Fascinating.
Growing up in a Hindu household, a lot of our festivals involve listening to origin stories of the customs. A lot of those have of course been glorified to add an element of holiness, but it's possible they are actually derived from some small incident happened in the past.
Like a butterfly effect, a small insignificant event leading to a major celebration for billion people continued over centuries
In India, there is a custom of passing ancient knowledge through poetic verses. Every poetic verses is sung in a specific 'meter'. If there is a discrepancy in recitation then remembering and passing knowledge 'letter by letter' can not succeed. Many of the verses are thousands of years old. I read some describing an ancient extinct river ~7000 years ago, later rediscovered through satellite imagery (don't know the right term).
Yeah, in language that suits HN, formal poetic structure amounts to error correction in oral tradition.
It dramatically narrows the possibilities of what idea or word or sound or whatever could fit in any particular place in the verse, making it easier to memorize and accurately recite. Clever (and some blundering) poets and changes in language still set up these recitations to evolve away from whatever they originally were, but the original seeds linger a long, long time.
But language itself and pronunciation of that language shifts over time. Probably better than hand transcription, but 7000 years is a long time.
“A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.’”
The old Sumerian joke?
I love reading the posited explanations for that joke in academia and when it’s posted randomly people usually have a stab at it too.
IIRC it's a pun on the "not seeing" verb being literally "having one's eyes closed".
Hmm. Blind people called dogs, because they have to use their nose instead of their eyes?
Not sure how that's funny though.
Makes me wonder, dogs supposedly have evolved to be better companions of humans, and lateral gene transfer is a thing. I wonder of they had much poorer sight 7k years ago, or perhaps, a popular local breed did.
(Naturally, to support my blind hypothesis, and walking into a bar instead of seeing it)
Yes poetry is a sort of decent checksum.
However I think parables are an even better checksum, as they can be translated also, but if the meaning is altered the story fails to be coherent. Parables are imo, the best form of information transference across time, imo.
Meaning is culturally contingent, though - the appropriate “moral” of a parable can change as culture changes around it, which can lead to changes to the parable itself.
For a contrived example, 100 years ago, the idea that one would defy one’s parents and pursue one’s own dreams would have been frowned upon, and any parables referencing that action would clearly contain the moral that one should listen to one’s parents. Today, that would be an almost unthinkable moral - discard your dreams and stick to whatever hidebound business your parents were in? Surely we got something wrong in the translation here.
Written in meter, though, clearly the only word that fits here is “shan’t”, not “must”.
I bet you've not seen a mustard seed, but you still get what is being said, in the parable of the mustard seed.
If the parable is talking to a foundational reality, rather than cultural situations, I think it can endure.
I get what you are saying, but even parables don't have 'the truth'. I would imagine that there may even be parables that argue the opposite position. And both, opposing positions could be right, depending on the context.
This is tangential, but have people really not seen a mustard seed?
Seeded/whole seed mustard was commonplace in my family.
This is what Manly P. Hall described as "acroamatic cipher" in his book "The Secret Teachings Of All Ages" [chapter "The Cryptogram as a factor in Symbolic Philosophy"]
Poetic structure is such a strong framework that linguists have been able to recover information about the dialect and pronunciation of English in the time of Shakespeare, from Shakespearean works.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?If you're alluding to the pronunciation of symmetry, I'm pretty sure eye and symmetry was specifically meant not to rhyme in order to throw off the reader slightly. Guess that hints at how difficult recovery of pronunciation can be.
The Saraswati description in the RgVeda is not 7000 years old. The text itself is believed to be only around 3500 years old
The river itself dried in around ~5000BC. The text attributed itself as being authored in 3000BC. The idea that text was written in 1500BC (3500 years ago) was proposed by Max Muller which was contested by his contemporary western and Indian scholars alike ( they proposed earlier dates) In his late life, Max himself admitted that the dates he gave were hypothetical, they were to considered minimum and it could actually be more than that.
"Scientific data and new evidence converge on the understanding that between 3000 and 2000 BCE (about 4,000 years ago), the river's demise began when Sutlej diverted from the present-day Ghaggar-Hakra valley to join the river Beas. By around 3792 BP (c. 1800 BCE), the river had completely dried up."
https://theprint.in/opinion/first-we-lost-saraswati-river-no...
