City-State Priests and Specialized Knowledge
As human beings progressed and traded devices and thinking between groups, they gathered into larger groups and settled into cities. Often the city was the state (hence, “city-state”), and the city would be the single center of a region it controlled. Then, many nations with a city each would conquer each other to make the earliest empires (consider Summer was conquered by Babylon, Babylon by Assyria, Assyria by Persia). We can see that as many tribes joined together to create city states the number of experts and types of experts multiplied. The shamans of the tribe became many types of priests and scribes in many temples. This means that experts became specialized. We can see that this pattern continued until the present time. Some priests would specialize in types of math used to chart the stars, others would specialize in healing people and animals. The many hats (or masks, rather) of the shaman became the many types of priests and scribes who recorded knowledge and made new discoveries.
Cities were centers of trade, such that not only was the city a site for many groups to converge and form a new culture but this culture also traded with other convergent cultures. Many are surprised to learn that ancient Sumer and Egypt traded with India hundreds of years before the Greeks and Israel arose. From the earliest times, culture, trade and thought have been international.
Consider the Assyrians. “Assyrian” did not name one ethnicity but rather a citizen of Assyria. Many people of different ethnicities called themselves Assyrians just as many people call themselves Americans. Assyria invented all of the siege weapons that were used in feudal Europe, but the Assyrians conquered others mostly by trade and diplomacy. Princes would be sent to be educated in Assyria, the center of knowledge in its day, and then the Assyrians would make contracts with the prince’s people to put them on the throne to maintain political control. Just like today (read Confessions of an Economic Hitman), the primary method of conquest is economic and military solutions are called for only when the economic methods have failed.
Egyptian Wisdom
Before considering passages of the Egyptian wisdom texts, I want to address two common misconceptions about the Egyptians.
First, the Egyptians are rarely portrayed as an African people but rather museums and text books portray them as a semi-European/Asian people who are quite light in skin color. When we consider that the Egyptians painted all of their statues and carvings (as did the Greeks), and they always painted men as dark red and women as yellow, as well as having black braided hair (Herodotus the Greek historian describes the “wooly” hair of the Egyptians) it seems that the Egyptians were an African people and we are only slowly growing to recognize this. It is a big debate between Eurocentric and Afrocentric scholars today.
Second, another common misconception of the Egyptians is that they were a slave-driving, brutal people who were all about authority. This is then contrasted with the Greeks, who are considered to be wise and questioning and the birth of civilized politics. In fact, the Egyptians treated foreigners, slaves and women considerably better than the Greeks, and the pyramids were built not by slaves but by conscripted labor. Recently tombs for workers have been discovered, confirming what Egyptologists have thought for several decades. This misconception comes largely from the Bible and movies like the Ten Commandments.
The Egyptians had many types of texts and scribes, including fictional comedies and tragedies, lists of minerals and plants, essays on medicine, ethics and politics, and important to this class, wisdom literature. The Egyptian wisdom proverbs we read come from this last class of Egyptian texts.
As many tribes converged to live in city states, people began to see more of people than they had before. Suddenly, obvious truths became questionable. Rather than be unquestioning of authority, the Egyptians had more variety of authorities and questioning of authority than most cultures before them. We can see in the wisdom proverbs the questioning of authority, nobility, knowledge, teachers, prediction, wealth, luxury, punishment, and other fundamental aspects of civilization. The Egyptians were not just great builders and rulers, but also wisdom seekers and questioners.
One last concept that appears in the texts is the “heart guided individual”. The heart was thought to be the physical and mental center of the human individual. As Egyptian society developed, increasingly being “guided by the king” was replaced with being “guided by the heart”. The heart is the essence of the human and the intention within the action. Repeatedly in the text, individuals are called to listen to their heart rather than build luxury and maintain authority. These are issues that we all struggle with to this day, and so we can learn much about early human experience by reading these proverbs.
Next time, we will study the readings on India and look into its thought and thinkers.
