Five Classics

Examples of Five Classics in the following topics:

• Chinese Philosophy

  • Ceremonies and rituals based on the Five Classics, especially the I Ching, were strongly instituted.

• The Classical Period of the Maya

  • The Classic period lasted from 250–900 CE.
  • The political relationship between Classic Maya city-states has been likened to the relationships between city-states in Classical Greece and Renaissance Italy.
  • The Maya believed there were five chaotic days at the end of the solar year that allowed the portals between worlds to open up, known as Wayeb'.
  • The Classic Maya Collapse refers to the decline of the Mayan Classic Period and abandonment of the Classic Period Maya cities of the southern Maya lowlands of Mesoamerica between the 8th and 9th centuries.
  • Early Classic period (c. 250 - 600 CE.)

• Classical Greek Theater

  • Classical Greek theater, whether tragic or comic, has exerted great influence on modern literature and drama.
  • Unfortunately, his plays, and those of Sophocles and Euripides, are the only works of classical Greek literature to have survived mostly intact, so there are not many rival texts against which to examine his works.
  • His comedies are the first to demonstrate the five-act structure later to become common in modern plays.

• Origins of the Song Dynasty

  • The Song dynasty was an era of Chinese history that began in 960 and continued until 1279, which succeeded the tumultuous Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period and saw many technological and cultural innovations.
  • It succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, and was followed by the Yuan dynasty.
  • Philosophers such as Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi reinvigorated Confucianism with new commentary, infused with Buddhist ideals, and emphasized a new organization of classic texts that brought out the core doctrine of Neo-Confucianism.
  • The Later Zhou was the last of the Five Dynasties that had controlled northern China after the fall of the Tang dynasty in 907.

• The Maya People

  • The Preclassic period is the first of three periods in Mayan history, coming before the Classic and Postclassic periods.
  • For instance, the site of La Blanca featured a central mound more than seventy-five feet tall.
  • The Late Preclassic also saw the rise of two powerful states that rival later Classic Maya city-states for scale and monumental architecture, Kaminaljuyu in the highlands and El Mirador in the lowlands.
  • However, there were actually two collapses, one at the end of the Preclassic and a more famous one at the end of the Classic.
  • A number of theories have been proposed, but there is as little consensus as there is for the causes of the more famous collapse between the Classic and Postclassic periods.

• Discontent with the Roman Catholic Church

  • Although there had been significant earlier attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church before Luther – such as those of Jan Hus, Geert Groote, Thomas A Kempis, Peter Waldo, and John Wycliffe – Martin Luther is widely acknowledged to have started the Reformation with his 1517 work The Ninety-Five Theses.
  • Humanism, however, was more of an educational reform movement with origins in the Renaissance's revival of classical learning and thought.
  • In the meantime, the faculty had condemned the forty-five articles and added several other theses, deemed heretical, which had originated with Hus.
  • It met for twenty-five sessions between 13 December 1545 and 4 December 1563, all in Trento (then the capital of the Prince-Bishopric of Trent in the Holy Roman Empire), apart from the ninth to eleventh sessions held in Bologna during 1547.

• Culture Under the Song Dynasty

  • Theatrical drama was very popular amongst the elite and general populace, although Classical Chinese—not the vernacular language—was spoken by actors on stage.
  • Song intellectuals sought answers to all philosophical and political questions in the Confucian Classics.
  • The continuing popularity of Buddhism can be seen with strong evidence by achievements in the arts, such as the 100 painting set of the Five Hundred Luohan, completed by Lin Tinggui and Zhou Jichang in 1178.
  • One of the Five Hundred Luohan, painted in 1207 by Liu Songnian, Southern Song period

• Erasmus

  • Erasmus was a classical scholar and wrote in a pure Latin style.
  • Aloof from entangling obligations, Erasmus was the centre of the literary movement of his time, corresponding with more than five hundred men in the worlds of politics and of thought.

• Astronomy

  • Forty five years after the publication of De Revolutionibus, the astronomer Tycho Brahe went so far as to construct a cosmology precisely equivalent to that of Copernicus, but with the Earth held fixed in the center of the celestial sphere instead of the Sun.
  • The book described his model that used Pythagorean mathematics and the five Platonic solids to explain the number of planets, their proportions, and their order.
  • Copernicus was a polyglot and polymath who obtained a doctorate in canon law and also practiced as a physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist.

• The Germanic Tribes

  • The term "Germanic" originated in classical times when groups of tribes living in Lower, Upper, and Greater Germania were referred to using this label by Roman scribes.
  • By approximately 250 BCE, additional expansion further southwards into central Europe took place, and five general groups of Germanic people emerged, each employing distinct linguistic dialects but sharing similar language innovations.
  • These five dialects are distinguished as North Germanic in southern Scandinavia; North Sea Germanic in the regions along the North Sea and in the Jutland peninsula, which forms the mainland of Denmark together with the north German state of Schleswig-Holstein; Rhine-Weser Germanic along the middle Rhine and Weser river, which empties into the North Sea near Bremerhaven; Elbe Germanic directly along the middle Elbe river; and East Germanic between the middle of the Oder and Vistula rivers.