EGYPT & THE CLASSICS CURRICULUM

This edition of Erato highlights the ways in which our colleges are expanding the traditional focus on Greece & Rome by looking at that most ancient of Mediterranean civilizations, Egypt. The heritage of Egypt remains a source of fascination for our students today, just as it did for a Greek visitor named Herodotus long ago. Feel free to contact our contributors for more information, copies of syllabi, etc. If you’d like to contribute a follow-up essay about the ways your own department is “going Egyptian”, we’ll save space in the next issue for it!

Anne Haeckl, Kalamazoo College (ahaeckl@kzoo.edu)
Teaching Multiculturalism through Greco-Roman Egypt
(originally presented in Austin, TX, at the 2002 CAMWS meeting)

Four years ago at Kalamazoo College, I introduced an undergraduate Classical Archaeology course on “Greco-Roman Egypt: An Ancient Multicultural Society” for a number of reasons, the paramount one being self-interest. As a member of the ongoing University of Delaware/Leiden University Excavations at Berenike, a Greco-Roman port city on the Red Sea coast of Egypt’s Eastern Desert, I was working on an array of material culture – architecture, sculpture, religious artifacts, and terracotta figurines – that ideally required expertise not only in Classical civilization, but also in the indigenous Pharaonic heritage of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. As a classical archaeologist with no formal training in Egyptology, I felt ill-prepared for the task. continue...

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Gene Miller & Kosta Hadavas, Beloit College (jthackfo@wiscmail.edu & hadavasc@beloit.edu)
Ancient Egyptian Studies at Beloit College

I. Introduction
The Beloit College Classics Department does not have a traditional Classical Studies minor. Instead, the department has developed an interdisciplinary minor called Ancient Mediterranean Studies, in which students have the opportunity to explore different civilizations (Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Roman, and Byzantine) from a variety of perspectives. The minor draws on the departments of Anthropology, Art History, Classics, History, Philosophy and Religion, and Political Science for its courses, with students having the option of either a philological emphasis (taking two classes in Egyptian, Greek, or Latin) or a historical one (taking two of the following classes: Egyptian Civilization, Greek Civilization, Roman Civilization, History of Philosophy I). continue...

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John Quinn, Hope College (quinn@hope.edu)
An Experiment in Coptic

I once taught a year’s worth of Coptic to a Hope student who cajoled me into doing it after she learned that it was a favorite language of mine. Her persuasions worked because she was a Classics major & an excellent student (in fact, she recently finished her doctorate in Classics at Ontario’s McMaster University). The experience got me wondering all the more how strong the “lure of Egypt” was among our students. Last fall, I decided to conduct a test: I listed in the spring course catalog “Egyptian (Coptic)”, CLAS 295, to meet MWF 9:30-10:20.
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