_Egypt._—According to Bunsen, Egypt is the middle place in the world’s
history. It is connected directly with the West or Europe, and as
directly with the East or Asia.
It is the only country in the great continent of Africa that forms a
link in the history of the world. What education is to be found in the
other parts of Africa, we have seen in our first chapter on education
in the savage tribe. Of course we reckon the Abyssinian Christians,
loosely, in this designation of Egypt, and consider Carthage as a part
of Phœnician civilization.
Egypt is properly a link in the chain of Asiatic civilization, although
geographically located in Africa. Its history is full of interaction
with the Semitic peoples of Western Asia, and we find it often in
relation with the Hebrews, the Arabians, and the Phœnicians, and even
with the far-off nations of the Euphrates and Tigris. Finally the
Persians conquer the country under Cambyses, and Egypt is henceforth
Persian, then Macedonian, then Roman, then Saracen, and finally a
Turkish dependency.
The river Nile is the essential feature of Egypt, more particularly the
circumstance of its annual overflow and subsidence. There is little or
no rain in Egypt in all the region from the mouth of the Nile up to
the last tributary it receives on its way down from the highlands of
Abyssinia. Northward from that branch (the Atbara) the Nile valley is
eight hundred miles long, and the Nile itself with all its windings
flows 1,300 miles, to its mouth.
The copious rains and snows in the mountainous countries at the south
supply fertility by the annual inundation, which begins in June,
attains its greatest height in September, and then subsides so that the
farmers of Egypt can sow their grain on the waters in October, and by
November, when the waters have subsided, the green blades of wheat are
seen everywhere sprouting through the slimy deposit left by the river.
In March there is an abundant harvest. Living was so cheap in Egypt
that the cost of bringing up a human being to his twentieth year was
not more than four dollars.
The Egyptian finds it possible to conquer nature and make it serve him.
He builds canals and dykes and regulates the overflow of the Nile so as
to get the utmost service from the fertilizing power of the rich soil
that the Nile brings down to him. Observation of nature necessary for
the purpose of utilizing the rise of the Nile, leads him to a knowledge
of astronomy, the construction of calendars, and hydraulic engineering.
He understands irrigation, the construction of canals, dams and
reservoirs. He invents the science of geometry because he has to use
the art of surveying in order to recover his farm after the inundation,
and fix its boundaries. Difficulties that occur in locating farms that
are liable to be washed away by new channels cut through by freshets,
as well as by the covering up and destruction of old landmarks, lead
to a more careful system of laws on the subject of landed property, as
well as rights and privileges appertaining to its use, than we can find
elsewhere in ancient times.
The greatest contrast exists between the day, which is very hot and
bright with light both direct and reflected, and the night, which is
very dark and cool.
In contrast to the natural changes which annually prevail, making Egypt
first a vast sea of water and then a blooming garden, the people of
Egypt strive for permanency.
Their struggle to control nature is their perpetual education. They
build enormous architectural structures—temples and pyramids. They love
the past and will preserve it if possible. The pyramid is a gigantic
tomb, for the high priest who is the king.
Not only the king but all good Egyptians shall have their bodies
embalmed and preserved. Their mummies shall be saved from decay in the
gigantic tombs of the hillside, above the reach of the Nile floods.
Egypt invented the writing by hieroglyphics, and developed out of that
system of picture-writing two other systems of writing, the Syllabic
and Alphabetic. Doubtless the Phœnicians borrowed their alphabet from
the Egyptians, and diffused a knowledge of it among the peoples living
around the Mediterranean Sea.
The priestly caste hold the directive power of Egypt, They administer
the education, and rule in the counsels of the state, and give
character to whatever is Egyptian.
The idea of death is ever present with the Egyptian. There seems to be
some faint idea of its spiritual meaning in their religion.
The god Osiris dies, slain by Typhon, and yet proves himself triumphant
over death, and attains perfect individuality after it. In East India
there is transmigration of souls as a punishment for the exercise
of appetites and desires in the life here. The properly prepared
soul reaches extinction in Brahm or in Nirwana. In Egypt, too,
transmigration punishes the individual by delaying his ascent into the
heaven of Osiris, wherein he may become a companion to that god. While
his body does not decay he need not be born again in another body, and
if embalmed properly, he can avoid transmigration until he lives again
with Osiris.
Egyptian religious ideas are in advance of Persian in the doctrine of
evil. The evil is not a principle of such power that it is invincible
by the Lord of the good.
The thought of death and the death-court which would decide whether
the individual had lived worthily or not, was the greatest educational
influence in Egypt.
If the death-court decided that the deceased was worthy, his body
should be embalmed, and this saved him from transmigration and secured
him ultimate residence with Osiris.
