The Power of the Ancients
Bettany Hughes contemplates the vanity of her profession as she outlines the reasons why we must continue to engage with our very distant past.
Brainwashing, mind games, thought manipulation. They are fearful and highly charged words. And so they should be. The expansion or contraction of the mind will determine our chances of survival on this planet. Our very name, mankind, derives from the Indo-European word for the mind, manu. We think, therefore we are human. So little surprise then that the groundhog-day battle for the future of the education of the next generation is with us once again. But so too is the threat to understanding how it all started – to the study of ancient civilisation.
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