If we begin at the beginning and take what is sometimes called the oldest book in the world, we shall see how early definite educational ideas took form. It is a set of moral lessons or instructions given, or supposed to be given, by a father to his son. The father's name was Ptah Hotep. He was a vizier of King Itosi of the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt, some time about 3500 B.C. {8} The Egyptologists used to date him earlier than that, but in recent years they have been clipping centuries off Egyptian dates until perhaps King Itosi must be considered as having lived probably not earlier than 3350 B.C. That makes very little difference for our purpose, however. The oldest manuscript copy of the book was written apparently not later than 2900 b.c. It exists as the famous Prisse Papyrus in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. There is another copy in the British Museum. There is a pretty thorough agreement as to these dates, so that we can be sure that this little book which has come to be known as the Instruction of Ptah Hotep, or the Proverbs of Ptah Hotpu--another form of his name with a variation in the title--represents the wisdom of the generations who lived in Egypt about 5000 years ago. It was written, as I have said, almost as long before Solomon as Solomon is before us, so that the character of the moral instructions which it contains is extremely interesting. There must have been a number of copies of it made. This and books like it were used as schoolbooks in Egypt. They were employed somewhat as we employ copybooks. The writing of the manuscript is the old hieratic, cursive writing of the Egyptians, not their hieroglyphics, and the children used portions of this book as copies, listened to dictation from it and learned to write the language by imitating it. Of books similar to it we have a number of manuscript copies. Some {9} of these copies preserved from before 2000 B.C. are full of errors such as school children would make in taking down dictation. This was their method of teaching spelling, and after the children had spelled the words the teacher went over them and corrected the mistakes. These corrections were made in a different colored ink from that used by the pupils! The whole system of teaching, as it thus comes before us, resembles our own elementary school teaching much more than we might think possible. Spelling, writing, composition are all taught in this way yet, or at least they were when I was at school, and while I have heard that some of the old-fashioned methods were going out, I have also received some hints of the reaction by which they are coming in again, so that the Egyptian methods take on a new interest.