Thanks for the clarification! I was referencing from an archaeological website of India and had confused BP with BC along with many other things:P
I encourage you to read research literature from the last century. Given that all of our linguistic estimates put Proto-Indo-European itself at around 3000 BCE, it makes no sense to claim that the RigVeda was composed earlier at that time. Indeed, Sanskrit likely did not exist at that time.
I can't trust the linguistic estimates fully as they are vague and are prone to many assumptions and approximations in their calculations. Just like change of stance of Max Muller, such estimations change depending on whether much older antiquities have been excavated or not. Like RigVeda described Saraswati during its time as alive.( I was mistaken that river dried in 5000bc, it dried around 3000bc to 2000bc ). It's only a matter of time since new evidence are discovered that pushes such estimates further back in time. What they do very well imply that certain developments happened a 'minimum' of years ago. Authorship's mention of time as in rig veda cannot be completely discarded out of consideration.
That’s clever and all, but how can you actually be sure the message was completely unchanged over 7000 years without an original written record? I get that special recitation tricks can make it harder to mess up, but I don’t think you can definitively say the information never once changed.
The people who follow this tradition of oral recitation where trained from childhood in a special school (kind of boarding) where certain values facilitating the lossless transfer of meaning like truthfulness, honesty etc, were imbibed deep into students. It was strictly not allowed to edit (add or subtract) the original verses( if one does so he/she can write another book). After certain years has passed by, only those who were capable enough and 'morally' qualified were authorised to become teachers and pass on the knowledge. Even today in some places in India(not so rampant as in like 100 years ago) the same culture is followed.
Because it was taught that the accents contain the meaning beyond the linguistic meanings of the words. It was sacred and you're not allowed to mispronounce it.
7000 is a bold estimate. But they remained intact for 3000 years in the face of significant religious changes.
Today modern Hindu hardly knows whats there in the Vedas, and religious customs are significantly different. But these verses are letter-to-letter same across India.
Isn't that how ancient Greek texts (that are attributed to mythical Homer) have been passed down too?
yes, many cultures had/have oral traditions that include poetics. The Finnish "Kalevala," is another epic written down from an oral poem/song.
I'm 99% confident (I have no sources because I'm lazy) the written versions of the various bible books were originally orally passed-down stories as well. Weren't the stories about Jesus written down ~70 years after his passing?
That's an interesting way to do a checksum
The metre is a basic checksum, but there are more elaborated systems (pathas) of chanting verses that aids in correct learning and memorization.
Some of it is described here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant#Oral_transmission
An example in action - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdq15ptqUs
One correction guys, river had started drying around 4000 years ago and took 500-1000 years to dry completely.
An example of this may be the healing spells found in the Merseburg charms, which probably came from a common Indo-European origin somewhere in the Eurasian steppes.
The river is the Sarasvati.
It occurred to me recently that tig/tag has probably been passed down through oral tradition from child to child for millennia. It's possible that it's older than homo-sapiens, older than the taming of fire. Millions of years of tradition.
And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.
What is tig/tag?
My three-year-old daughter plays this with cat. It's a cross-species thing that is possibly part of mammalian brain development in origin.
The cat is less than one year old. Our 17 year old cat does not engage in this at all and hisses at the kitten for even trying to start a game of tag. This makes me wonder if that origin is more related to predator/prey.
In regards to your 17 year old cat…
All mammalian species have something in common.
When mammals are young we all love playing. This is true for humans, dogs, elephants, primates, cats and so on.
But play ends up disappearing as the mammal gets older. Compare a playful baby elephant to an adult elephant. The baby elephant loves playing. Not just with other elephants but with humans and dogs and so on. But older elephants are more likely to watch and less likely to play.
This is why your 1 year old cat loves playing while your 17 year old cat doesn’t.
It’s a very interesting phenomenon
Play is a semi-structured way of learning important skills! Evolution really just has to make it engaging enough for you to learn the skills, not much of a reason for it to persist after that.
not much of a reason for it to persist after that
for working out and keeping fit!... oh, hmmm, I guess that's glaring evidence that working out and keeping fit are not beneficial after all
I am clearly speaking from the perspective of evolutionary pressures. And you're right, there's very little evolutionary pressure on working out, staying fit, staying happy, etc. etc. beyond the bare minimum required to ensure propagation.
