,

so taking ancient Greece as a starting point,

if you're now looking at this whole thing from today,

but from a Western point of view,

there's a certain way that ancient Greece connects to you,

and this will be familiar to you probably,

it goes like this:

there was Greece, and then there was Rome,

and then Rome fell, right? und||||

Very dramatic, it fell.

Imagine all the buildings falling, right? |||||n'est-ce pas |||||don't you think

It's a very dramatic image, Rome fell.

It was overrun by barbarians, it ceased to exist, right? ||invaded by|||||||

Very dramatic.

And then nothing happened for a while,

and then there was a Renaissance, |||||rebirth of culture

or there were Dark Ages and then there was a Renaissance,

and then that Renaissance miraculously, ||||und dann geschah die Renaissance wie durch ein Wunder, ||||unexpectedly

the clever Europeans discovered

all those things that were lost.

They discovered the Greek stuff, and the Roman stuff,

and they, so I told you before,

always be skeptical of this rebirth metaphor, ||doubtful||||

because if you think about rebirth for one second,

it's really creepy, right? ||unsettling|

I mean, just birth itself, honestly.

Like, I don't know how many of you have seen one,

but it's a thing.

And then think about doing it twice with the,

I mean it's just, so be suspicious of rebirth metaphors, ||||тому|||||

including the Renaissance.

So anyway, this is a Western perspective, right?

Greece, Rome, Rome falls,

then there's a Renaissance where everything is rediscovered, |||||||перезнайдено

and then after the Renaissance comes nations, ||nach||||

and the nations, the French, the Italians,

the British, and so on,

all in some way look back to ancient Greece to this pattern. |||||||||||modèle

If you're in our part of the world, this looks different.

You can still start with ancient Greece, as I say.

There's Rome, there's ancient Greece, there's Rome.

So far, so good. |up to this point||

Does Rome fall?

- [Student] No. - No, never falls.

Yeah, okay (laughs).

There's like one solid supporter of Byzantium over here.

I'm glad. (students laughing) |content||

That's right, Rome does not fall, right?

Rome doesn't fall, the buildings don't all fall,

the Colosseum doesn't fall, it's still there, |the Colosseum|||||

you can visit it today, trust me.