A Gap in the College Curriculum

Abstract

rT ODAY there is a definite popular interest in the ancient Near East. Newspapers now report in detail discovery of the tomb of Menes, first king of the first Egyptian dynasty, or the finding of official Palestinian documents written just prior to the time that Nebuchadnezzar deported his Jewish enemies to Babylon. This recent journalistic impulse can be traced to popular enthusiasm that developed after the discovery in 1922 of the tomb of King Tut, as this youthful king came to be known. The marvels of Tutankhamen's tomb had also the effect of arousing active and splendid support of important excavation projects in the Near East. As a result, American, British, German, and French archaeologists have vied with each other in friendly rivalry to see who could recover the most important aspects of this long-buried past. That all have been generally successful is apparent from the tremendous body of knowledge that we now possess concerning the peoples of the ancient Near East, peoples who were the cultural predecessors of Greece and Rome, and from whom Greece and Rome borrowed much that has been passed on to us. The press has recognized public interest in such matters, but what have colleges and universities done about integrating this information with our general education program? Many schools offer well-organized courses in anthropology in which man's development is traced from its crude Palaeolithic beginnings to the point where man adjusted himself sufficiently to his surroundings to domesticate wild animals and to make pottery out of the clay on which he walked. Such studies are all important if we are to understand the clay of which we are made; but the average college student who wishes to continue the story of man's growth must jump to Homer and pick up the thread of human development in the traditional manner. In so doing he is forced to disregard the ages of brilliant advance that paved the way for many of the intellectual triumphs of Greece. In so doing this student fails to learn of more than two thousand years of recorded thought. Writing, an essential of advanced culture, had been developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt by the end of the fourth millennium B.C., an intellectual feat of the greatest importance to world history. About a thousand years before Homer a group of Semites in Sinai apparently borrowed and