That's one of the things I would most like you to come away
with from this lecture.
First of all, you cannot study the Egyptians as an
archaeologist, or as an astronomer,
or as a philosopher, or as an anthropologist.
You must put it all together, because they put it all
together.
If you read what the Greeks said, not what we think, but
if you read what the Greeks said, they said they got
everything from Egypt.
They got all their knowledge from Egypt.
Pythagoras spent 15 years in Egypt.
And what did he have to do?
He probably had to spend five years convincing them that
he was worthy to get the knowledge that they had.
Remember, knowledge was power, knowledge was sacred,
knowledge was something you just didn't publish in the
newspapers.
Knowledge was guarded very closely, because it was of
tremendous value.
You wouldn't give it to anybody.
You would give it to somebody who was willing to shave his
head and be a penitent for five years, and then you might
start to tell him things.
And the Greeks did this.
Pythagoras did this.
Other Greeks did this.
And they said that they got all their knowledge from the
Egyptians.
Now, when did we come up with the idea that the Greeks
created everything from scratch?
Well, believe it or not, it happened in the 18th and 19th
century.
And it's an unfortunate fact of life that romanticism,
which has many great things about it, also has dark side,
which has to do with racism.
And then the 18th and 19th century, it was decided that
it was just not appropriate for all this knowledge to come
from an African country.
Where would that knowledge, if it survived to the time of the
Roman Empire, where would it have been kept?
Yes, in Alexandria, in the museum, in the library,
in Alexandria.
And what happened to the library?
It was burned in a war, okay?
And at that point, what happened to those books that
were burned?
If they were written in living languages, there was a scholar
someplace who had memorized the book and could just write it
in.
But if it was in a dead language, like ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics, end of story, can't be reconstructed.
