Schools of writing

Welcome, fellow members of the Carpe Diem group, to the first of November, 2011; or, as I like to refer to it, 11-1-11.

:)

Now, moving on to the actual content of my post.

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I did a bit of research on schools in Ancient Egypt - you might remember me mentioning something about it in an earlier post. This time I went into a bit more detail.

Relative to our discussion of the idea of restricted or hidden knowledge, schooling in Egypt was very much dependent on wealth.

According to this site (which I used to find much of the information that follows), they would only be taught the subjects that were required for their future careers, instead of the more scholastic spread of subjects that we typically receive schooling in today. Therefore, another limiting factor in the schooling one recieved was their future occupation - decided by their father before they began school

Here's something I definitely didn't know before - 'scribe' refers not only to the person who wrote, but to a specific set of instrumentation used for writing.

Here's a picture of a scribe that would have been used in Egyptian schools:

The scribe consisted of three parts - a brush, a small container of water, and a container with a small amount of red and black inks. The same site I cited above describes it as being similar to waterpaints we use today.

But they didn't paint on papyrus in the schools, and they didn't carve into rocks (Obviously. Brushes aren't great chisels). Since papyrus was so labor intensive to make the students practiced on white limestone tablets.

See here for an example of papyrus making- really, it takes some serious time and effort to make papyrus, even with modern tools to assist you.

Like I also mentioned in that other post, Egyptian teachers were very strict. From that same site:

"The school master had total control over the pupils. The students were expected to work as hard as they could,and were often beaten on their backs with a rod for talking, being sleepy, slow or lazy."

Sheesh. I'd be dead by now if we got beaten for being sleepy in my schools.

This further reduced the number of students who were able to learn writing due to potential drop-outs (again, my previous post), which meant the knowledge of writing was restricted even further.

I saw an odd correlation with something that was mentioned in my Book of Mormon class, of all places. King Benjamin says that Lehi was able to read the brass plates because "he [had] been taught in the language of the Egyptians (Mosiah 1:4)". I had never realized that the brass plates as well as the golden were written in Egyptian characters - this changed a lot of my perspective on them, somehow. Moroni says that Egyptian allowed them to write more in limited space than Hebrew would have, and indicates that he would have felt much more comfortable writing in Hebrew (Mormon 9:33). That explains to me why Egyptian was used for both records, but it also brings up the question of how the general population was able to use scriptures recorded in that form?

Mosiah 1:2 suggests that Benjamin taught his sons Egyptian as well (the "language of his fathers", contrast with 1 Nephi 1:2) and seems to imply that this was not a universal teaching. In fact, we suggested in our book of Mormon class that very few were able to read or write this language - perhaps only those of prophetic or royal descent, until the time of the reign of the judges. Certainly the common people would have been happier with Hebrew, which had many fewer characters (and simpler ones) than heiroglyphic Egyptian. But does that mean they knew less about the scriptures?

I'm curious what ya'll think about that question, but my opinion is that they had adequate access through less permanent mediums, such as papyrus or parchment, on which there was enough room to use Hebrew. In fact, I'm almost certain this is true, since it makes little sense that writing would allow the Lamanites to increase in productivity as a nation unless it was in a fairly commonplace form such as parchment. Stones are great, but not as easy to use.

So how does this relate to us? I think it shows how important it is to be able to learn from as many sources as we can. No doubt those who were schooled in Egyptian had more direct access to some records in the Nephites' times. So I think the lesson is to always try to learn for yourself, like we're being taught to do in this class. That way you can get as much out of things as possible, without blindly trusting instructors or authorities.

The Source

So to start, thanks, Jenna, for giving me the jump-off point for this post! It was while I was researching the Mayan language that I discovered all this information.

Once upon a time, about 1900 BC in fact, the first known consonantal alphabet was in usage.

It was called Proto-Sinaitic Script.

One example of genuine Proto-Sinaitic

This alphabet coexisted with Egyptian, and in fact took its symbols from the Egyptian hieroglyphs. This was either due to an Egyptian conquest of Sinai, or a more friendly spread of literacy through shared trade and workers, though it is uncertain which one (or both) was more influential (source). Oddly, though Egypt had a phonetic alphabet, as I mentioned in this post, the Proto-Sinaitic Script didn't make use of these symbols to represent the sounds of their own language. Instead, seemingly at random, they chose signs from the hieroglyphs and assigned them values.

This newly formed alphabet pre-dated even Phoenician, which came into being about 1100 BC. However, the two are very closely connected. In fact, Proto-Sinaitic is the Alphabetic "grandfather" of most alphabets that are still used in our modern world! (Source)

Look at this chart I found, showing the evolution of the alphabet over many years from Proto-Sinaitic to Greek:

I dunno about you guys, but I think this is unbelievably cool. This finally gives a purpose to all the random lines, curves and shapes that make up our alphabet - coming from the original Egyptian, they once had an intrinsic meaning! It was simply lost over time.

