​This artifact is two essays wearing a trenchcoat, one on the Ancient Hebrew religion and the framework it provided for Christianity (especially as regards conceptions of God, and the developments of their ritual practices), and the other on the contributions of the ancient Greeks to Western Civilization. While both are very expansive topics and I was barely able to scratch the surface of what could be discussed in either one, I think they can serve well as an introduction to either topic, and effectively achieved the goals I had in mind when composing them. Namely, those goals were to: 1. express understanding of the worldview behind the cultures discussed in the essays, and 2. show how those cultures have contributed to the larger world scene.

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The first goal was demonstrated in looking at how those two cultures (Hebrew and Greek) each viewed the world in their own right, and how that shaped the way they engaged with reality. Understanding the general mind of a people group can help immensely in the study of the works they produced and actions they took throughout their history, and can inform our own experiences by offering a different perspective than what we usually default to.

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The second was demonstrated in examining the religious aspect of Hebrew culture and the intellectual, linguistic, and political aspects of Greek culture. Seeing as these legacies are what western civilization has inherited from them, it was only appropriate to focus on these parts of what constituted their cultural identities.