By Dr. Christopher Carrico
Amerindian Research Unit
University of Guyana
When Europeans came to the Americas, they came with clearly defined ideas about what was civilised and what was not. The classical European notion of civilisation was first developed in ancient Greece, where ‘civilised’ meant to be a male citizen of a Greek city-state. The Greek word for ‘barbarian’ applied to nearly all non-Greeks.
Greeks did recognize some groups as being more civilised than others, so while they believed that they were superior to all other peoples, they did recognize that other state-based and class-stratified societies had more in common with Greeks than they