My favorite was the example for the letter M:

Water. It clearly begins as a series of wavy lines, to illustrate water, and then changes with time: the symbols came to be more simply represented, in order to make them easier to write or carve.

This made my life make more sense; now we can know a little better why on earth it is that we use seemingly random shapes to represent certain sounds.

Of course, English isn't very consistent with the whole "spell it like it's said" idea.

But then, that's a part of what makes it so awesome.

(If you're really interested in random facts about Egyptian written language in particular, view this website page. It has a lot of great information on other writing systems as well.)

Click here to travel forward in time to my next post, which isn't even written yet!

(Here)

UPDATE - Egyptian oral knowledge interview

This interview was, for me, a perfect way to end this unit on oral knowledge and move into our next unit of written knowledge.

This is very good news, because I have far too much excellent (in my opinion) information now to confine it to one post.

Dr. Kerry Muhlestein, whom I interviewed, has an impressive list of accomplishments, including a PhD in Egyptology. His viewpoint on some of my questions about the Old Kingdom was very informative and clarified many things for me, as well as giving me a good jump start on our written knowledge unit (Happily enough, Dr. Muhlestein has even written an article about the transformation of knowledge in biblical times from orality to written word, so expect to see more of his ideas later on).

First of all, I asked him a question that I brought up before in class - how can we ever really be sure that we know what the oral traditions were when the civilization itself is so old?

Dr. Muhlestein explained that the Pyramid Texts, which I've referred to in other posts, are the best evidence for an oral tradition in and before the Old Kingdom. Since these texts were religious in nature, they reference the Egyptian mythology and legends - and although they do not expound upon these stories, they contain the earliest written references to them. This, Dr Muhlestein told me, is a proof of the oral tradition that existed at the time. Later, after the time of the Old Kingdom, these myths were written down, and if one was to examine those later writings with the Pyramid Texts, they would find that the oral traditions alluded to in the Pyramids remained fairly consistent until the time that they were written down - the references to the legends now make more sense, once we have the later records to compare them to.

It was good to know that I was right to assume a relation between the oral knowledge of the Egyptians and the Pyramid Texts. Next, I asked about the philosophy and religion of the Old Kingdom; specifically, did the Egyptians really believe in fate as much as some sources I'd read claimed they did, and was their religion more of a public ritual or a private worship?

The answers to those questions? No, and yes, and they're related.

The concept of fate, or FATE, is not too apparent from what has been found in Egypt at that time. However, they did clearly believe in divine intervention on their part - as proof of this, religious stelae have been found covered in carvings of ears, (appropriately termed ear stelae) under which worshipers would leave written prayers in the hope that their pleas would be audible to the gods.

I found some pictures of them to show you.

(Source)

To me, this shows the power of language, written or oral, for the Egyptian people. As I mentioned in my first post on the Old Kingdom, the Pyramid texts contained many 'utterances' intended to assist the deceased's passing to the next world and assure a favorable judgement from the gods.

Now, back to fate. Since they believed in the intervention of the gods on their behalf, the Ancient Egyptians could not have had as strong a belief in unalterable Fate as I had read in other sources.

I tend to trust the Egyptologist's opinion over that of the un-credentialed website manager.

Finally, a word on our discussion about Maat. I asked Dr. Muhlestein about what I mentioned last time, if the concept of Maat led to a kind of stagnation of the social order where no change was enforce. He said that since Maat was defined by the Pharaohs, each king had a different concept of what this 'cosmic order' should look like - therefore, there were many small or gradual changes in how Maat was enforced, portrayed, or thought of by the king and his people over time. However, the idea of the Order of Maat likely contributed to the stability of the Egyptian civilization; not just in the Old Kingdom, but in the later periods as well. It was an advanced concept for the time, and the people were able to maintain a sense of social unity with it.

I have a lot more, like I said, but it will relate more to our next unit. Until then, happy blogging!

Maat

NOTE: Please also refer to this update of this post, if you have the time. Thanks!

In previous blog posts, I've neglected to mention a critical part of the philosophy of the Old Kingdom - Maat.

There are two main different 'incarnations' of Maat:

1- Maat as a goddess in the Egyptian pantheon (see above picture)

2 - Maat as the Order of the universe

The first incarnation doesn't hold much special meaning to our discussion of oral knowledge, beyond being an extra deity among many. The second, however, is a clear philosophical aspect invented during the Old Kingdom, reflected in their recorded traditions.

Maat was basically the order side of the archetypal order/chaos struggle. It was often reflected in those traditions that were eventually recorded non-verbally (thus giving us access to them) - one of the earliest references to Maat is found in the Pyramid Texts of Unas. Here, Maat is used in the context of social and global order: The deceased Pharaoh is called the "Guardian of Maat" (Utterance 260, line 319), an important concept to their time. Maat was not only the divine force of Order, it was also the authority behind the Pharoah's decrees and kingship - as the Guardian of Maat, it was his job to maintain that order.