Well that's not the point of play to begin with, it's learning motor skills, so your logic doesn't make any sense.
Once you can't reproduce and can't help with reproduction evolution doesn't care if you stay fit.
You don’t need to play to stay fit.
Adult lions don’t play like baby lions yet adult lions are still fit.
Dogs seem to want to play until they're physically unable to.
There's a theory that the domestication of dogs selected for the retention of juvenile behavioral traits into adulthood (non-suspiciousness, playfulness), vs wolves who do not retain those traits.
It's even thought that the first domesticated dogs pre-domesticated themselves to an extent because the less suspicious wolves were able to use human settlements' trash middens as a food source.
It's just knees.
Young squirrels also play tag.
Predator vs prey i thought too
The cat might not want to move as much anymore if it has arthritis.
What is tig/tag?
the chain is broken..
The chain never grows without a “tag you’re it”
yes it does: tig, you're it!
We just repaired the link :)
The game tag, as in "Tag! You're it!"
In parts of the UK it's often called 'tig'
Ok thanks to all that replied.
I was misdriven by "through oral tradition", I was expecting something that was supposedly transmitted as a linguistic invariant. It actually has significantly different names, so nothing close to some diachronic international onomatopoeia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias
In parts of the UK it's often called 'tig' in the US and other parts of the UK it's called 'tag'
Fittingly, it was a Yorkshireman who discovered you could use inert gasses other than argon for gas-tungsten arc welding.
A name so regional that it featured on the NY Times' UK & Ireland accent/dialect quiz
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/britis...
I guess it's the game of tag ("tag, you're it!"). In Dutch it is called tikkertje ("tikkie, je bent 'm!"); as Old English and Old Dutch were very similar, this may explain the -i- in tig, or at least it made it easier for me to recognize the word. :-)
never heard of it as well. Maybe he means the game of "tag"?
My parents failed me too on that!
Not quite as old but another example of an enduring child-to-child cultural transmission is the daring right of passage that is Chappy/Knicky-Knocky Nine Doors/Ding dong ditch[0].
Ring around the roses as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_a_Ring_o%27_Roses
I’m surprised by how tenuous the link is between the cave find and the archival find. Is the bar really that low for claims in archaeological papers or am I missing something? It’s a compelling story, but surely Occam’s razor would conclude that poking sticks into dead animals and fire pits is just what people have done for thousands of years? Where’s the evidence that there was chanting and a healing ceremony?
Edit: full paper is freely available on Nature here:
Have to agree here. Also just kind of doesn't pass the common sense test. We all learn the "game of telephone" as a kid and how information can change even just being passed once.
In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not really comfortable sharing.
In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
Maybe you meant 1000 years?
If you really meant 100 years, there's an obvious counterexample: The "Happy Birthday Song", published in 1893. Arguably no one learns it by reading the words and notes from a page.
Furthermore, considering that until pretty recently in history most people were illiterate, the stories they learned were transmitted to them orally (even if read from a book).
You are aware that the Happy Birthday Song has dozens upon dozens of variations (and not just the parody ones), right?
The Happy Birthday Song isn't even the Happy Birthday Song! It's Good Morning To All! Happy Birthday lyrics didn't even make it into print until 1912 and that's not even the version that we use today. That version was first published in 1924 by Robert Coleman. The copyrighted version that even credited the Hill sisters with the melody (from Good Morning to All, in 1893) didn't come around till 1935.
As for peoples' literacy, yes, that's the point. That history is often unreliable. We even have disputes between early _written_ historians writing about the same events and have to compare them and also evaluate whether they were alive at the time of the events and what their sources were. Often we can discount what those people wrote today based on what we've learned from the past.
I said 100 years and I meant it. If you really think about it deeply, it should be obvious. Hell, I don't know who my father is and my own mother couldn't manage to stay consistent between tellings of that story...
You expect a complicated tradition to stay the same for 12000 years? I went to Catholic Church my whole childhood and I couldn't even tell you beat-for-beat what happens at mass if you put a gun to my head.
My point is that the Happy Birthday song is an oral tradition which has lasted more than 100 years. That seems corroborated by the 1924 date you cited. That's all.
Of course I don't think oral traditions go unchanged for 12,000 years. Some very old oral traditions, like the ones from ancient India, stayed relatively unchanged only because their emphasis shifted suddenly and dramatically from active composition to ritual performance, to the extent that most people had no idea what the actual language used meant. Their opacity became a feature, not a bug.
However, despite the details changing, consistent storylines and story fragments exist across many ancient cultures, sometimes because they are derived from the same narrative source, and other times because of shared experiences across divergent cultures.
Where I grew up "game of telephone" didn't include repetition over and over and over again. It also didn't include meter or rhymes.
Okay. Take Shakespeare then. https://thegreatthinkers.org/shakespeare-and-politics/biblio...
Confirms what I'm hinting at, through tradition a version is consolidated that becomes the consensus and can reach a very long-lived stability.
Please do share! Often those are the most interesting ones :)
Several cultures have developed techniques to error-correct and prevent these kinds of transmission errors.
"Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat.
The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat."
That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen people poke sticks into tiny hearth's?
If they had been doing the ritual regularly enough to preserve it for over 12,000 years in a relatively small range, it seems surprising that the excavations didn't turn up way more instances than it did. They can find 2 perfect instances within centuries of each other 12kya in the same excavation, then it just teleports without a trace to the 1880s?
This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are so many rituals and superstitions in indigenous peoples over the millennia that it would be shocking if you could never find cases of things that looked vaguely similar when reduced to an archaeological residue and you cast a net as wide as 'anything which anyone has ever described which sounds similar no matter how many millennia'.
(I would also note that 'fat smeared on stuff and involving fires' is not nearly as rare as it might sound. Fat is important and used in many sacrifices or medicines - eg Homer, with all that fat wrapped on or stacked on top of bones in a holocaust to the gods.)
Its a stick in the ground. People might have tripped over thousands of them, and millions lost to the elements and time. This find was only noticed because someone with the right specialized knowledge was looking in a specific location for artifacts, bothered to test the stick, and managed to link it to an obscure document written 150 years earlier, itself amazing that this particular ritual from this particular region was documented, unlike the unknown but huge number that were not. It is surprising we find this sort of thing at all. They might have cooked their lunch with a 35,000 year old stick without realizing it.
Archaeology is almost exclusively circumstantial evidence...
It varies a lot. Later European archaeology is generally quite well-founded as it ties in to a historical record. While I don't have any familiarity with the Colosseum, I have heard that there are records of payments to sailors for manipulating the shades.
If you get further away from historical records, it does get more tenuous, but there is often a solid basis of scientific or technical evidence. My own doctorate is in use of physics for dating by thermoluminescence and optically stimulated luminescence, which together cover a lot of ground for stuff that cannot be dated by C14. There are several quantitative techniques like that, for instance for isotopic analysis which can be used for deducing trade routes. There are also many qualitative and semi-quantitative techniques, varying from traditional trenches and ground penetrating radar to pollen analysis (which gives you information on climate and ground cover).
However all of this has to be tied together in to a picture of human culture. That necessarily has a large element of interpretation. This is not unique - you can see the same pattern in fields like astronomy. Generally I think archaeologists are reasonably good at knowing when they are on uncertain ground. If I may give an example: in Scotland, mainly on the north west coasts, there are the remains of pre-historic buildings called brochs. The biggest stands 40' high, and it is possible to walk up through the stairs between the double walls to the top. We know roughly when they were built, but not why. There are several theories, but I find it interesting that there is an absence of dogmatic assertion that one particular interpretation is true, and it is still possible to have a sensible discussion about a "fringe" theory (my own idea is that some of them may have been for excarnation) which will centre on what evidence you might need to search for (bone fragments in this case).
It’s all circumstantial evidence because that’s all we get.
Circumstantial evidence is not “weak evidence”, it is evidence concerning the circumstances.
For instance, DNA is circumstantial evidence. It’s evidence that can imply a connection between events, but it is not proof of such a connection. Fingerprints: circumstantial. Call logs: often circumstantial.
The opposite of circumstantial evidence is direct evidence. Direct evidence is rarer and often not as useful. Direct evidence would be an actual witness to the event. To call back to prior examples:
Fingerprints are direct evidence someone touched something. But they are circumstantial evidence they then used that object in commission of a crime.
Here, the direct evidence is that things were burned and sticks were sharpened. The circumstances in which they were found implies the rest.
This sounds like something out of law school, where for some reason "direct evidence" is oddly treated as superior to "circumstantial evidence".
So, for instance, you could have a murder, and the prime suspect's fingerprints were found at the scene and on the murder weapon too. However, an eyewitness testifies that he saw the murder committed not by the prime suspect, but instead by furry space aliens who then departed in their UFO. We're supposed to believe the witness?
After all the knowledge we have now about how utterly unreliable and frankly worthless most human testimony is, you'd think our courts would stop treating it as worthy of a conviction.
Have you ever watched US State Department press briefings, and paid close attention to how they use language (ie: "X is linked to Y")? Or, heard the public subsequently discussing what was said in them (say, right here on HN)?
Humans are a story based species...always have been always will be. Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.
> Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.
Stories (and LLM 'story models') can be fine tuned and A/B tested against humans with live neural monitoring to evaluate narrative effectiveness.
"Evaluate", on what scale?
Donald Trump can tell a story (which is what all humans run on) adequate to motivate thousands of people up to no good to descend upon the nation's capital, do you think LLM's (science, etc) can compete in that specific arena/domain, at that level? (To be fair though, the Normies have been motivated to do more than a few silly things themselves by their trainers. Donald is good, but he ain't the best.)
There are readings of brain activity, and then there is brain activity that causes humans to do particular things with their bodies. One of these is more powerful than the other.
(Pardon for the vitriol, no offense intended.)
12 years ago, https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2012/04/departm...
> FY2012 budget states a plan to “initiate investigations into the relationship between…neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-cognition interactions, and narrative structures.”
What has transpired since then is left as an exercise for the reader.
I came to post the same thing. You have a stick from 12,000 years ago, and a story from 100 years ago, and they link them because of a similarity "there is fat at the end of the stick".
You could get fat on a stick by roasting a small mouse (so a small hearth), or tons of other ways. This really isn't enough evidence, not without a ton more findings of the same thing at various dates over the timeperiod.
If tiny hearths with fat-covered sticks were common elsewhere, this would be a valid objection. But as it is, this seems to be a distinctive practice that is present at the same location separated by 12k years, and the ancient one was buried and so not observed for most of that time. What's the alternative explanation except a common root in a cultural practice?
It's actually not that far-fetched when you consider the long view of human history. Hominins have been capable of cultural transmission for millions of years, and during most of that time it made most sense to repeat what the previous generation had done as closely as possible, since they had by definition survived and reproduced well enough to make a new generation. Among all those practices of toolmaking, hunting strategies, herbal knowledge, and whatever we call 'ritual', it wouldn't have been clear to the practitioners which were actually effective at increasing survival and which not, so everything gets repreated over generations (with occasional modifications catching on and producing cultural evolution ofc)
Kinda sad that the ritual was a way to curse somebody. 12,000 years of hurting each other.
Side Node: computer programing is kinda cool. It is a set of incantations which actually does work.
EDIT: Hello, all you down-voters and people who say I should read the article before commenting :-) I to, don't like it when people just start commenting without reading the article.
I also don't like it when people take what a pop-sci writer too seriously. In this case, I was interested enough to read the original article in Nature, where it says this practice was for cursing (see quote at the end)
Don't forget Gell-Man's Amnesia :-)
"Howitt described how magic was employed to harm a victim using a ritual fire and a wooden object smeared or attached with a piece of human or animal fat (major sources of lipids): “In all these tribes a general, I may say almost an universal, prac- tice has been to procure some article belonging to the intended victim. A piece of his hair, some of his faeces, a bone picked by him and dropped, a shred of his opossum rug, or at the present time of his clothes, will suffice, or if nothing else can be got he may be watched until he is seen to spit, when his saliva is carefully picked up with a piece of wood and made use of for his destruction..."
Computer programs do nothing. It’s computers, i.e. actual hardware, which work. We forget this at our peril.
If computer programs do nothing, why do we need them?
A computer can run them, and thereby accomplish things.
So programs can affect the internal state of the computer, thus resulting in useful work being done which would otherwise not be done in the absence of said program. Which means programs do something, rather than nothing.
This is like claiming books change the world. In one sense they do, but in a a bit more real sense it’s people reading books who change the world. A crucial distinction.
chuckle computer programs are the incantations we do to make computers do what we want. Quite a bit like shamans did incantations to get the world to do what they want. Only ours actually works. Or, it does if we can debug them.