Hieroglyphics can not express clear abstract ideas, but only symbols
of ideas. Symbolic thought is not sufficient for science. The Egyptian
expresses his ideas in the form of enigmas or riddles. The Sphinx is
the most adequate expression of his mind. It has the form of a human
bust placed on the body of a lion, rising out of a rock. It expresses
the question of its soul: “What is man? Is he only a natural being
who, like the rock or the animal, belongs to nature only, and does
not escape from it—or does he rise out of it and attain to individual
immortality, outlasting all the forms of nature?”
Egypt contributed to the spiritual development of all other lands.
It is the great stimulator to the unfolding of mind in Greece and
Rome, and all other nations about the Mediterranean. It is the great
schoolmaster, not in morals and religion, but in scientific thinking.
And yet it did not itself furnish the completed sciences, but only the
limits and beginnings of science.
Greek literature abounds in exaggerated accounts of the learning and
wisdom of Egypt, and of its appliances for education. We should believe
that the Egyptian priesthood constituted a sort of university of
philosophy, history, and science.
Arithmetic, geometry, surveying, and mensuration, civil engineering,
language, and writing, and, according to some accounts, music formed
the chief branches of their education, which varied with the caste.
There were scientific schools for the priests and warriors, at Thebes,
Memphis, and Heliopolis. The education of the common people was at
a low standard. Plato tells us that the children of the Egyptians
learned to read in classes. Diodorus says that the artisans in
particular were taught reading and writing; and this we may readily
believe, when we see that so many inscriptions had to be made on the
walls of buildings, and on papyrus rolls. It seems that the trades and
arts were learned by children from their parents.
The women looked after the out-of-door affairs, while the men did the
housework, and especially cared for the training of the children and
the work at the loom.
Arithmetic was taught by games and plays, such as trading apples or
pieces of money, guessing at the number of grains of wheat concealed in
the hand, or by arranging pupils in military lines.
Children went barefoot and almost naked, the climate being very mild.
Psammeticus (B. C. 650) sought to introduce foreign ideas, especially
Greek and Phœnecian, apparently thinking that something could be gained
from those peoples. Foreign languages were taught under his reign, but
not in other ages.
The sight of what is strange stimulates us to wonder and reflection.
Herodotus, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, and others of the wisest of the
Greeks speak with reverence of that part of their education received in
Egypt.
After Alexandria was founded by the Macedonian Greeks, as the
commercial emporium of the world, Egypt became more than ever a center
for the collection and distribution of learning and wisdom for the West
and for the East.
The Ptolemies cultivated mathematics, astronomy, medicine, grammar and
history. The great museum founded by them in 322 B. C., furnished for
two hundred years a sort of dwelling-place and university for the Greek
investigators who resorted to Egypt. Even after Christianity had become
the established religion under the Romans, Alexandria remained a chief
seat of theological controversy.
In this museum there were several large courts surrounded by colonnades
opening inward, and seats under the shady trees and by cool fountains,
were placed for the scholars. The dwellings of the learned teachers
were near by. The famous library was in the court most retired from the
street, and free from interruption. There the busy scribes copied out
the treasures of the library for the libraries of other lands.
The astronomical observations carried on here surprise us.
The length of a degree on the surface of the earth was measured as
accurately as the perfection of their instruments permitted, and the
circumference of the earth was calculated by this means. The fact
that the earth is round seems to have been well known long before.
Eratosthenes, the superintendent of the Alexandrian Library, about
two hundred years B. C., computed the obliquity of the ecliptic to
be 23° 51' and 20?, and also measured the distance between Syene and
Alexandria, and the difference in latitude, by observations on the sun
and stars. This gave him data for the calculation of the size of the
earth, which he made to be about thirty thousand miles.
_Phœnicia._—Along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean on the narrow
sea-coast at the foot of the Mountains of Lebanon, were a series of
commercial and manufacturing cities, the seat of the Phœnecians.
Tyre, Sidon, Byblus, Berytus, Tripolis, Aradis were places of great
security on the land side, and afforded great security on the seaward
side to the shipping of their merchants. The manufacture of metallic
goods, glass, linen textures, dyed with the wonderful Tyrian purple,
furnished the home productions wherewith to obtain the coveted articles
of foreign peoples. Phœnicia was the land of industry and adventurous
sailors. The tin from Cornwall, and the amber even from the Baltic were
brought home through stormy seas and used in manufactures. The trains
of camels loaded with Phœnician wares pierced the deserts and arrived
at the great cities on the Euphrates. Cyprus, Crete, Carthage, Gades
(Cadiz) were settled by Phœnician colonies. In commerce writing is
indispensable, and the Phœnician borrowed the art of writing from Egypt
and spread it widely over the world.
