Civ 5 is modelled after real-life history, so yes, it's true.
As examples, in Egypt, the Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom were quite powerful, but afterwards, tolerance, openness to foreign culture, and worshipping cats in a fundamentalist manner led to Pharaoh's decline. Persia conquered Egypt, then the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Arabs. All of those powerful nations with powerful cultures destroyed Egypt, and Egyptian religions are extinct. What if the Ancient Egyptians kept their culture like the Judeans? Then we'd still have practitioners of those old ways, and how cool would that be? How much heritage was lost because of that abandoning of culture, but at least Egyptian mythology survives to this day, and more than enough to recreate that era.
For the Persians during the Sassanian era, Zoroastrianism was given a harsh lash by Arabs, partly leading its rapid decline, so much so that it has not recovered since. The Iranians, back then, gave-up their culture, taking a new one, betraying their heritage, hence their weakness allowed Arabization to take over. The Persians were known to be translating works from India and China into Persian and Greek; how much was lost when the Persians ceased their tradition of cultural science and learning, swiftly destroyed by their Arabic conquerors over a thousand years ago.
The Greeks did better, accepting and then becoming Roman, but still keeping their Greek mythology intact, so much so that it lived on throughout the ages even to this day.
How do you make your nation immortal when about to be destroyed by an unstoppable enemy? Religion; it encompasses culture, heritage, art and faith, and sometimes a little history. So far, only the descendants of the Judeans have done that successfully, in such a way that it is still practised, but still, I wish "cutting of a piece of the private parts" and animal sacrifice was completely discontinued.
26-Nov-2015 05:05:29
- Last edited on
26-Nov-2015 05:07:43
by
Azigarath
