Posted on 05/31/2004 6:32:29 AM PDT by Grzegorz 246
CAIRO, May 26 - Polish archaeologists have unearthed 13 lecture halls believed to be the first traces ever found of ancient Egypt's University of Alexandria, the head of the project said Wednesday.
"This is the oldest university ever found in the world," said Grzegorz Majderek, head of the Polish mission.
The lecture halls, with a capacity of 5,000 students, were part of the fifth-century university, which functioned until the seventh century, according to a statement from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
"This is the first material evidence of the existence of academic life in Alexandria," Mr. Majderek said. Knowledge of earlier intellectual pursuits there came through historical and literary documents.
Ancient Alexandria was home to a library, which was founded about 295 B.C. and burned to the ground in the fourth century. Ruins were never found. The auditoriums were found near the portico of the Roman Theater in the eastern part of the city. All the lecture halls are of identical dimensions. Each contains rows of stepped benches in a semicircle and an elevated seat apparently for the lecturer, the antiquities council said.
well, so much for TRoP claims to have been the first culture to establish universities.
The PC crowd must be sooooo depressed.
What "Arab" scholarship would that be? Plato and the Eliatics were merely rediscovered; Arab philosophic "scholarship" is still defined by a single person - Alfarabi.
Boethius, Augustine, Cassiodorus, and Alcuin were Arabs??? Which "crusades" were in Toledo and Monte Cassino??? Amazing the things they are doing with Aristotle, Cicero, and Plato in Saudi Arabia these days...
Where is this "discovered" Western thought generally found today??? Lot of Aristotelians in downtown Cairo and Mecca???
Nope, not even close.
Lol, you're asking for a source to verify Alexandria was Greek?
TRoP????
Nope. Asking bert to site a source for his claim that all western thought came from møøselimbs.
It seems to have been refuted by some other posters...
As far as I can tell, we have yet to come up with a better system for real communication than face-to-face dialogue. While a lecturer can't engage in one-on-one dialogues, they offer something that no book, movie or internet site ever will be able to.
Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah is generally thought of as a hell of a good history. Arab scholarship, during years before the crusades, WAS far beyond anything in western europe. The fact that it was based upon Greek thought doesn't mean much: at least they were civilized enough to preserve greek learning!
I believe the mohamedan invaiders burned the library to the ground.
I note the university functioned from the 5th to the 7th centuries. The end seems to coincide with the Arabs kicking out the Byzantines in the late 600s.
Most of the same people who brag about a Muslim/Arab role in preserving Aristotelian scholarship reject it emphatically as part of the "Dark Ages" - a metaphorical terminology popularized by Petrarch to describe lack of knowledge of Ciceronian rhetorical Latin - something which has nothing to do with Muslims. IF lack of knowledge of Aristotle is "dark" that makes the modern American era one of the darkest in Western intellectual history.
William of Moerbeke, call your office...
Indeed. Saudi Arabia is about as interested in classical scholarship as the tenured Leftist dolts on American campuses, eh?
Now where did I leave my baseball bat...
I was always amused to hear liberal academics boasting of the rediscovery of "Greek learning" after the long "Dark Ages." And loved to ask them where on campus we could find that wonderful, brilliant, modern, enlightened, "Renaissance" of classical Greek scholarship, intertextual exegesis, and Aristotelian philosophy. A bizarre, awkward expression and silence usually followed, since the liberal in question usually knew no Greek and little Aristotle.
Helps to keep the liberal ideology of progress and modern "Renaissance" romanticism in perspective.
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