Inclusion of Egypt in Western Civ courses

by Jameswoods8

Hi, I'm a high/middle school history teacher and I'm always thinking this when teaching Ancient Egypt. It strikes me that the inclusion of Egypt in Western Civ courses has a lot to do with co-opting African culture or Orientalism on the part of Europeans rather than a true legacy the way Rome or Greece has (I'm aware their are connections to Greece in particular, but it's rarely included) . I'm curious if any thinkers have explored the awkard Orientalist nature of Ancient Egypt in Western History.

If there is a genuine connection to Western Civ, than why do most textbooks focus on the exotic and different, rather than the connections to the present the way we do with Rome and Greece.

Bentresh

If there is a genuine connection to Western Civ, than why do most textbooks focus on the exotic and different, rather than the connections to the present the way we do with Rome and Greece.

Of course there is a genuine connection. For example, let's take the alphabet you used to write your post. It comes from the Roman alphabet, which was inspired by the Etruscan alphabet, which came from the Greek alphabet, which was modeled after the Phoenician alphabet, which was a descendent of the Proto-Canaanite alphabets inspired by the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system. For more on the early history of the alphabet, see Orly Goldwasser's article "How the Alphabet was Born from Hieroglyphs."

As for why textbooks focus on the exotic and "other" Egypt, well, it's partly because Egyptology has long been an insular discipline and partly because most historians are poorly informed about ancient Egypt.

The study of ancient history has long been unnaturally fractionalized due to its Eurocentric origins. To this day colleges and universities typically have departments of "Classics" and "Classical Studies" rather than, say, the less popular "Ancient Mediterranean Studies," which not only separates Greek and Roman history from other fields of ancient history but also unduly emphasizes the primacy of Greco-Roman history and literature.

Additionally, exceedingly few history departments have Egyptologists or Assyriologists on faculty - thus ignoring the "first half of history," as the Assyriologist William Hallo called it - and all too often "ancient history" courses cover only Greco-Roman history. There are several reasons for this, but a major one is that history departments are often skeptical of PhDs from interdisciplinary departments, and Assyriologists and Egyptologists are almost invariably trained in Near Eastern studies departments rather than history departments. The vast majority of history departments are content to hire a classicist or medieval historian and have them teach everything from 3000 BCE to 1500 CE.

Egyptology has long been considered an insular discipline, interacting little with related fields such as history, gender studies, and sociology, and thus a sort of myth has grown up around Egypt that, while interesting, it is too unique and unusual to be compared to other societies and contributed little to the world at present. These issues are discussed at length in Juan Carlos Moreno García's article "The Cursed Discipline? The Peculiarities of Egyptology at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century" (in Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures edited by William Carruthers). Moreno García essentially argues that there are several problems plaguing Egyptology:

  • The field has its foundations in the study of flashy finds and glamorous artifacts, and people have come to expect that of Egyptology. Consequently, Egyptian art, literature, and religion have received a disproportionate amount of attention relative to social and economic history, and museum exhibitions tend to focus on the same tired topics (mummies, jewelry, royalty, etc.).

  • The field has long been dominated by brilliant individuals effectively reigning over subdisciplines like Demotic studies, stifling other approaches and forcing each successive generation to reinvent those subdisciplines.

  • Egyptologists have seldom engaged with other disciplines in the humanities or even other areas of ancient history.

  • The periodization of Egyptology, admittedly necessary when dealing with a time period of over 3000 years, has resulted in a balkanization of the discipline, with Old Kingdom specialists knowing little about the issues and debates surrounding the New Kingdom (and vice versa).

I'll quote the main gist of the article:

The “Egyptian exception” (Baines and Yoffee 1998, 203; O’Connor 1997), with its emphasis on religion, artistic masterpieces, (ancient Egyptian) isolation, and conservatism has nothing to do with the ancient record (still to be explored in many aspects) but corresponds, in fact, to an “Egyptological exception” made up of disciplinary choices.

Such “Egyptological exception” is the consequence of the isolation of Egyptologists themselves. In spite of the discipline’s disproportionate visibility in the media, Egyptology remains a rather modest field not only within the humanities but also within the more restricted domain of ancient studies...

Under these circumstances, philology, digging, and the study of beautiful objects left little time, opportunity, or consideration for more in-depth attention to theoretical or comparative issues or, simply, for dialogue with other disciplines. Institutionalization of these practices, in addition to connected archaeological priorities and choices, has perpetuated practices, perspectives, and traditions that have made Egyptology a rather isolated, conservative, and bounded discipline, dominated by philology and still, in many cases, by old-fashioned archaeological concerns. Consequently, while the number of ancient Egyptian remains is simply overwhelming, Egyptology finds it difficult to integrate this rich heritage within sophisticated social and historical narratives, even less to contribute in any stimulating manner to current discussions in ancient history, archaeology, anthropology, and the social sciences. Academic isolation, then, seems largely responsible for the common assumption among social scientists that ancient Egypt was dominated by religion and conservative social practices, while economy, politics, social conflict, or geopolitical concerns appear almost as nonexistent. The fatal consequence is the reinforcement of the myths of “eternal Egypt” and of the “Egyptian exception,” bolstering well-established Egyptological practices and meaning that ancient historians disregard pharaonic Egypt as a somewhat esoteric and, in the end, incomprehensible world...

To return to your central question, we know that Egyptian and Near Eastern influence permeated almost every aspect of Greek culture. One does not have to be an art historian to note striking similarities in Egyptian and Greek art, for example, and the similarities between Hesiod's Theogony and the Hurro-Hittite Kumarbi cycle are far too significant to ignore.

The Greeks and Romans themselves were well aware of the influence of Egypt and referenced it often. For example, Diodorus Siculus spends much of Book I of his Bibliotheca historica discussing the impact of Egypt on Greek religion, art, and philosophy.

Lycurgus also and Plato and Solon, they say, incorporated many Egyptian customs into their own legislation. And Pythagoras learned from Egyptians his teachings about the gods, his geometrical propositions and theory of numbers, as well as the transmigration of the soul into every living thing. Democritus also, as they assert, spent five years among them and was instructed in many matters relating to astrology. Oenopides likewise passed some time with the priests and astrologers and learned among other things about the orbit of the sun, that it has an oblique course and moves in a direction opposite to that of the other stars. Like the others, Eudoxus studied astrology with them and acquired a notable fame for the great amount of useful knowledge which he disseminated among the Greeks.

Also of the ancient sculptors the most renowned sojourned among them, namely, Telecles and Theodorus, the sons of Rhoecus, who executed for the people of Samos the wooden statue of the Pythian Apollo. For one half of the statue, as the account is given, was worked by Telecles in Samos, and the other half was finished by his brother Theodorus at Ephesus; and when the two parts were brought together they fitted so perfectly that the whole work had the appearance of having been done by one man. This method of working is practised nowhere among the Greeks, but is followed generally among the Egyptians...

Though long ignored in European scholarship, the contributions of Egypt and the Near East to Greek culture have been discussed extensively in recent decades. To cite just a handful of the major works of the last few decades: