Today the oldest universities in Europe trace their history back to the middle ages, and they generally date their origin to a time around the end of the twelfth century. However, this has often been difficult to determine precisely, because the sources are sparse and the concept of a university itself was still not clear at that time. In medieval times people were not satisfied with this kind of dating. Historians of the past in England were convinced that the university in Oxford had already been founded in the ninth century by King Alfred the Great, and on the continent people regarded the university in Paris as a direct descendant of Plato's old Academy in Athens, which they thought had been moved to the French capital via Rome. Never mind that such ideas are chiefly evidence of the small critical sense in certain medieval historians - at the time they contained a proper understanding of the fact that the universities had roots in the past which went back as far as the great schools of classical antiquity. Today the prehistory of the universities can be traced back even further, considering that there were schools among the pre-Grecian cultures in the Middle East as well. These schools gave instruction, advanced for the conditions of the time, to select groups of students who could later count on entering particular positions in society in order to apply their special knowledge there.