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School house in SW Egypt dating to ~AD 300

Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 2:38 am
by MrMacSon
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It had ancient Greek writings on its walls, including a text about ancient drug use that references Homer's "The Odyssey."
https://www.livescience.com/43265-ancie ... egypt.html

The house illustrated how people came into contact with culture, displaying, for instance, mythological learning both in painted plaster (see ยง7.2) and in writing. http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/oasis-city/chapter7.xhtml

In the first epigram, the mention of "god" and "the great god" is intriguing but ambiguous. Did the verses allude to a mythological god or to the Christian God? Both are possible. The language of these epigrams is heavily poetic and epic, but many expressions from Homer and Apollonius Rhodius later passed into Christian poetry and prose. Hermes Trismegistos, or Thoth, was not only the god of rhetoric but also the main deity of Trimithis, and the epithet megas (great) is attested for him, so that the identification appears at first possible. And yet Christian epigrammatists often applied the same epithet to the Christian God. In the first epigram, moreover, Hermes is mentioned among the deities who escort the students up the hill, so he cannot be identified with the "god" that the teacher invokes at the beginning, and it seems very likely that the "god" is the Christian God. The coexistence of mythological gods and God poses no difficulty, because in the fourth century Christians claimed for themselves the right to use a classicizing language and literature; this contest for the classical heritage lies behind the emperor Julian's edict against Christian teachers and the counterreaction of Gregory of Nazianzus, among others.

http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/oasis-city/chapter7.xhtml