Maat was the idea of justice behind the law, but the Government decided on specific punishments and enforced them through the court system. Maat was more of a set of human ideals, of fairness to others and the maintaining of equality among people.Perhaps because of this concept of equality, women in ancient Egypt had virtually equal legal rights with the men (source).

Interestingly, this brings to mind another discussion we had in the comments of one of my earlier posts, where Jenna asked if the Pharaohs used their 'divine' status to influence the people. One site that I found suggests that this may have been the case - Maat, they believe, represented not only the grand Order of things, but also the societal order of the Kingdom - the keeping of things in the way they had always been, the maintaining of the current government, and so on.

this sounds ominously like a method of keeping the lower class people in line through their philosophy and religion, for if they disobeyed the decrees of the Pharaoh, they disobeyed not only his words but the very order of the universe.

So the Pharaoh was even more to be feared through this concept. And they made use of the idea, certainly, especially as recorded in some Pyramid texts, where certain phrases are seen that proclaim how the Pharaoh upheld justice among the people.

So, although Maat as a social and cosmic idea has many good aspects, and has been compared to aspects of Confucianism and Taoism, it may have also been twisted by the Pharaohs to make their decrees the will of the universe, while treating dissension from the normal way of things as a dangerous anomaly in the Ordered fabric of society and the world.

I've never though of Order as a dictatorial method, but perhaps it's possible. I'm interested to know if anyone else thinks this idea is plausible?

If you'd like to read more specifically about Maat and how the concept translated into realities, go here (I used this site as a source earlier as well).

This week's translation of "The old kingdom of Egypt" (found in the post labels) is brought to you by Germany.

COMING SOON - An update to this post, containing content from my interview with an actual Egyptologist. If all goes well, I'll just post that whenever I can, most likely within a couple days.

Aegyptus

(This post, while hopefully having some interesting stuff in itself, will serve also as a jumping off point for my next post in several topics.)

In my last post, I talked a little bit about the religious and philosophical change that came over Egypt's Old Kingdom. I thought that here I'd expand on that idea a little, based partly on the comments on my last post, and talk about how that change was reflected in some of their other ideas.

My question while researching is, was this change reflected in how they governed the people? Did they, like several of you suggested, use their status as a demi-god to maintain better control? It seems reasonable enough to me. But what if the Pharaoh's status was already so high that this was really just another layer of icing on a hugely overdone cake?

(This is actually a real picture. It was on the BBC, so it must be. Really, go type in 'huge cake' on Google image search sometime. In fact, do it now, if you don't find Egypt all that interesting. But make sure to come back and finish reading this post, or I'll be sad.)

I found something interesting that relates to that question. The philosophy of the Egyptian government seems to have not been simply one ruler over everything. In theory, of course, the Pharaoh was the ultimate king of the land; but in practice, it soon became impossible for him to deal with all of the issues he needed too without assistance. Thus, the kings began to use a new level of delegation in their government(source). This can also be seen in Imhotep's status under Djoser. He has a very impressive list of titles (source) that show many areas that he was made the administrator of. So at first it seems like they aren't taking to their new 'godlike' status as impressively as some would. But on further reflection, I thought: wouldn't this system of government make sense to someone who believed in a king of the gods? The head god directing his lesser servants from the top?

(Get it? The top?)

In any case it makes sense to me. I know from experience with anything that requires large-scale planning that it's usually important for the leader to delegate certain responsibilities to trustworthy people. Otherwise it's just too much to do.

To tie this thought about government more closely into oral knowledge, I decided to look for any decrees of the Pharaohs of that time, and see how they used the eloquence of words written to be proclaimed.

Unfortunately there is not much evidence of these things that remains...So I'm going to keep looking and try to bring that up in a later post.

However I did find another interesting idea from the Old Kingdom's philosophy. There was a strong belief in fate, that one's destiny was determined from birth. Interestingly, at birth, a person's manner and time of death were supposed to be decreed verbally by seven 'Hathors', or Fates in the Greek equivalent.

Eventually, there was even a ceremony performed at birth was intended to close the mouths of the Hathors so they could not predict calamity on a newborn. Source

This is an example of the oral knowledge closely associated with religious and philosophical ideas. There are several stories with reference to fate, transcribed during the Middle Kingdom but most likely originating during the Old as an oral tradition. One tells the story of a prince who seemingly evades his predestined death, and another speaks of a man whose fate leads him far from home and into riches and power. I'd suggest reading at least the first one yourself sometime, since it's a great old fairy tale as well as a glimpse into the old ideas about fate. (Sadly, it's missing the very end of the story...)