Only if you take computers for granted as a natural part of the world. Which you do at your peril.
It says nothing about cursing. Please read article first before commenting.
I read the original Nature article, not the one written by an underpaid and overworked english major who wrote the popular article.
Then maybe you cite it? And what a shitty assumption to make of the writer, btw. And also, what the fuck kind of a condescending attitude to have for the English major? Maybe if you were an English major we wouldn't be posting all this nonsense right now.
Mr./Ms. greenheart, whoever you are, life is too short to have hostile conversations.
As far as a condescending attitude---I did say they were underpaid and overworked, didn't I? When you are overworked don't you start to make mistakes as well? I sure do.
That's not how I understood it. From the article:
"The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete,"
Which to me seems like a healing ritual.
Alas, the writer of this pop-sci article got it wrong---see my edited OP which contains a quote from the original nature article.
Well, I read an article once discussing the social good of cursing each other. The essence was this:
Yes, it's an attempt to do harm. You're mad at someone, perhaps they wronged you, and you want something bad to happen to them. So ask a demon to spoil their grain, or to tear their clothes. (In other words, pray that entropy will happen - you can't go wrong!) If you didn't have demons you could ask for help and you were motivated to do them harm, you'd have to take matters into your own hands. By slandering them or harassing them or attacking them. Much better for society that we genuinely believe we can get our revenge by not doing anything at all.
Struggling to find the article now though...
This is a very profound point. We have to actually live with each other, and even for small groups, frictions arise. As the groups get larger and larger, friction intensifies. There has to be some way to blow off steam.
Kind of like how instead of cities fighting each other, we have their sports teams fight each other in a ritualized, ersatz combat.
Curses are what you do instead of beating someone with a stick. It's an outsourcing of justice to nature or spirits rather than taking it into your own hands.
This is a very profound point. I suppose it's kind of like what the olympics are supposed to do: how about we all fight each other in a ritualized game, instead of with sticks and stones, strikes and drones.
Where did it say it's a curse? The first line says it's a healing ritual
You have to go look up the Nature article which this po-sci article was written from.
One ritual involved tying something that belonged to a sick person to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick was thrust into the ground before a small fire was lit underneath.
"The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete," a Monash University statement said.
It's not a surprise to me that computer programs are so widely compared to magic spells, from SICP to SMT, but it remains a cool observation.
Where are you getting that from? The article states it was a healing ritual -- the ritual was something done to someone who was already sick. Presumably...to make them better. I have no idea where you got the idea that it was intended as a curse.
I'm from a Jewish family that has been unable to pass down its rituals over the past few generations. My great-grandparents were observant on both sides. I have no religion or inherited rituals to speak of.
So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor? Was it something in the ritual itself, perhaps an altered state drug experience? Or was the motivation just cultural?
Is there anything in our culture that could possibly have such staying power, or is our cultural temperature so high that nothing can survive for long?
So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations?
There's literally nothing else but this.
motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor?
There's no vigor. There are almost no outside influences. There's almost no rebellious thought. You're raised into this life, and you know the rituals by heart from a young age.
Is there anything in our culture that could possibly have such staying power,
Any isolated/primitive culture with no outside influences. Throughout the 20th century ethnographers collected thousands of such rituals before they disappeared after contact with the outside world.
What must the observer get from it
The compulsion to raise and seek answers for questions like this has a lot to do with it.
Over the last couple centuries, increasingly much of the world has been inducted into a culture that looks at life from the perspective of an individual, looks at that individual's life through the lens of economy and benefit, and invites the individual to approach that life as some engineer seeking optimization.
For many, this way of seeing the world as economic individuals is even projected onto the people of elsewhere and elsewhen, taking for granted that they must have been doing the same thing whether they knew it or not.
A different perspective sees ritual and tradition as the blood and flesh of a community or legacy, and sees the community and legacy that lives for hundreds or thousands of years as the far more important thing than the individual that arrives and leaves over the pittance of just a few decades.
For a community, carrying forward a ritual is like breathing, and an individual who fully understands themselves as a fleeting little lung cell in this long-lasting community implicitly fulfills their role of perpetuating the community's life by practicing the ritual.
But what's interesting is that asking questions framed like yours is itself a kind of ritual, perpetuating a different (and much more recently birthed) community, and there are countless other rituals of "modernity" that we implicitly peform. These rituals are so natural to us that we barely even recognize them as something outside of us... the same, most likely, your great-grandparents with theirs.
