The answer to the first question is open, with
estimates varying between 200,000 and 1 million.
However, the answer to the second question can be
answered with more certainty. If you guessed that most of them are located in Europe,
you would be correct.
Some 98% of all castles in the world are located in
Europe, with Italy, France, Ireland, and Germany together accounting for around
88%.
Although there are over 300 castles in the USA, all of
them were built following European colonisation.
A castle, according to experts, is a fortified
structure built primarily by, and for the use of, nobility or royalty. This
distinguishes castles from, for example, palaces, mansions and other similar
buildings.
A castle is fortified.
Another fortified structure is the wall. Some of the
earliest cities in the world, particularly in Mesopotamia and the Levant area
were walled. Cities such as Uruk, Babylon, and Jericho were walled and
fortified. Any traveller in Europe will have noticed the old city walls often
found in the middle of European cities today.
Again, most of the walled cities of the world are
located in Europe.
The other major parts of the world in which we find
fortified walls are in China (the Great Wall is especially famous,) the Indus
Valley, and the walls built by the Romans in northern England (Hadrian’s Wall)
and Thrace (Anastasia Wall.) Apart from Myanmar, most walled cities in SE Asia
were built following European invasions.
Apart from now being tourist destinations and part of
the heritage of many European cities, what do all these castles and walls
suggest to us?
They strongly suggest a continent of conflict, where
one side had to wall themselves in to protect themselves from outsiders.
Castles and walls suggest a mindset of us versus
them.
Castles and walls are mean to divide, to cut off the in
group from the out group.
This us versus them mindset appears to have
arisen concurrent with the building of fortified castles and walls. This
mindset arose within one continent and one culture. Europe and the European
culture. Walls did not only get built physically, they got built mentally also.
Walls and castles got built in our psyches and in the ways in which we perceive
the world.
This mindset has since been exported (by the process
of colonisation and globalisation) throughout the world.
Let us not pretend that humanity is naturally
antagonistic, brutal, distrustful, and divisive.
Most indigenous and nature-based cultures are not.
Some groups within these cultures have become so because of the hegemony of the
Europeanised culture that has swept the world over the past 500 years or so.
We can read it in the castles and walled cities of Europe.
It is up to those of us from within this European culture
to tear down the castles and walls within our own worldview and mindset.
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