"It may appear paradoxical to affirm that it is in arid districts, where agriculture is most arduous, that agriculture began; yet the affirmation is not to be gainsaid but rather supported by history, and is established beyond reasonable doubt by the evidence of desert organisms and organizations."[1] This lesson drawn from the life of the Papago Indians might just as well have been drawn from Egyptian life. Egypt is practically rainless, but the soil of the Nile valley, ever renewed by the silt deposited by the yearly inundation, yields enormous returns provided only man uses his energy and ingenuity. Long before our written records begin the Egyptians had developed an extensive system of irrigation. Thus by arduous toil, organized and watched over by the growing state, Egypt developed an enormous agricultural wealth—the foundation upon which her civilization was built. With Egypt it was not a question of the "conservation" but of the development of her natural resources. The Egyptian was forced to keep up a continuous struggle with nature and as a result he was always practical. Egypt has been called the mother of the mechanical arts. It is not surprising that the imaginative Greeks, when they became acquainted with the material civilization of Egypt, her pyramids and temples, her system of irrigation, her craftsmanship, conceived an exaggerated opinion of the wisdom of the Egyptians. Even today we hear surmises of "lost arts" which were used in the construction of the pyramids. But we know better. The pyramids were built by the brawn of tens of thousands of serfs, without the use, it would seem, of even a pulley; not even the roller seems to have been known. On the other hand, we have only to visit the museums here and abroad—especially the one in Cairo, to realize the marvellous skill the Egyptian workman acquired in the carving of wood, ivory and stone, and in the working of metals. Our architects are studying the products of the greatest geniuses Egyptian culture produced, and our students of design may learn many a lesson from the workmanship of her artisans.
Not long since it was not unusual to see ridicule heaped upon the theories of the "high-brows" by our farmers, manufacturers and other "practical" men. Probably our system of education was at fault. Nevertheless, these same farmers, manufacturers and other practical men are beginning to realize the importance of the researches and investigations of the specialists. We cannot hope to compete with the industries of the Germans which rest upon a scientific basis, as long as ours are conducted by "rule-of-thumb" methods. There is no better opportunity offered anywhere for observing the limitations of an exclusively practical system of education than the study of Egyptian learning.
The Egyptian regarded learning as a means to an end, and that end was never the increase of the sum of human knowledge or the advancement of humankind, but always freedom from manual labor. Next to a few folk songs, preserved in the decorations of Fifth Dynasty tombs—by mere accident, for a scribe would never have thought of preserving them, the oldest literature of the Egyptians which has come down to us consists of the precepts of Kagemni and Ptah-hotep.[2] This wisdom of the viziers of the Pharaohs of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, is similar to that of the books of instruction from all periods of Egyptian history, and consists largely of rules of conduct. The sole object of an education was to obtain a position as scribe or secretary of higher or lower rank in the government service, and this could only be done by gaining and keeping the favor of the Pharaoh or of one of his officials. These scribes never weary of telling of the superiority of their calling over that of the man who must labor with his hands, who is like a heavily laden ass driven by the scribes. Of course we too recognize the gulf fixed between the educated and the unlettered, but we try to bridge it. It is not probable that many of the laboring classes knew more than the barest elements of reading and writing. The Egyptian script was exceedingly cumbrous, and probably few would have seen any use in mastering it, even if they had had the time, unless they intended to enter upon a scribal career. Of course many such careers were open, for the elaborate bureaucratic system of administration demanded the services of a host of secretaries and overseers. In time these constituted a distinct middle class, largely recruited, we may be sure, from the laboring class below. The Egyptian was always ready to recognize and reward ability, no matter where it was found. Now a word about the limitations of such a view of education. As already indicated, the object of an education was to gain a government position. In Egypt, as elsewhere, the chief end of government, in the eyes of the officials at least, was the collection of revenues. Taxes were in kind and as a result the work of the scribe consisted in finding out the amount of the harvest and deducting the king's share. The extensive mining and building operations conducted by the Pharaohs required the services of hundreds of scribes and overseers to superintend the work and distribute the rations of the armies of workmen employed in these projects. In this work the scribe developed a remarkable facility with figures. But he never advanced beyond concrete examples. Multiplication and division in our sense of the terms were unknown to him, their places were taken by addition and subtraction. For example: to multiply seven by nine, the Egyptian scribe would proceed, 1·7=7, 2·7=14, 2·14=28, 2·28=56, etc. That is he always doubled the last figure. It was nothing but addition. He wrote his results as follows:
