The Cultural Origins of Western Civilization:From Cultural Borrowing to the Formation of Cultural Genes
When the Western civilization originated in the 11th and 12th centuries,it could be said to be culturally barren and desolate.The formation and shaping of its cultural genes had gone through a long historical process which could be roughly divided into three historical phases.The 11 th-14th centuries were the embryonic stage of the formation of the Western cultural genes.The Renaissance was the stage of the development of the Western culture.These two historical phases belonged to the period of cultural borrowing,with large-scale borrowing of the cultural concepts and cultural imagery of ancient Greece,the legal terminology and even the legal system of ancient Rome and Byzantium,and the technological culture of the Oriental civilization and the Islamic civilization.Three major cultural genes,namely,rationalism,christianity and individualism,were shaped by appropriating,absorbing,transforming and restructuring these cultural factors,and by combining them with the evolving and re-created cultural factors of the Germanic traditions.The early modern period was the stage of maturation of Western culture and the stage of cultural creation of Western civilization,which began to create its own culture.
Western civilizationcultural historycultural genescultural borrowing
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