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RE: EGYPTOLOGY: Science in Ancient Egypt, Part #3
I went back through to read all the parts of this series. I guess it never occurred to me to think about the difference between our modern quest for knowledge being motivated by desire to collect knowledge, and the ancient Egyptian's motivation coming from a need to problem solve. How fortunate are we to live in a time when we can collect knowledge for the sake of collecting it. What a privilege!
Maybe I must describe it a bit detailed: today we have various reasons to collect knowledge. One is the knowledge that we gain because of institutional research programs that "gather" similar interests such as graduate schools with a certain scientific focus. The funding of those organisations is often directly connected with publication. So it is often just "piled up" knowledge without a direct practical value. Hopefully, we'll benefit later from it. On the other hand, especially in medicine, we try to "find a solution" by testing a cure for cancer. But at the same time, medical research is also done by huge pharmaceutical companies to earn more profit. This was basically not the mentality of the ancient cultures...