Fantasy Projects: Exploring the True Depths of Ancient Egypt

Jan Assmann may be the most prominent living Egyptologist.  His work shakes the foundations not only of what we think we know about ancient Egypt, but about the history of philosophy and all too easily made distinctions between philosophy and religion. When I first discovered his work during my BA in religious studies, I found it so fascinating that it almost derailed my studies of Indian religion in the colonial and modern era.  During my student teaching, I taught units on ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, I found the textbook lifeless and inaccurate.  I found myself wishing that I could have written the textbook myself, using Assmann's work not only to bring Egypt to magical and startling life, but to explore the truly beautiful, profound philosophy of Egyptian polytheism.

Jan Assman

Assmann's oeuvre provides vast resources: his Mind of Egypt presents the entire span of Egyptian civilization, contextualizing the many shifts in culture, belief systems, arts and ideas that occurred across the long span of many kingdoms, concluding with the dramatic shifts that occurred under Persian and then Greek colonization.  Textbooks I have looked at don't exactly present marvelous depictions of these cultural transitions of the sort that would provide students with opportunities to understand them.  However, the rich contextual shifts of Egyptian life could easily be written for sixth graders. 

His book The Search for God in Ancient Egypt could be used to write curricula that not only would help students actually make sense of Egyptian religion, but overcome stereotypes of polytheism as strange, primitive, or unsophisticated.  While students might marvel at the technical genius of Egyptian architecture, there is little curricula out there that succeeds in helping them understand the genius of Egyptian culture and religion.

We should work hard to change this situation, because it is not simply the understanding of ancient Egypt, but the understanding of - and the judgment of - all ancient civilizations: for all were polytheistic, as were (and are) Native Americans and the tribes and cultures across the earth that did not participate in civilizations or state religions.  We should prioritize helping students make sense of religion, so that they do not grow up judging cultures to be bizarre of inferior.

Perhaps even more than writing curricula, I have a deep desire to write stories - vividly illustrated stories that achieve what I set out for my curricula to accomplish, which is bringing the richness of academic literature to magical life for children, adolescents, and adults.  The story I would like to write more than any other would be a retelling of the story of Osiris, as informed and inspired by Assmann's Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, which offers a profound opportunity to contemplate the complicated relationships humans have to death and notions of soul and afterlife.  

Fantasy Projects: Writing Curricula Based on the Oxford History of the United States

I have many "fantasy projects" - projects that I would love to engage in given sufficient time and resources.  The first would be re-reading the Oxford History of the United States, and using that resource to write tightly but thoroughly contextualized two page essays on major questions in US history.  The Oxford History, although vast in scope and rigorous in scholarship, is also highly readable, extremely thoughtful, greatly respected... and contains essential contextual information for understanding history that is largely unavailable at the secondary school level.  

In a nutshell, I believe I can take twenty pages of rich contextual information from the Oxford History and re-write it in two enticing pages, at a secondary school level, in a way that few other resources have accomplished. 

I imagine it would take me a month to read and take notes on each volume, and another month to write perhaps twenty two page essays that would help students (and teachers) make sense of history.  Since I have the summer ahead of me, I've decided to test this timetable and to see what product I can create.  I've just started reading Empire of Liberty, and believe I'll be able to start publishing some prototype essays here in mid-July.  

Provocative example questions from the post-revolutionary era that Empire covers include: Why could only men with property vote?  Why did so many founding fathers own slaves?  How did the Revolution weaken slavery, and why was it subsequently reborn with a vengeance?  How could the revolutionaries talk of independence while supporting slavery?  The answers to these questions require analyzing historical contexts in which notions of property and liberty differ dramatically from our own.   Students and adults jump to assumptions about these questions all the time, reading their present understandings of these subjects into the past, in a psychological phenomena known as presentism. (I hope to post an essay on the subject of presentism here soon). 

These essays would be able to stand alone, allowing for easy integration into curricula, but would also link together, creating a cohesive whole.  They would offer the rich scholarship of the Oxford History - lots of contextualization, rich descriptions of causality - and translate that richness into a shortened version accessible to sixteen year old students.

(For a samples of how I've made academic research available in secondary school texts, see my posts Contextualizing the Buddhas Life, and Examining Prejudice in Ancient China, which were written for sixth graders.)