Connecting with the Past

How Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt have Influenced Our Nation
By:  Jade Paulsen
Mod 7

Where do the columns come from that our outside some of our Nation's buildings?  Who helped come up with the great cures for some illnesses?  What civilization helps us understand how the world came to be by explaining stories through plays and poems?  I believe the civilizations that helped influence our nation a great amount would be Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt.  Thanks to them our Nation may be thriving.

Ancient Egypt contributed a great amount to our knowledge of medicine and the body.  Numerous papyrus have been found in archaeological searches that reveal many facts they knew.  Ancient Egyptians knew that the heart, pulse rates, air, and blood were important to the function of the human body.  How did this help us?  It could have been the early data that allowed our doctors to invent CPR or realize that these basic body functions are necessary for life.  Egyptians also came  up with medicine for burns, broken bones, wounds, and infections.  Thanks to their knowledge our doctors could add on to the medical knowledge and make it even more effective.  Ancient Egypt had great knowledge of embalming and how to preserve bodies which may have influenced our practices in funeral homes and morgues today.

Greek Literature has influenced our Nation a lot.  The ancient Greeks composed myths and wrote poems and play.  Many of these stories have inspired directors to create films about them.  The myths that they created were to help our understanding of their world and daily life.  For example, one of my favorite plays is Pandora.  It is about a curious woman who opens a box that lets  out the ills of the world, but also hope.  It explains why there is envy, crime, hate, and disease in the world, but thanks to that box it also gave us hope.  Without that myth we might not be able to define the bad things in the world.

Greek architecture can be seen many places around our nation.  What makes the architecture so famous are the columns.  The three styles of Greek architecture are:  Doric(plain), Ionic (scrolls), and Corinthian(carved stone leaves).  These styles can be seen all over.  The Lincoln Memorial has fifty-four Ionic columns around it.  Those are just a few examples out of many.  Greek architecture has definitely influenced the Nation and has made it more diverse in design.  Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece have made our Nation more intelligent, diverse, and astonishing.