 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fiedel. And I'm Lisa Anderson. And I'll show this time. I'll attend a talk on ancient education by visiting Professor Raffaella Crebiore at the art auditorium at UH Manoa. She's a professor of classics at NYU. Her talk was called an Ancient Egyptian Schoolhouse, Studying Greek in an Egyptian Oasis. Professor Crebiore is from Milan. After taking a l'oreal magnacum laudi from the Université d'Alsacro Quarry, she came to New York. In 1993, she took a PhD in classics from Columbia University, where she taught and curated the collection of Greek and Coptic papyri. She moved to NYU in 2008. And in 2010, she presented the prestigious Townsend Lectures at Cornell. Dr. Crebiore is a specialist in ancient education from the 4th century BCE to the 4th century CE. She's a literary papyrologist and spends a month every year at Dockla Oasis, an NYU excavation in Egypt where an ancient school of higher education was found. Dr. Crebiore has been studying the literary papyri in two oases in Egypt and researching questions of ancient literacy. She's also interested in Greek rhetoric. Her research is centered on late antiquity rhetoric in the 4th century. In an excavation in the Dockla Oasis, NYU found a 4th century residence that belonged to Sarenos, a city counselor in that time. Next to Sarenos, his home was a school. He annexed the school to his home and his sons and their classmates studied grammar and rhetoric. In one room, a text that exhorted students to learn rhetoric was found. In another room, texts on the wall had verses from Homer and Plutarch. These discoveries are important because so few schools have been found from the Greek and Roman worlds. The talk was organized by Dr. Robert Litman, a professor of classics and director of the Tel Tamai excavation being done by the University of Hawaii in Egypt. Tonight we're going to find out that people have been teaching ancient Greek a long time, even in Egypt. I'd like to just share a personal recollection of my time at Columbia and meeting Raffaella. So I met Raffaella probably decades ago, a couple of decades ago, it's hard to believe, when I was a graduate student. At that time at Columbia, one of the courses that we were expected to take was a course as a seminar in Paparology. Raffaella was a fixture in the rare books room on the sixth floor of Butler Library. I remember very clearly that the papyri room was kind of like a cage with a big seminar table and there were shelves of books lining the space like a sanctum in the rare books room. The rarest of the books were these papyrological fragments and so we had to be very careful when we were examining these specimens of ancient books. Raffaella had this ability to extract fragments of papyri that were published in volumes all over the place in the library. The papyri are never really fully filled out texts. They're scraps of text so it takes a very incredible memory and mind in order to keep track of all of these different important, seemingly unimportant but actually very important scraps. From 1994 to 2008 Raffaella was the curator of papyri and she was also an adjunct professor in classics at Columbia. In 2001 she helped to pilot an important NEH funded project called APIS. Of course, it had to be APIS. The acronym is the Advanced Papyrological Information System. This was a pioneering effort to make available the images and the translations of actual papyri on the internet and I remember when I had come to Hawaii where there's no papyri here for me to work on it, it seemed like a goldmine, a treasure to have these scanned papyri available on the internet. Since then the APIS project has gone dormant and it's been absorbed into another papyri site. Raffaella created a very detailed study of schools, of students and their writing materials. She looked at how teachers were hired by parents and how parents often wrote letters to check up on their child's progress. In the introduction to her book she writes quote, a conspicuous part of the work of a historian is to render visible details that were hidden in the unexceptional practices of everyday life. Digging a sort of archaeological trench in the reality of ancient education helps us target the details, the material culture of education. And she says also that by studying these fragments that were found in the deserts of Egypt on papyrus and also on limestone and ostraca potchards, she says that these fragments allows us to retrieve voices from the ancient past that are unmediated by the necessity of reaching a wider public and posterity. And it permits us to literally touch the hands of people who left traces in writing. After the death of Alexander the Great, Greek became the language of the administration and of education in Egypt. So the peasant kept on speaking Egyptian but the people let's say who counted had to learn Greek to reach some position. Here you see Alexandria and you come down along the Nile. Here you see Amida and on the side Trimitis. This was in fact, this is the city that we were excavating. And the remains go from the pharaonic period we found for example a beautiful stele that now is in the major museum in Cairo to the 4th century AD. This magnificent thing is the only other example of a school besides ours that is available. Serenos was a counsellor of the city. He was important, he received dignitaries and I mean the men who counted in the oasis and in his triclinium like the place where they ate but also received people. He surrounded himself with many images from Homer. This is the kind of magical room because the students were sitting here. They looked and I'll show you better the verses that are here. They looked at almost like a blackboard. All the walls were covered in some kind of a white coating so that people could write and then with water and a sponge they could erase. The unusual thing about this text is also that you have a god up there made a god grant my wishes and the god cannot be Hermes because so there is a possibility that since here we are at the very beginning of the 4th century AD that we are talking about the Christian god because at that point many Christian teachers kept on using the Greek system of education, the pagan gods and everything. We spent months trying to understand what this was and the reason was that if it were poetry or prose it would have been written in what we called a book hand kind of orderly with the letters a little bit separated. Here we have a very cursive text and so some people said oh maybe this was a receipt of something but I thought come on I mean in the school a receipt. I always suspected that some students did not learn everything the syllabaries but they just wrote to practice their hands and here you see on the top the teacher who writes a maxim and the student copies it but then he keeps on copying it but instead of copying from the teacher writing he keeps on copying it from his own text so once you arrive at the bottom it's a disaster. This one is a masterpiece because it's a letter of a student who writes to his father the father had sent him to Alexandria to learn rhetoric together with two other brothers and everything appears to have happened from this letter people had said to the father your children are actually growing long hair so clearly it wasn't they didn't like it then the student said okay dad I was sent here to learn rhetoric but there are no absolutely no teachers all the teachers are completely incompetent and of course scholars have jumped