Proceedings Colloquium on World History - Waldorf Research Institute

vaded Egypt. The Hyksos did not have the same numbers as the Egyptians,
and the Egyptians were no slouches militarily. Their wars were normally
internal between upper and lower Egypt. But the Egyptians were utterly
baffled by people who used different techniques, and in this case the chariot.
The Egyptians were exceptional surgeons, and we have examples of
them and of Mesopotamians who carried out apparently successful eye surgery
and brain surgery as well as that they had anesthetics and all sorts of
very sophisticated abilities. But the interesting thing with the invasion of
the Hyksos was that the Egyptians were now confronted with wounds inflicted
by unfamiliar weapons. And they were absolutely stumped. There
was a great trauma, apparently, and they were not able to help their wounded,
and a large number of people died who would not normally have died. I’m
suggesting that we have a people who are not capable, and here I’m going to
use the term just a little bit loosely, what I’m going to call abstract fraud.
That is, they’re not able to take from an example that they know perfectly,
absolutely flawlessly how to treat, they can’t take the principle and then lift
that up and then apply it to something similar. That’s just one example of
that sort of thing.
Sometimes with students, I’ll talk about Jean Piaget and his experiments
with young children. He built models of mountains. The children
would walk around the model and he could see that they knew that there
were houses and fields and a lake, and then on the other side of the mountain
he would say, “Okay, now tell me what’s on the other side.” The younger
child doesn’t know, it isn’t real anymore, because the child can’t see it. And
this is a similar thing that the Egyptian can’t do. And, when I first taught
ancient history, I lived in Southern Germany with valleys and rivers and
roads and woods and forests. And I just thought to myself, let’s say you
want to go to the next village, and you did it by foot. You know that if you
go down into a valley you’d go along a path, you’d go past the forest, over
the fence and, now, how do you remember how to get from A to B? When
you’re a young child, you’d have to be accompanied, but at some point
you’re old enough, and you get it, you know the way. At some point you
start to get a mental map, a sort of three-dimensional map in a way. And
just think, for example, there’s nowhere really in Egypt proper that you’d
ever have to do that. Their entire world is actually visible at any one point,
and travel is pretty simple, you go with the wind to the south, or the river to
the north. That’s it. You never have to think about it at all. So, they’re
never even really pushed in a way to think like that.
I don’t know how much you know about Egypt, and I don’t know
that much, but I’ve been struck by letters complaining when they went to
Mesopotamia, they found it really unbearable traveling up and down, for
example, and it troubled them that the rivers flowed the wrong way. They’re
really connected to this fairly straight-forward world.
And, finally, I’ll give you a last example of abstract thought. Now, if
they built pyramids they had to do math, right? And they had to do fairly
complicated calculations. So, if it’s true they couldn’t do abstract thinking,
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