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Epilogue
Greece between Europe and Asia |
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Greece occupies a unique position at the interface of two continents. Such is the layout of seas and lands that no other country of Europe is so exposed to the warm breath of Asia. 'Europe' and 'Asia' in this context are no empty cartographic labels, but weighty shorthand terms: they stand for two great cultural arenas, not coextensive with the Europe and Asia of atlases but conveniently designated by these names. |
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Behind Classical Greece on the European side, to the north and west, lay lands dominated by other branches of the great Indo-European family of peoples: Thracians, Illyrians, Celts, Italians, and beyond them others again, Scythians, Balto-Slavs, Germans. While by no means sharing a uniform culture, these peoples all to a greater or lesser degree retained elements of a common patrimony of language and, in some cases at least, of customs, social organization, poetic tradition, mythology, and religion. |
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Across the sea, to the south and east, Greece looked out towards a concatenation of old established urban civilizations, Egyptian, Phoenician, Syrian and Assyrian, and others stretching away to the sunrise. Within this zone that reached from north Africa across much of southern Asia, cultural influences had radiated eastwards and westwards from the centre, from Mesopotamia and Syria, since the earliest times. |
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The Greeks came out of a relatively unsophisticated Indo-European background, but their developing culture was to a considerable degree moulded in the second millennium by pre-existing 'Aegean' culture, and both then and later by contacts with the peoples of the east. This is undoubtedly a factor of high importance in relation to ancient Greek music. But how high? Was Curt Sachs, for example, justified in his view of Greek music as belonging wholly to the oriental sphere?1 Does the balance shift in the course of time? These |
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'Griechische Musik und der Orient', Musica 12 (1958), 518-21. |
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