on this and said but not true there were so many and also they beat up a slave anyway lots of stuff so this letter even just in translation is absolutely marvelous the text said that Helena mixed this potion that she calls Nepenthes that makes you forget all your pain and your sorrows scholars said probably opium because but the thing is that I published the text and somebody in the internet picked it up and talked a little bit on my article but put a title that was drugs on a school wall you cannot imagine I received phone calls it became viral if you want to know more about professor Kribiore check out her faculty page if you want to know more about the classics department at UH Manoa check out the website page for that department as we always say history is so important to help us understand the world today once in a while wouldn't it be a great idea to take a look at the ancient classics and now let's take a look at our think tech calendar of events going forward there's so much happening in Hawaii sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them but think tech will take you there remember you can watch think tech on spectrum oc 16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government industry academia and communities around the islands and the world think tech broadcasts daily talk shows live on the internet from 10 a.m to 5 p.m on weekdays then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long 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374 2014 and pose a question or participate in the discussion and now here's this week's think tech commentary i'm jay fidel and this is my commentary trump's declaration of an emergency puts us in a constitutional crisis under the constitution congress does the spending congress already refused to appropriate money for his wall trump is ignoring congress going around congress and thus the constitution we should not worry that the president he is trying to set by this phony emergency will allow the democrats to do the same thing later we should rather worry that if trump gets away with it he will do it again and again phony emergencies on everything allowing him to dictate the laws and the government with the indefensible and continuing help of mitch mcconnell trump has already marginalized the government by compromising the republican party and the senate by appointing and immediately confirming hundreds of right-wing judges in the federal courts by failing to make appointments and appointing unqualified leaders to federal agencies and by undermining the intelligence agencies in our country this dangerous crossroads is hauntingly reminiscent of the enabling act of 1933 in germany when hitler ended the right stag by having them pass a bill to allow him to make all the laws the rest is history if the courts and especially the supreme court permit trump to declare national emergency without the being an emergency and congress does not stop him congress will again have abdicated the balance of power among the branches of government designed by the founders will be corrupted and democracy as we have known it will be upended in favor of this bullish pretender putin must be dancing his efforts to manipulate public opinion and our elections by active measures and disinformation are working very well trump has been helping him by fomenting irreconcilable hostile conflicts on politics race religion health care climate change international trade environment education taxes abortion gun control special programs and infrastructure and more and in undermining nato and our critical diplomatic relations with long-standing allies putin must be ecstatic to see trump his fawning follower throw our sacred constitution to the wolves putin seems to own trump lord and mother know what putin has on him but it must be big for us a continuation of trump's machinations can lead only to a national breakdown and ultimately political and economic domination by russia and or china or for that matter global war sadly we may already have passed the point of no return see how much time we waste on trump and his daily distractions and how little time we have left to think together and save ourselves from what he is doing as a country we see more and more unfocused and unable to deal with him this makes him all the more powerful what's the solution what can we individually and collectively do well we shouldn't fall into the web of divisiveness we shouldn't be complacent about his lies and distortions of the truth and his ruthless attacks on the media and those who criticize him above all we should not take the bait and fight among ourselves we cannot let trump divide us the democrats can't afford fragmentation on non critical issues we need to focus we should come together to get trump out of office we should form and support a national alliance to choose and elect someone else who can resist his provocations and repair the wreckage of his unhinged administration i'm glad hawaii joined the suit to stop trump's declaration of emergency just as i was glad that hawaii joined the suit to stop his travel ban hawaii needs to be a leader morally socially and politically here and in washington and across the country we should be part of this national effort we should make our views known across the country and the world we should connect the dots on trump we should point out the error of his ways and the damage of his actions we should resist anything as would enable him to continue his efforts to achieve unrestrained power if that means writing or disseminating op-ed pieces then so be it if that means contributing to candidates in other states then so be it if that means talking with or going to the mainland to participate in their campaigns then so be it we are here with the advantage of distance and diversity and we need to contribute to the national conversation and show congress and particularly the senate how much we the people around the country care and how much we the people want our elected officials to do their sworn duty to uphold the law then franklin said we can only have a republic if we're willing to keep it right now this republic is in greater jeopardy than it has ever been if we don't act together to restore constitutional government in washington we will all be very sorry to keep the republic we must all pay the price just as they did in 1789 freedom doesn't come free the price is eternal vigilance against the terrible villainous tom fullery we are now seeing under donald trump time to stand up what were you doing when the country came apart daddy i hope you can give your kids a good answer we'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of think tech but first we want to thank our underwriters that wraps up this week's edition of think tech remember you can watch think tech on spectrum oc 16 several times every week can't get enough of it just like at least us for additional times check out oc 16 dot tv for lots more think tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on think tech visit think tech hawaii dot com be a guest or a host a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on hawaii thanks so much for being part of our think tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech energy diversification and global awareness in hawaii and of course the study of ancient education in egypt you can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next sunday evening for our next important think tech episode i'm jay phy down and i'm elise anderson aloha everyone