You can still go to or host, say, a Seder, no? That kind of cultural transmission doesn't rely on individual families but in the case of the rituals of Judaism and lots of other religions it seems to have been fairly effective.
I assume by unable you mean they had to stop due to persecution? It sounds from this article that this practice that had survived so long also hit an abrupt stop when faced with persecution from colonizers (at least that's why I'm assuming they have to go by records from 1880 and not just ask the current practitioners). I think this says more about the ability for persecution to shut down a cultural practice more than any quality that practice has to have to survive.
The story of Pleiades might be as old as 100 000 years.
So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor?
I think small, pre-literate societies on the edge of survival rely heavily on "traditional" knowledge, and for very good reasons.
One of my anthropology professors told me a story about a village (I forget his source for this, but it sounded like he had one). They had an old woman, probably in her 80s, toothless, partly blind, and mostly immobile. She only survived because of a significant ongoing effort of the village.
Then the village had a bad year, a famine. And the old woman said, "This happened when I was a child. What you need to do is take the leaves of such-and-such a plant. They're poisonous. But if you beat them with rocks, soak them, and let them age a bit, then they're disgusting but edible." And so the village remained fed. The old woman was contributing to the village's survival, because she was a source of mostly-forgotten knowledge.
Similarly, we know that modern hunter-gatherers might be able to find and identify 47 species of edible mushrooms in their local climate. This knowledge base can easily be the equivalent of a college education focused just on finding food.
Now, inland Australia is famously one of the most inhospitable places in earth. Early European explorers noticed just how difficult it was to survive there. But the locals someone managed just fine. They knew all the tricks.
So my guess is that the kind of society which can remember how to find and prepare 47 kinds of edible mushrooms, or which can survive a famine that occurs every 75 years, or which can survive inland Australia, is a society with significant respect for ancestral knowledge. Learning the rituals may often be a matter of life and death.
The modern world is different because we have books, and science, and high division of labor. If we forget how to do our grandparents' jobs, someone else will still learn. Or the nature of work will change so much that a new generation needs to learn a new way of working.
Hmm, I’d say this is a problem that Jesus, the Rastafarians, the Amish and your own tradition grappled with.
Jesus was in the world, but not of the world.
Rastafarians step one foot at a time out of Babylon.
The Amish have removed themselves for the most part, but they are still somewhat free riders on the greater society.
Jews celebrate the sabbath. In this way, 6 days a week they are of the world, and can share in its prosperity, but one day is reserved for keeping the traditions.
The main thing is you need to live near other people with the same rituals.
I suspect your grandparents moved to the US after the holocaust and settled somewhere far from other Jews. Judaism can not be practiced in isolation, it was not setup that way.
Also, nothing stopping you from finding a Chabad near you and reclaiming at least a portion of your heritage.
So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations?
Probably some combination of of a large pool of rituals in traditional societies (so the probability of any of them carrying over 500 generations is greater than that of a single given one), high fertility (so if you don't feel inclined to carry it, some of your siblings/cousins do) and utility (some rituals may increase surviving odds of people that follow them). This particular ritual don't seem very useful, but maybe it has some unexpected benefical side effect, say, the plant they traditionally picked the sticks from, when burned, could shoo away insects that were potential vectors for disease (completely made up example, just to make the point clearer).
Australian Aboriginal people, have very advanced social and cultural structure. Australia is comprised of several thousand different aboriginal groups and territories. Acceptance into another community relied on endorsement from the elders of the community you were leaving. Family bonds and ties are extremely strong.
Hence, one explanation may be that participation was essentially mandatory to be considered part of the community at all, and to be recognised as an adult.
this ritual likely had a real effect on the person (similar to placebo effect). They probably wouldn't have kept it up for 12k years if they weren't getting some tangible improvement.
Multiple religions are thousands of years old and they can't all be true.
They don't have to be true to have an effect on people.
I think it argues against the claim that it must have had a (real) healing effect for it to be passed along.
People are quick to call in the placebo effect, as a scientific sounding explanation, but is nobody reminded of faith healing? People get up out of wheel chairs, cast away their crutches and say they've been healed.
but is nobody reminded of faith healing? People get up out of wheel chairs, cast away their crutches and say they've been healed.