| 1 | 7 |
| 2 | 14 |
| 4 | 28 |
| 8 | 56 |
| 16 | 112 |
and then found which of the numbers of the first column added together would give the sum 9. These were 8 and 1. He then added the corresponding numbers in the second column and got the result, 56+7=63. So 50÷7 would have looked like this: 50-28=22; 22-14=8; 8-7=1. The result was (4+2+1) sevens with 1 as remainder. The Egyptian scribe could not handle fractions other than those with one as numerator. Two-thirds was the only exception. The Egyptian knew that the area of a rectangle was to be found by multiplying the two adjacent sides together, and that the area of a right angled triangle was equal to half the area of a rectangle whose base and altitude were equal respectively to the sides adjacent to the right angle. When his problem was to find the area of an isosceles triangle he applied the same rule, that is, multiplied the base by one of the sides and divided by two. Here theory might have helped him, had he been able to develop it. He never reached the conception of base and altitude. His rule for finding the area of a circle is worth mentioning. He took the diameter, subtracted one-ninth of it therefrom, and squared the result. In a word, he had not come far from the correct value of π. But the Egyptian always dealt with concrete examples, he never was able to generalize and carry his mathematics into the theoretical. As a result he never attained scientific accuracy. Not that he did not set himself difficult problems. Indeed many of them are so complicated that they required an immense amount of reckoning, by his methods, to solve. Without giving his solution, let me add one more of his problems: "A man owns 7 cats; each cat eats 7 mice daily; each mouse eats 7 ears of grain; each ear contains 7 grains; each grain gives a sevenfold return in the harvest. What is the sum of the cats, mice, ears and grains?"
The Egyptians observed the stars. They had names for all of the principal constellations; knew the circumpolar stars from those which at times disappeared below the horizon, but they never seem to have noticed the difference between fixed stars and planets. They invented a calendar with a year of 365 days as early as 4241 B.C. This was based upon the heliacal rising of Sirius (Sothis) coincident with the beginning of the inundation. But they never discovered, or if they did, never bothered about the fact that their year was one-fourth of a day too short. They were deeply interested in medicine, and their recipes prescribe everything that can be swallowed. Many of these were borrowed by the Greeks and from them have come down into the folk-medicine of modern Europe. No doubt many of their remedies were helpful, but magic always played the most important rôle in their medicine, as it does among all primitive peoples and as it did in our own until the beginning of our modern scientific age.
The progress made by the Egyptians in the development of a purer conception of religion will be discussed at length in the body of this volume, especially on pages 131 and following. The Egyptians were not far from monotheism.
But the Egyptian culture must be studied as a whole. Time was when the study of the civilization of Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, together with that of the Hebrews, was regarded as a sort of introduction to the study of history, which began with the Greeks and Romans. Much was said of the immovable East. It was supposed that progress was exceedingly slow there as compared with that in the West. But our wider knowledge of the history and life of these peoples shows how false this conception was. We can trace Egyptian civilization from its beginnings in the palaeolithic and neolithic ages; see it develop from many petty states into an absolute monarchy; follow it as it emerges after a period of anarchy into a Feudal Age, and as it rises after two centuries of foreign oppression into a mighty empire pushing its southern frontier away into Nubia and its northern one to the Euphrates. Meanwhile we are not neglecting to study the economic and intellectual forces at work. Society has been developing steadily. A monotheistic religion has been growing up. But Egypt has reached her zenith and the age of decline sets in. In time she falls before foreign invasion, because she has used up her vitality. Her civilization is not to be studied as a preliminary to anything else, but as the achievement of a gifted race. Of course we are to compare her progress with that of other peoples, to see the faults of, but also to appreciate the good in, her culture.
[1] W. J. McGee, "The Beginning of Agriculture," American Anthropologist, 8, 375.
[2] See page 164.