In any case, I think that this emphasis in storytelling on the idea of fate directing people's lives led to what some people see as the Egyptian preoccupation with death. When all your stories contain the idea that your death is known from birth, I would think it tends to work into the collective psyche of the people. Perhaps, to tie it all in together, the idea of the Pharaoh's divinity was his personal attempt to change the inevitable passing from this life by ensuring the gods' protection even in death. That, I think, is the power of a continuous oral tradition to impact the workings of a people.

...And just for fun, every week I'll be putting a different translation of "the old kingdom of egypt" in the post labels. There's no real reason, except that it's cool. This week's bonus label is brought to you by France.

Medew Netcher - the divine speech

(I have to apologize in advance - the formatting was confused on this post. I fixed most of it, but it's still a little skewed.)

"Life is too short to devote years of study to learning that what went on with the ancients was just more of the same. It is too short to let us live both our lives and theirs from day to day unless they have something to add to the story, something we do not have, something quite wonderful and unexpected. Of all people the Egyptians are most likely to supply us with such matter." -Hugh Nibley, from Abraham in Egypt

The Old Kingdom is the term for the Egyptian dynasties between about 2686 BC and 2181 BC. It is known as the Age of Pyramids, when the great Architect, Imhotep,

was a servant to the Pharaoh Djoser (For a very interesting theory about Imhotep's

relation to a well-known biblical prophet, see this link).

It was also an age of religious change for the Egyptians.

The Egyptian religion was hugely complex, and had already gone through several

changes in what or who was worshiped, the qualities of the gods, and even in who was said to have created the universe. It is believed that the original pantheon of

gods was compiled from various tribal myths and local religious traditions, which were

then reconciled by the 'official'

priests in order to make them all conform. During the Old Kingdom, the change was different than any before.

This new shift in their religion involved mainly one figure: the sun-god, Ra.

That's him.

Ra was said to be the king of the gods, the ruler of earth. This was a departure from

the previous incarnations of religion in Egypt,since before there had been no

discernible ruler of the gods.

In some ways, he was made to be analogous to Zeus or Jupiter, though with a major difference - he was the Sun-god rather than the god of the sky, since the Egyptians believed that the sun was the source of knowledge and power for the earth. (source)

Along with this shift, and possibly serving as the reason for it, was a change in attitude towards the Pharaohs. The royal line was declared to be descended directly from Ra, and so presumably worthy to inherit power over his creations on the earth.

From this came the interesting fixation with the afterlife - since they were descended from gods, the Pharaohs wanted to make sure that they were in good standing with their 'relatives,' especially upon their death.

From this came what is known as 'pyramid texts.' On the walls of the burial chambers and hallways of the Pharaoh's pyramid or grave site, they would write down words and phrases to be sung or spoken to the gods during the final portion of the king's burial ceremony. The language addresses each deity individually with nearly the same requests or speeches,both of which attest that the Pharaoh is worthy of joining the gods in their abode. In fact, they seem to be attempting to convince the gods to accept him(see here for an example translation of one pyramid's wall inscriptions for the Pharaoh Unas).

These inscriptions provide an excellent example of Egyptian persuasive speech and writing. We can see the use of the rhetorical idea of pathos, or a petition to the emotions of the audience.

Here's an excerpt that shows an appeal to Ra:

"He [comes] to you, O his father, he comes to you, oh Re [(Ra)], he comes to you, O his father, he

comes to you, O Overthrown One, he comes to you, O his father,...he comes to you, O Wanderer."

-From the east wall of the sarcophagus chamber in the pyramid of Unas

Their two main techniques are pretty clear here, in my opinion. Not only do they appeal to Ra emotionally, reminding him that Unas is his 'son' and therefore should be accepted by him, but they also make use of repetition, an even bigger tool they enjoyed using. It's far too long to put it all here, but you can check out the lengthy, repetitive appeals to each god in the link I gave above.

The repetition in the priests' recorded speeches reminds me of ancient Hebrew writings, like the Bible: the most important points would be emphasized by repetition to impress them on the audience.

Here, the only difference is that the ones they were trying to convince were not mortal, and were believed to be in charge of deciding the fate of their king's eternal soul. A lot was at stake for these priests to invoke the gods well on the pharaoh's behalf.

Who knows, maybe if they did it wrong, this would happen:

Just kidding. But seriously, they were under a lot of pressure to do their best to implore their pantheon on behalf of the Pharaoh, and they probably used the best techniques of speech that they knew. In my opinion, that's why these pyramid texts are so revealing about how the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom used their rhetorical skills.

Just on the fun side, I really enjoyed researching this topic, and I learned a lot of new and interesting things.

For example, the above is my name, transliterated as near as I could get it into ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics.

And as a bonus, here's a short video about how the uni-lateral symbols of the Egyptian "alphabet"

work. Enjoy!