"This recognition of the earlier human background, now so obvious to us, did not come all at once, for the inclusion of history itself in university instruction is an event less than two centuries old"
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Breasted is doing something slyly polemical: he’s calling “obvious” what his own field had to fight to make thinkable. The line flatters the modern reader’s sense of enlightenment while quietly indicting the institutions that took so long to catch up. “Earlier human background” isn’t just prehistory; it’s the deep time that destabilizes older, comfortable origin stories. By framing that recognition as recent and hard-won, Breasted turns academic common sense into a historical achievement - and implies it could be lost or narrowed again.
The kicker is the timeline: “less than two centuries old.” He’s writing as a professionalizer, someone who watched universities transform from clerical finishing schools into research machines. In the early 20th century, “history” becoming a legitimate university subject is not a quaint trivia fact; it’s ammunition in a campaign for the humanities as a modern science of evidence, archives, artifacts. As an archaeologist, Breasted is also smuggling in a hierarchy of credibility: the “earlier” past is best accessed through trained methods, not inherited tradition.
Subtextually, he’s taking a swing at provincialism. If history instruction is newly institutional, then any curriculum that treats the nation-state, the Bible, or the classical canon as the whole story is a recent construction masquerading as timeless truth. Breasted’s intent is expansionary: widen the frame, legitimize ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian pasts within Western education, and remind readers that what universities teach is never neutral - it’s a record of power deciding what counts as knowledge.
The kicker is the timeline: “less than two centuries old.” He’s writing as a professionalizer, someone who watched universities transform from clerical finishing schools into research machines. In the early 20th century, “history” becoming a legitimate university subject is not a quaint trivia fact; it’s ammunition in a campaign for the humanities as a modern science of evidence, archives, artifacts. As an archaeologist, Breasted is also smuggling in a hierarchy of credibility: the “earlier” past is best accessed through trained methods, not inherited tradition.
Subtextually, he’s taking a swing at provincialism. If history instruction is newly institutional, then any curriculum that treats the nation-state, the Bible, or the classical canon as the whole story is a recent construction masquerading as timeless truth. Breasted’s intent is expansionary: widen the frame, legitimize ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian pasts within Western education, and remind readers that what universities teach is never neutral - it’s a record of power deciding what counts as knowledge.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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