[jhgb]

Ancient Greeks were Indo-Europeans, though, unlike any of the contemporary Ferticle Crescent cultures. In many ways that does make them very much western, e.g. their invention of vowel graphemes was one that other western peoples such as Latins/Romans who were also Indo-European and needed them as well could take advantage of.

[datameta]

The Persians were just as much descended from Indo-Europeans as the Greeks were and they were squarely in the Near East by any Greek account. If anything Indo-European ancestry is what can point out commonalities rather than be a source of categorical division.

[bigbillheck]

> Ancient Greeks were Indo-Europeans, though,

So were the Hittites, and the ruling class of the Mittani.

[jhgb]

True, I sometimes forget how far north the Fertile Crescent reached. Nevertheless, when the Greeks rose to their height the Hittites had already been gone. The fact the Hittite language had to be deciphered in the 20th century attests to the cultural irrelevance of the Hittites for the western world. Compared to that we have whole schools of philosophy for Ancient Greece. We've never needed to rediscover Greece -- it's always been there in the background.

[wl]

We also had to decipher Egyptian. I don't think having to do so speaks to the cultural irrelevance of a civilization.

[jhgb]

Yes, and the result of that was that for two thousand years, Greco-Roman culture was directly influencing European cultures while Egyptian was not. That my country produced Alexandreis (a vernacular Czech version based on a French original by Gautier de Châtillon) in the High Middle Ages and not Ramesseis instead is telling: Egyptian culture had been irrelevant to us for two millennia. You had to wait for the 20th century and Mika Waltari to retell the story of Sinuhe.

[wl]

If we're talking about Sinuhe, that's on the wrong side of the Late Bronze Age systems collapse. Other than perhaps faint echos found in the Greek epics and the Hebrew scriptures, Mediterranean texts from the other side of the collapse were undeciphered until the 19th century. Ramesses II and Alexander are more than eight centuries apart, with Alexander being on our side of the collapse.

On the other hand, that Greco-Roman culture that was so influential is in no small part Egyptian. Alexandria was a major cultural center of the Greco-Roman world. Egypt was the first nation to convert to Christianity en masse and that influence on Christianity remains today.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The Hittites were gone, but languages related to Hittite were still spoken throughout Asia Minor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_languages