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.
