Schoolboys of the Ancient World

Extract

In the Greek papyri from Egypt we meet a little band of schoolboys. They are a remnant of their kin. The tousled heads which bowed over the clay tablets laboriously incised with wedge-shaped tables in the Sumeria of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar are gone. No one even thought of carving them on a temple wall. Gone, too, are the lads of Egypt's temple schools. They had no free milk at school by the Nile, but each morning their mothers appeared with three rolls of bread and two jugs of beer to be consumed during lessons. ‘A boy who wanted more’, says the document which supplies the information, ‘is a gluttonous creature.’ Were there brown Oliver Twists among the budding scribes in the days when Tahutmes III was setting up ‘Cleopatra's’ needle ? The sturdy scribe who sits cross-legged in limestone in the Louvre looks as if he might have merry tales to tell of schooldays in his century. It was the twenty-seventh before Christ.