What makes an ancient society more productive in terms of art, literature & philosophy?

Why were the Greeks, Indians and Chinese popping out intricate artistic products, major sagas of literature and unique philosophies by the truckload while the Romans, Carthaginians and various steppe peoples made very little or almost none, in terms of size to production? What factors most influence a society's capability to produce these things?
 
Why were the Greeks, Indians and Chinese popping out intricate artistic products, major sagas of literature and unique philosophies by the truckload while the Romans, Carthaginians and various steppe peoples made very little or almost none, in terms of size to production? What factors most influence a society's capability to produce these things?
Cries in Virgil, OVid, Pliny... etc
 

Skallagrim

Banned
The Romans created a lot, and it is almost unthinkable that the Carthaginians didn't do so as well. If a society has a literate elite of any significance, it will be productive. The expressions may of course differ: some cultures may be more interested in certain art forms, while others may be more productive when it comes to intellectual essays and philosophy. This differs per culture, but also per time period within each culture. But the idea that some literate cultures are way more productive than others is just wrong. The problem is the medium. Some materials just decompose quicker, and as a result we have nothing left of what some cultures wrote.

The biggest difference, the only difference that really matters, is between literate cultures and non-literate ones. The former create an increasingly fixed corpus, whereas the latter rely on an ever-changing, ever-evolving oral tradition. (In this sense, Homeros of Greece and Snorri of Iceland fulfilled the same role, many ages apart: they famously wrote down pre-existing oral traditions in what became the definitive version. They marked the transition from a tradition of singing story-tellers to one of written epics.)
 
I think it is more of that we have copies of the Greek tragedies and epics and such, and of the Chinese, and so on, but we don't of the others.

Take the Iliad for instance. There are between 500 and 1000 copies but they don't date from when it was written but from hundreds of years afterward. Enough copies were able to be made that when these survived they were able to be reproduced and found a place in our lexicon of important classical things. There might have been a writer in Carthage who created some fascinating dramas or Adventures which were even more riveting but they didn't survive. If only one copy survives that is 500 years later then it was written, it becomes like Beowulf. It can get copied and noticed, but it won't proliferate quite as much and so still won't be quite as well-known just like Beowulf probably isn't as well known as The Iliad. But frankly I'm not aware of any even like that.

Another factor is that the Greeks came before the Romans and many of the others, and therefore a lot of people just look at them and base what came afterward off of them since they are the most well-known. This is a mistake of thinking because it presumes that what came after was building upon what was before rather than considering the cultures as individual. However, it is probably a normal psychological phenomenon to look at it that way. So, if you had Descartes, for instance, sent back in time and had him write some stuff in 500 BC he would be considered one of the Giants off of whom others based their thinking. Even if you put him in Gaul people might presume that Socrates got his ideas from time travelling Descartes and that his idea of the individual was based on the idea that if one thinks there for one is, so that would be clearly putting Descartes before the horse. :)
 
Enough copies were able to be made
IMO, you've hit the key factor. Could the society produce copies?

Was Shakespeare really so brilliant, or just popular enough he survived?

(Yes, that's the "STVH" joke, "Suzanne, Robbins--the giants.":openedeyewink: IMO, there's more than a grain of truth.)

In defense of Rome, consider all the aqueducts & such. Architecture is art, too.
 
Why were the Greeks, Indians and Chinese popping out intricate artistic products, major sagas of literature and unique philosophies by the truckload while the Romans, Carthaginians and various steppe peoples made very little or almost none, in terms of size to production? What factors most influence a society's capability to produce these things?
WHAT? WHAT?!
W H A T ? !
H
A
T
?
!

I mean there's some degree of truth to the accusation that the Romans copied more than they created, but to say their cultural production was negligible/near negligible is... a unique thesis.
 
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Why were the Greeks, Indians and Chinese popping out intricate artistic products, major sagas of literature and unique philosophies by the truckload while the Romans, Carthaginians and various steppe peoples made very little or almost none, in terms of size to production? What factors most influence a society's capability to produce these things?

These ones, at least, had very different cultures and societies that were geared to other cultural products which are not as easily studied by our historical and archaeological techniques.
 
These ones, at least, had very different cultures and societies that were geared to other cultural products which are not as easily studied by our historical and archaeological techniques.

Also it's not a given that they neither did art nor wrote. We know of decently literate steppe societies in perfectly historical times because neighbouring literate societies have recorded them as such. But in terms of what they left behind, well, sometimes it's as little as three bits of paper, one monumental kurgan stone, and a few graves.

Because everything else just got burnt to ashes every couple of generations. I mean, consider that the entire literary legacy of the Golden Horde which was home to hundreds of thousands of literate Uighurs/Persians/Armenians/Russians/Arabs as well as Turcs of all descriptions, and the Mongols/Tatars themselves: it can fit in a copybook. Why? Tamerlane. And the Mongols themselves succeeded several other cultural groupings that left about equally as much each.

The steppe was historically a very harsh environment for anyone trying to leave much material legacy.
 
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