Clay tablets allow us to conclude that schools existed in Mesopotamia, and that they coincided with the earliest representations of the Sumerian language about 3100 BC. Among the documents of Old Sumerian, which existed until about 2500 BC, are school exercises – lists of signs and words. At the time of the Semitic invasion of Mesopotamia, about 1700 BC, we find a compendium of celestial omens called the Enuma Anu Enlil. These omens concern the moon’s eclipses, halos, and conjunctions with fixed stars; solar eclipses; weather and earthquakes; and planetary stations. They held special importance for those who believed in astrology, a system of correspondences constructed between celestial phenomena and terrestrial events. The celestial phenomena must have been catalogued over centuries and at diverse places by trained observers. These circumstances suggest an early social pairing of priestly and scholastic functions.
Many of the Sumerian calculations we possess treat practical measuring problems, often involving land area. (In modern terms they reduce to complicated algebraic equations, often cubic or even quadratic expressions.) The problems are sometimes formulated with what we may call malice of forethought (correct answers are integral numbers), and sometimes they have absurd proportions (lengths stretching more than a thousand kilometres or food for an impossibly large army). We have problem sets both with and without solutions, and some solutions feature elementary mistakes. We must conclude that the corpus relates to instruction in schools. The techniques were no doubt useful for keeping track of state assets, but it seems more reasonable to imagine that this specialized knowledge served better to discipline young minds.
The presence of codifying abstruse calculations (whatever their ostensible, practical referent) implies the existence of schools, even if we cannot say much about scholastic organization. Egyptian mathematics, for example, is based on unit fractions – fractions where the numerator is always one. It is possible to speculate about the origin of such a convention (in terms of family structure, inheritance practices, land tenure and taxes), but there can be no disagreement about the ultimate impracticality of the convention for advanced mathematics. Among the few surviving compendia of Egyptian mathematics, we find calculations dividing the contents of a jug of beer into minuscule parts, obviously a school exercise by its lack of utility.
A new kind of teaching emerged in the fifth century BC, and it left its mark on learning in all cultures with access to the Mediterranean world. The innovation related to a group of Greek teachers known as Sophists. They were private professional pedagogues (like later-day itinerant lecturers) who operated in a free-market economy. They would teach by contract whatever people wanted to learn. Their syllabuses suited individual tastes, and their pitch seems to have been a mixture of affable cultivation and practical skills designed to propel a citizen forward in his city.
Their innovations notwithstanding, Socrates (ca.470–399 BC) and Plato (ca.427–347 BC) were teachers in the Sophist tradition, even though they distinguished themselves by their strong claim to methodological precision and systematization of knowledge. Plato’s Academy occupied a large athletic facility long used by teachers like him. Aristotle (384–322 BC), who might have succeeded Plato, created his own school at another athletic facility, the Lyceum. Aristotle’s chosen successor Theophrastus (372–287 BC) produced written anthologies of his pre-Socratic predecessors in addition to general manuals and new works. He purchased land near the Lyceum and donated it in perpetuity to his colleagues for a school, although the Lyceum’s library left Athens for Anatolia as a result of an ideological schism. Later the library returned to Athens and eventually found its way to Rome (as spoils of conquest), where it received wide notice. Permanency of place and syllabus, coupled with the international and public nature of instruction, produced a search for certainty rather than, as with the Sophists, mere expediency.
The Academy and the Lyceum were institutions of higher learning. They departed from the smorgasbord of Sophist offerings whose heritage we find, today, in undergraduate liberal-arts curricula. Young people associated with these schools absorbed particular truths as well as the spirit of the place, and then contributed to the discourse; it pleased some men (we have no clear record of women scholars) to stay on for part or all of a lifetime. The excitement of scholarly discussion and the presence of libraries, where knowledge was collected and stored, made such a choice attractive. We possess no diplomas from antiquity because the world of Greek learning was so small as not to require them. A quick conversation would be enough to establish a person’s credentials.
State funding ensured the contemplative life of these colleges, which continued in some form for many hundreds of years. At least at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, academic contemplation related directly to political involvement. Because the end of all learning was to train better citizens, scholars often applied themselves to statecraft. The goal was to produce someone like Henry Kissinger or, more optimistically, Woodrow Wilson, each of whom was a distinguished academic before entering politics.
The Big Three – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – closed the Greek golden age. In the far-ranging conquests and the subsequent Hellenizing process initiated by Alexander the Macedonian, these and other thinkers of contemporary renown received tremendous exposure. What distinguishes the sequence of the Big Three is not speculative moral or political philosophy, but rather a tradition of collective enquiry into nature. They also sought explanations rooted in experience and capable of standing up under sustained, reasoned debate. Whatever the philosophical colour of knowledge-seekers in Hellenistic times (the philosophies came in dozens of hues), their accomplishments depended on libraries and secular centres of higher learning.
Institutions with a teaching function began to take shape, emphasizing the search for knowledge of nature, with the result that the contentious ethical-political side receded into the background. A pupil of Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus, Demetrius Phalerius (ca.345–293 BC), deposed as dictator of Athens, went to the Egypt of one of Alexander’s generals turned potentates, Ptolemy I Soter; there Ptolemy, acting on Demetrius’s advice, founded the institute for advanced study known as the Museum of Alexandria. The name suggests a secular temple for receiving inspiration by the muses, the nine avatars of arts and letters (including astronomy) in classical antiquity. Though under the direction of a priest (until Rome imposed a supervisor) and with their material needs overseen by curatorial staff, the Museum’s fellows were free to study what they liked. They lived sumptuously at the king’s expense. They had outdoor galleries and lecture theatres for learned discussions, and they ate in a large dining hall. Attached to the Museum were a botanical garden and what became the largest library of Mediterranean antiquity, the Serapeum. The prestige of the Museum made it a magnet for scientists throughout Hellenistic and Roman times – Euclid (fl. ca.295 BC), Apollonius of Perga (fl. ca.200 BC), Aristarchus (ca.310–230 BC), Eratosthenes (ca.276–ca.195BC), Archimedes (ca.287–212 BC), and Hero (fl. AD 62) all resided in Alexandria for longer or shorter periods. Museum fellows could and did take on pupils – the grammarians Dionysius Thrax of Alexandria (fl. AD 40) and Apion (fl. AD 30) are traditionally held to have studied there under Didymus (b. 63 BC). Scholars generally found it a safe haven from political storms. The Museum was the nerve centre of a cultural community that we would find today in places like the Cambridges.
The Museum inspired copies at the administrative centres of Antioch, Ephesus, Smyrna, Seleucia, and Rhodes. The Attalids of Pergamum in Anatolia (in modern Turkey) imitated the Alexandrian example by creating a medical school and magnificent library, an environment of learning that centuries later nurtured the Pergamum native, the famous physician Galen (ca.129–ca.200). A second-century contemporary of Galen’s, the great thinker Claudius Ptolemy (ca.100–ca.170, not related to the royal family) held a professorship at the Alexandrian Museum, part of the small number of chairs in philosophy that Egypt’s nonresident monarchs, the Romans, had financed. After AD 200, however, the Museum began to lose some of its intellectual centrality, despite the extraordinary achievements of Ptolemy. Galen’s writings suggest as much, because he visited the Museum and wrote disparagingly about its physicians. Alexandria’s Museum – with its hundreds of thousands of rolls of books and its heritage in speculative philosophy, with its tradition of high-table meals and sparkling dinner conversation – is a distant mirror of twentieth-century universities. It is difficult to say how much was left of the library and its intellectual circle when Caliph Umar, following a tradition of book burnings stretching from the pre-Socratics