Bruce Stewart
“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 upon through polishes. 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 fifteen 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 okay 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 a unfortunate fact of life that romanticism which has many great things about it also has dark side which has to do with racism and in 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 the Library of 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 down again but if it was in a dead language like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics end of story can’t be reconstructed.“