Educational methods are constantly innovating, but some basic education methods have not changed much in the past, especially for the method of learning writing, punishment should be a stage that people of different eras must have experienced.
Archaeologists in the central Egyptian city of Athribis found the largest record of ancient Egyptian life since the 20th century, found as many as 18,000 pottery fragments with writing or drawings, which not only recorded the living habits of ancient Egyptians, including receipts, shopping lists and school textbooks, but also witnessed that children in ancient Egypt experienced the same learning experience of copying.
Among the 18,000 fragments of inscriptions found at the site is a painting of a child. （Atribis-Project Tübingen）
The team, led by Professor Christian Leitz of the University of Tübingen in Tübingen, Germany, collaborated with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities on an excavation project in the central city of Athribis, which was centered on a temple built by Pharaoh Ptolemy XII. The excavation revealed 18,000 remains of pottery with inscriptions, known to the ancient Egyptians as "ostraca", on which ancient Egyptians wrote in ink made of reeds, recording transaction accounts, shopping lists, copying literary works and teaching students to write and paint, which were more readily available and cheaper than papyrus, another medium of writing at the time.
Professor Christian Leitz said the pottery from the excavation was derived from a school textbook or textbook with a list of "months, numbers, arithmetic, grammar exercises and bird alphabets", each letter assigned a bird whose name begins with that letter, and the other fragments include three humanoids drawn by children, as well as drawings of animals such as gods, geometric figures, scorpions and swallows. There is a repeating symbol on the front and back of hundreds of pottery pieces, which archaeologists believe is evidence that "Bai Yi Zi" was forced to copy, reflecting that punishment is an unchanging learning method for human beings throughout the ages.
Hundreds of stone slabs have the same symbols written on both the front and back, which archaeologists believe is evidence that the students were forced to write lines.
Sacred texts written in hieroglyphs may have been copied by students.
Most of the inscriptions found are written in the Secular (Demotic), an administrative script used during the reign of Ptolemaic XII, who ruled from 81 BC to 59 BC and later from 55 BC to 51 BC, the rest are Hieratic, the rare Coptic, Greek and Arabic, and the mixed use of different scripts hints at the city's turbulent multicultural history, For example, the Coptic alphabet is a mixture of Greek and Egyptian, closely related to Christianity.
The last time such a large number of pottery inscriptions were found was in the early 1900s, when archaeologists found many fragments of writing in the ancient village of Dale Medina, a little further down the Nile.
School text with bird alphabet.