For a commercial people the education was of a utilitarian character,
especially arithmetic and writing, the commercial arts. The moral
training was peculiar, inasmuch as the Phœnician wished to train the
youth into roving habits, and to root out early that affection for home
and parents that would injure the quality of the sailor. The child
was not trained to reverence parents and home. His religious worship,
too, was peculiar. He celebrated the pain of his gods. Melkarth was
worshiped as a hero who had gone through great and useful labors like
Hercules and become a god. Indeed Hercules is just the Greek copy
of Melkarth, and was doubtless borrowed from the Phœnicians. The
worship of Adonis by a sort of funeral commemoration of his death—loud
lamentations and sad ceremonies—prevailed here also. We must note again
that this worship of pain in Phœnicia, as well as the reverence for
death in Egypt betokens a deeper insight into the mysteries of the
relation of the human nature to the divine nature than we could find
existing among the Persians or the Hindoos.
The Phœnicians obtained and held a “quarter” set apart for their
trading colony in cities wherever they could gain a footing. They
introduced luxuries among rude peoples, and found their profit in
catering for them. They united producer and consumer, and used deceit
and cunning, and (whenever necessary or useful) violence, but always
for the promotion of trade.
They carried their forms of religious worship with their wares, and
must have met with considerable success in introducing it among the
Celtic peoples in Western Europe, if the Druid religion was a Phœnician
importation among them, as seems likely.
The Phœnician concealed his discoveries under mythical narrations
calculated to frighten away the sailors of other peoples from the
places he had discovered. The fearful worship of the fire-god Moloch,
to whom they sacrificed especially children, laying them in his red-hot
arms while the mothers standing by were not allowed to express their
pain at the spectacle by cries, seems to have been a powerful means of
educating by religious ceremonial the parental and filial indifference
necessary for the training of this people of commercial adventurers.
The Oriental and African education thus far considered does not seem to
have had much respect for the individual man as such.
Of all Asiatics the Hebrews are the most interesting to the modern
world. These as Jehovah’s chosen people will hold the place of honor
throughout all time. They are preëminently the educated people, because
educated by Jehovah; and preëminently the educators, because it is
through them that the world has been taught the personality of God.
_Judea._—Out from among a Chaldean people, of Sabæan religion,
worshipers of the heavenly bodies, went Abraham, and founded a people
that should reveal the true God to all nations.
At first there was a nomadic or herdsman’s life of his people; then the
Egyptian bondage, a training in the highest civilization of that time.
The chosen people were to learn agriculture and the arts, and leave off
the herdsman’s life. Then in the promised land comes the development
of the city life under the kings. The patriarchal, the agricultural,
and the urban phases of life make up the national forms. Then there
is the captivity to Babylon in which takes place another phase of the
education of this people. Finally, under the Roman dominion, there is
born the Desire of all Nations in Bethlehem, and the career of the
Hebrews as a chosen people is at an end.
The Jew educated his children with the utmost tenderness and care, for
they were the gift of Jehovah, and should be consecrated to him by
education in his law and in the teachings of the prophets.
It is impossible to conceive of any other education of so powerful a
character or of so spiritual and ennobling a tendency as the education
of the Jewish child in the history of the dealings of Jehovah with his
forefathers. His national history revealed the direct relation of man
to God.
God is a teacher. He reveals his will to men. The consciousness
of being God’s people educated those colossal individualities the
patriarchs, the great national leaders, and the prophets. Their
biographies furnish types of character that have a pedagogical value
for all time.
With his idea of God as a father, the Jew becomes the most humane of
all peoples. His respect for bodily life, his humanity toward widows
and orphans, his institution of the Jubilee year, the scape-goat, the
laws against cruelty to animals, have been a great lesson to modern
civilization.
The Psalms of David that celebrate God’s greatness, goodness,
providence, patient kindness and forgiveness, present for all time the
expression of what is most comforting and most purifying to the human
soul.
The Egyptian and Phœnician spirit is limited by nature. The Jewish is
elevated above it. He conceives God as pure causality;—the creator of
the world;—the sun and stars are not his special revelation and in no
respect to be reverenced by man.
Man is greater than nature because he is chosen by the Almighty as
his friend, and unconscious nature is not worthy such a destiny.
Righteousness is honor of God, and mere ceremony is not. Mere nature is
not adequate to the revelation of the divine. It is not the hurricane
nor the earthquake that reveals God, but the small voice that speaks to
man’s spirit and reason. The human heart is the place for God, but the
sun and moon are not his incarnations.
Finally the Jew conceives of the unity of humanity in one people, who
shall all worship the One Personal God. Nationality, talent, caste,
work, accidents of any sort are all indifferent compared with knowledge
of the true God and subjection to his will. The God of the Jewish
people is not a special, national God over against the gods of other
nations. He is the One only God and all others are false gods, mere
wood and stone, mere things. Thus for the Jew there is the doctrine
that all people descend from Adam created by Jehovah. The Prince of
Peace shall come to heal the nations, and his character shall be
holiness—not physical strength, or beauty, or great size, or dignity
of bearing, but holiness and humility and patience. He shall take upon
himself infirmities and disgrace in order to redeem the world. He will
be the Messiah.
Here is the greatest educational idea ever conceived in this world!