Page 282 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

sos for the first Minos. They were taught a little trade arithmetic,
too; and those whose fathers were architects or surveyors were
faced, in the upper grades, with problems of geometry and volu­
metry. But by then, of course, they were apprenticed, and were

learning their trade, just like their contemporaries who were
learning to distinguish and price precious stones, to calculate
freights, or to make the simpler divinations from the livers of

sacrificial animals.
There was nothing called history or geography in their
school curriculum—there never had been in the age of the world,
and it had never occurred to anyone that a knowledge of the
present and past of the world should be taught in the schools.

But from listening to their parents, and to the many visitors
from foreign parts who passed through Knossos, the children
learned much of what was happening in the world outside.
Two countries in addition to their own were particularly

vivid in their minds, Achaea to the north and Egypt to the south.
Achaea was not really a single country, but rather a con­
glomeration. It comprised the mainland of Greece, a collection of
small states, where every city owned its fjord and its hinterland,

and owed a sort of allegiance to the king in Mycenae and an
even more nebulous allegiance to the Great King in Knossos.
And it included the Aegean islands, and the settlements on the
coast of Asia Minor, subject by racial ties to Mycenae but by

proximity subject to the neighboring kingdom of Arzawa and in
practice retaining complete independence of action by playing
off the one against the other and the Hittites, the greatest power
of Asia Minor, against both.
Egypt, on the other hand, was the power above powers, the

greatest empire of all. The children learned at an early age the
roll of the kings of Egypt, Amose the liberator, Amenhotep,
Thothmes the conqueror of Syria, Thothmes the conqueror of

Nubia, Hatshepsut the queen-pharaoh, Thothmes the Great, and
now another Amenhotep. Feelings were mixed about Amenho­
tep II, the present king. In the first years of his reign, six or
seven years before they were born, he had put down a rebellion
in Syria with great severity, showing personal prowess and re­

establishing in a single campaign the boundaries of his great fa-