제7차 교육과정 고등학교 세계사 교과서의 고대 이집트, 페니키아, 헤브라이 문명 서술 분석

Abstract

This study is intended to examine the contents of history and culture of ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, and Hebrew in current three High School textbooks of world history. The cultures of the Ancient Near East, so󰠏called the ancient Orient, can be divided into two major civilizations, i.e.,Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures, and other relatively minor ones such as Hebrew, Hittite, Aramaean, and Phoenician cultures. Because the ancient Orient is the starting point of ancient Western and general human history,through which we inherited the legacy of alphabets, cities, etc., it is important to seek the accuracy of its descriptions in school textbooks. Upon the analyses, I found a number of erroneous contents in almost every subject such as time frame, maps, tables, terminologies, proper names,and so on. More striking is these errors occur in very basics of this field of study. For example, one textbook describes that the Egyptians built pyramids only in the Old Kingdom Period, and another presents ancient Egypt as a united kingdom throughout its history without mentioning the intermediate periods. And also, it should be pointed out that recent scholarship of the field was not reflected in appropriate sections, and the amount of description is not enough to cover long histories of these cultures. Although these kinds of problem in history textbooks is not confined to the cultures of the Orient, it must be reminded that the ancient history is essential to understand our current society, for it functions as its root, and the information which school textbooks offer is regarded as a standard knowledge of the society. Therefore, problems of school textbooks should be checked and corrected by appropriate scholars, and the history of the ancient Orient must have proper evaluation in next history textbooks.