Palestine Across Millennia: A History of Literacy, Learning and Educational Revolutions

The Center for Arab Unity Studies published the book Palestine Across Millennia: A History of Literacy, Learning and Educational Revolutions by researcher Nur Masalha (translated by Victor Sahab).

Returning to four thousand years of the history of Palestine places us in front of a knowledge and cultural treasure, which other civilizations have rarely known in terms of its scientific, pedagogical and educational stock accumulated through the passage of multiple civilizations through Palestine, a country that has preserved its name and the name of its Palestinian people throughout the civilizational eras over the past centuries.

The book delves into the distinctive cultural history of the Palestinians, shedding light on the entire history of Palestinian science, with reference to writing, education, literary production, and intellectual revolutions in the country. The book presents this long cultural heritage to prove that Palestine is more than just a “holy land” for the four monotheistic religions, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Samaritanism, and to expose the falsity of the Zionist narrative that claims that the land of Palestine and the Palestinians lack cultural, scientific, and civilizational stock throughout the ages; It also shows that Palestine is a major global site for classical education and the production of knowledge in multiple languages, including Sumerian, Canaanite, Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin. This cultural saturation of the country appears not only in the historical mosques, churches, and synagogues, but also in scholarship, historical schools, colleges, universities, world-famous libraries, and archive centers, which the Palestinian lands have stored over four thousand years.