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.