Civilization

Imagine a world where the very ideas that make modern life possible—policy, science, economy, culture—simply didn’t exist within the faiths that now dominate swaths of our planet. That might seem unthinkable, yet history shows that the foundational concepts underpinning our societies were forged elsewhere: in the city-states and republics of the Mediterranean, in the rich intellectual ferment of ancient Persia and India. When Rome coined words like “politics” and “policy,” and later when Greco-Roman thinkers wrestled with the birth of natural philosophy, they were laying bricks for a future civilization that their spiritual heirs would later claim as their own—often without acknowledging the origin.