Apartheid

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7. Education
Apartheid education is…a crime against humanity.
(Nelson Mandela) 499
7.1. The Museum, the Gymnasia and the Definition of Writing
Ptolemaic Egypt was very rich, most probably the richest country in the world at the
time. Alexandria, the world’s largest city, boasted the largest library and research institute in
the world, the Museum. The most famous scientists of the era, Euclid, Archimedes,
Eratosthenes and others either lived there or came there to study or to do research. Yet,
science and research in the modern sense were only secondary for the Museum. It was mainly
a philological, and thus to a considerable extent an ideological center. Classic Greek literature,
especially Homer and Hesiod, was the supreme subject of inquiry. The researchers were all
appointed (and if unsatisfactory, dismissed) by the king or queen, and most of them studied
Greek literature, poetry, and mythology. A second group studied astrology (which had been
imported to Egypt by the Greeks from Asia), astronomy, and mathematics (including the
famous Euclid), and the third largest group dealt with applied science, mainly military
technology, but also physical anthropology – including vivisections of the bodies of convicts
provided to the anatomist, Herophilus, from the prisons by royal decree – as well as biology
and geography. There were no students, and no classes or courses were apparently offered at
the Museum itself. 500
All of the researchers that we know of were Greeks, with a single certain exception, an
Egyptian priest called Manetho, from whom we still have a history of Dynastic Egypt with a
list of all the dynasties, kings and queens in Egyptian history since the early third millennium
BCE. It is in fact the most important single tool for our current understanding of the history of
ancient Egypt.
Manetho was active during the reign of the first three Macedonian kings of Egypt,
Ptolemy I, II and III, and he seems to have been employed for the sole purpose of getting the
Greeks acquainted with a necessary minimum of Egyptian culture. He even wrote his history
of Egypt in Greek, and we only know his Greek name, not his original Egyptian one. Manetho
is the last ancient Egyptian to have written a history of Egypt of which we still have fragments
and reports. We do know of over fifty other ancient historians of Egypt, almost all of whom
had Greek names and were Greek scholars. Their contributions have influenced the
appreciation of Egypt and its dynastic history deeply. As a historian, Manetho has had a hard
time gaining posthumous acceptance until now. Although present-day egyptology gives
Manetho right in many of his scholarly disputes with famed Greek historians such as
Herodotus, the 9 th century monk George Syncellus, for example, ‘vilified Manetho for
presenting Egyptian history from a native Egyptian stance…’ This is just one example of
many, opposed by Manetho’s reasonable chronology of over 3,000 years of almost
uninterrupted indigenous Egyptian rule prior to Alexander’s conquest. This timeframe,
however, burst the extremely narrow chronology of the Bible’s Genesis, which dates its
account of a divine creation of the world as a more recent event than the first Egyptian king in
499 See footnote 524.
500 Clauss 2003: 95-110; Järv: Biblioteket i Alexandria, 1997: 86. In Roman times, however, there were probably
classes held in auditoria near the library, as some recent finds seem to suggest. The auditoria might even have
been in use under Greek rule already. See N.N.: Ancient University Classrooms Found in Alexandria, May 27,
2004. Following Fraser 1972: 348, Clauss writes that Herophilus’ anatomical discoveries would have been the
greatest product of Alexandria had they not been lost until recently (106). Some of his findings were in fact not
paralleled until the late 19 th century CE. Perhaps it is worth considering whether World War II’s Nazi or
Japanese anatomical experiments on live subjects were carried out or foreshadowed here, as well. The racisminduced
lowering of thresholds of inhibition necessary for carrying ut such experiments may indeed have been
present in Ptolemaic Alexandria.