Culture, Religion, and Ideas Across History

Major world religions

The classical era (roughly 6th century BCE through 7th century CE) saw the emergence of most world religions:

• Hinduism — from Vedic religion (~1500 BCE) developing into diverse later traditions. Central texts: Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, Ramayana. Spread to parts of Southeast Asia (visible in Angkor Wat and Balinese Hinduism).
• Buddhism — founded by Siddhartha Gautama (~6th–5th century BCE); Ashoka's 3rd-century BCE Mauryan patronage and missionary activity; spread across Asia via Mahayana (China, Korea, Japan) and Theravada (Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia).
• Judaism — Abrahamic and Mosaic traditions; Hebrew Bible; Second Temple period; diaspora communities from ancient times.
• Christianity — from Jesus of Nazareth (1st century CE); Constantine's conversion 312 CE, Edict of Thessalonica 380 CE making Christianity the Roman state religion; subsequent European Christianization; East-West schism 1054; Reformation from 1517.
• Islam — from Muhammad's ministry (~610–632 CE); rapid expansion under the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates; Five Pillars as central acts of worship; Sunni-Shia split; Islamic Golden Age of scholarship.

Classical philosophy

Greek classical philosophy — Socrates (through Plato's dialogues), Plato (Republic, Symposium, and others), Aristotle (Ethics, Politics, Metaphysics) — established foundational frameworks for Western philosophy. Their work reached medieval European philosophy substantially through Islamic transmission (Ibn Rushd's commentaries on Aristotle) and later direct Byzantine sources. Chinese classical philosophy centered on Confucius (~551–479 BCE) and various later developments through Neo-Confucianism (Zhu Xi 1130–1200).

Medieval cultural traditions

• Islamic Golden Age (~8th–13th centuries) — al-Khwarizmi's algebra, Ibn Sina's medicine, Ibn Rushd's philosophy, elaborate observatories.
• Medieval Christian scholasticism — Anselm, Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (~1265–1274) synthesizing Aristotle with Christian theology.
• Gothic architecture — Chartres, Notre-Dame, Cologne with pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses, stained glass.
• Vernacular literature — Dante's Divine Comedy, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Cantar de Mio Cid, Nibelungenlied.

Renaissance and Reformation

Italian Renaissance humanism recovered classical Greek and Roman traditions and celebrated human potential. Major figures: Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael. The Protestant Reformation from 1517 shattered Western Christendom into competing traditions — Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist), Anglican, various others — and produced substantial religious wars before the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.

Enlightenment

18th-century intellectual movement extending Scientific Revolution reason to political and social questions. Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Kant, Adam Smith. Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751–1772) as canonical work of encyclopedism.

19th-century cultural movements

• Romanticism — emotion, individualism, sublime nature (Wordsworth, Byron, Beethoven, Turner).
• Realism — everyday life, working-class experience (Dickens, Balzac, Courbet).
• Nationalism as cultural project — folk music collection, national epics, linguistic standardization.

20th-century cultural transformation

• Modernism — abstract art (Picasso, Kandinsky, Pollock), stream-of-consciousness literature (Joyce, Woolf), atonal music, Bauhaus architecture.
• Global popular music — jazz, rock and roll, hip-hop, K-pop, reggae with global spread and hybridization.
• Film as major art form — Hollywood, French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Japanese cinema, Bollywood.
• Non-Western literature — Achebe, García Márquez, Ngũgĩ, Morrison, various others reshaping global literary conversation.

CBE skill focus

Cultural questions often ask you to match a cultural figure or work to its era and tradition. Also expect questions on diffusion — how Buddhism spread from India, Islamic scholarship's transmission to medieval Europe, K-pop's 21st-century global reach.