Maybe it's just nonsense but...

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Good points about the Greek culture, Maca, I'm enjoying your observations. But before we move on, I have to react to what you said:

Originally Posted by Macalaure

I don't want to offend, but I think you might overemphasize the importance of ancient Israel. After all, most of the time it was conquered by somebody and its cultural and religious influence only came A.D.

Indeed, I think I was speaking about in my previous post - look it up there. Israel was not important in the "global world politics", but it was important because of what it represented. As we know from the cases of Frodo&co., the smallest things can be of highest importance. Even when Israel was conquered by someone, something was happening down there. Israel was not important in the political sense, but in the human thinking overall. Between 900-200 BC, there was something that Karl Jaspers calls "the Axial Age". In several cultures the cultic era suddenly ends, we are not just in the time of repeating rites, in the mind of man, the time shapes into a line going from somewhere to something. Several nations are not just looking back to their myths, but they start to consider (and look up to) the future. This is, in my mind, the end of the "First Age". In Middle-Earth, this starts with Eärendil for me. The men (and elves) realize they are not doomed to the Dark Lord, their life is not just repeating circle of their works throughout the year until death, but they realize that there is some future, some expectations of the end. In our world we see it at the Greek philosophers, Lao'C, Buddha, and the Hebrew prophets. The ritual religion turns into a waiting for something - which is, I think, the best showing of "promise-fulfilment" schema of Númenor. For these nations, the First Age ends here. And also the important thing which this "Axial Age" represents is - in the same cultures - that breaking the ritual comes up with the emergence of ethics in human thinking. In these cultures, that what is called by Confucius "the Golden Rule", and what is called in Christianity "one of the two greatest commandments" emerges: "Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you." The humanity does not accept it rightaway, but it begins here.
I think this is important as we were speaking of how the culture - "intellectual side of civilization" -developed (as I supposed from elempi's first post), and the "ethical breaking" is very important for this.