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.