Kong Xiong -- Reality

   (It would be OK to come up with a more informative and specific title!)

   General comment to everyone:  Be sure you articulate why you are calling some things 
   *borders* or *boundaries* (i.e. things that divide some place from another place or 
   some people from others, while at the same time forming a connection between them).  
   Some of you seem to be using those words almost as synonyms for "differences," but there is 
   more to it than that because you aren't always working in the idea of simultaneous 
   *separation* and *connection*. 

   As writing, your opening paragraph is fine.  However, there are two errors of 
   fact and interpretation that (kind of severely) undermine what you are trying to say.  
   First, if you look carefully at what Herodotus says, you will see that the purpose of 
   the experiment of Psammetichos was not to determine whether the Egyptians or the Phrygians 
   were the oldest people.  The question was just whether the Egyptians were the oldest people;
   the Phrygians only entered the picture when the word "bekos" was recognized as a 
   word in the Phrygian language.  Second, Herodotus says the two children isolated for 
   the experiment were both "from ordinary people" and I think we are supposed to understand
   that they were both Egyptian, not one Egyptian and one Phrygian (nothing like a control
   in a modern scientific experiment!)  Please fix both of these points in your rewrite.

   For the rewrite also, you need to get to more precise ways of identifying the borders
   you are discussing. Along the lines of the general comment above, I don't really see 
   that what you say in this sentence: "The border here is the ideology that the Egyptians 
   believed the Phrygians came before them" really identifies a border.  I think it could be 
   *one side of a border* but the border itself is a border between the way the Egyptians 
   thought of themselves before, and the way they thought of themselves after the experiment.  
   This could be articulated as a border between belief and knowledge, as you say next, and 
   that is an interesting idea that you come back to later (one of the strongest points in 
   the paper, I think).  But you should start with that way of defining what the border is.  
   The rest of that paragraph going on to page 2 seems to be based on the way you were thinking 
   one child was Egyptian and one was Phrygian. You need to think this through again.  

   In the next paragraph, you say Herodotus follows "this same lifestyle."  What lifestyle 
   is that?  This is vague and it's not clear that being open to changing one's mind 
   (as in the end of the previous paragraph) is something that one should call a "lifestyle."  
   Isn't it more like an "attitude" or a "way of thinking?"  

   The paragraph where you discuss the "transcendence above a religious border" is not 
   very clear either.  In fact, note that Herodotus says he doesn't want to discuss a lot of the
   religious information he learned from the Egyptians.  So how is this a "transcendence?"
   Can one transcend something by not discussing it?

   I like very much that you tried to use the "Some might say that ... , but I think ... " 
   maneuver in discussing how widely the "silly stories" characterization that Herodotus
   uses should apply. I don't think that the characterization "silly stories"
   applies to the main part of the account.  It seems more likely to me that 
   Herodotus is telling the Egyptian version "straight," then saying that the 
   Greeks tell other versions that have silly aspects.  In a way, I think it's
   the wording of the particular translation that we read that is creating this
   question.  Here's another English version of the same passage
   (by the late 19th and early 20th century British classicist A.D. Godley):

   "This is the story which I heard from the priests of Hephaestus' temple 
   at Memphis; the Greeks say among many foolish things that Psammetichus 
   had the children reared by women whose tongues he had cut out."

   Do you see how different that makes it sound?  This (and the original Greek 
   text too) make it much clearer to me that the word "silly" really only applies 
   to Greek versions of the story, not to the "authentic" Egyptian version 
   that Herodotus has learned from the priests.  So I ultimately agree with the 
   way you come down about this question.
  
   In terms of the attached writing rubric, I would say most of this is at the Proficient
   level, but the "Accuracy and Interpretation of Sources" is more at the "Basic" level
   because of the two points mentioned above in the discussion of your opening paragraph.

   Content:  B

   Mechanics:  B+