That's just common fakery.
Placebo effect absolutely can yield effects for all religions. That's pretty much what's interesting about it: it doesn't matter much what stimulus is producing the effect.
It doesn't sound like anything pure religious, but more of a psychotherapeutic technique, probably coupled with some folk medicine too.
There are a few examples of oral cultures ensuring perfect transmission across a large expanse of time.
One example is the several different recitation styles used to memorize Sanskrit verses. These methods give memorizers multiple ways to remember a line, and also prevent errors like the inadvertent mixing of adjacent words (" euphonic combination"). The "checksumming schemes" are far more elaborate than you'd imagine. [1] The result is perfect transmission of text and its pronunciation, including pitch accent.
Another example is a "multi-party verification" scheme in some Aboriginal Australian cultures. "... storytelling among contemporary Aboriginal people can involve the deliberate tracking of teaching responsibilities. For example, a man teaches the stories of his country to his children. His son has his knowledge of those stories judged by his sister’s children—for certain kin are explicitly tasked with ensuring that those stories are learned and recounted properly—and people take those responsibilities seriously. ... the 'owner-manager' relationship, requiring a story to be discussed explicitly across three generations of a patriline, constitutes a cross-generational mechanism which may be particularly successful at maximising precision in replication of a story across successive generations". [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant
[2]: "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago", Patrick D. Nunn, https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539
I think the harsh conditions in Australia, where there a thousand ways to die, put the onus on truth and preservation of it in the oral tradition. Unlike most other cultures where it's kind of ok to gradually deviate from the truth. It is worth paying attention to the aborigine stories.They have also made astronomical observations that are pretty accurate to the date. https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/australias-indigenous-peopl...
Singing/Ballads are also popular way of preserving information fidelity. Homer's works were based on ballads. We don't put premium on memory now, but before the invention of printing press, memory techniques were widely studied and used.
It kind of feels like a local optima situation where they relied on memory so much that they didn't feel the need for writing. Either that or the fact that there was no writing for so long resulted in them specialising in memory techniques a lot.
We didn't evolve reading and writing. Literacy is just a recently developed hack. Memorization was the only way for the vast majority of human history.
I've also heard it about the Buddhist tradition, that at least three groups of monks would memorize parts of the canon, and they would preiodically come together to chant it. If one group differed from the other two, they would know that's an error (at least to fairly high probability). This seems to have been an accurate method of transmission since independently written-down versions separated by centuries of oral tradition in Gandhara and Sri Lanka are very similar.
There are worse schemes, but that is barely comparable to Vedic chanting.
3-pick-2 as a method is quite good but also quite vulnerable to a bunch of transmission errors beyond simple memory issues. Over long periods of time there is a higher risk of group think or status plays leading to wild changes.
Of course the vedas aren't immune, but it is a lot more effort to get them wrong than just a few people thinking "we want to change the story". A group would have to be hugely motivated to successfully change the chant.
Very cool :-). I don't know that much about the natives of Australia and their history, I wonder how many of these oral traditions have been written down. An immediate google gave me this document, seems interesting at a glance: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/159354575.pdf
When I lived on the west coast a native friend of mine spoke of how some elders no longer wanted stories to be written down. They have seen how their oral stories get documented, effectively transforming them from a living secret into a fixed text in a dead book. The book then goes on a shelf, fodder for the endless stream of anthropology classes taught ay universities in distant cities. More people read the story in the book than ever come to listen to the story in person. After a few decades of this pattern, young anthologists are now hearing stories and asking questions about why the story today is possibly slightly different than what was written down a decade prior. There is an old stereotype of western Indians believing that cameras could capture one's soul. That is something to think about when we "document" an oral tradition.
I live near the Navajo Nation, but claim no true understanding of native american culture. Here's what I've heard about their attitudes toward e.g. video recording their rituals:
They welcome you, or any respectful individual, to participate and to "live their rituals" with them. The local college even hosts such events, to help the neighboring communities understand each other better. Any elders will likely tell you many stories, once they see you're actually interested and not just in it for a cheap tourist thrill[1].
They discourage trying to record or explain it to people who did not participate. They consider the first-hand experience to be transformative, and that you fundamentally cannot understand them without it.
[1]: I understand there are some things they're not supposed to mention much, roughly in the sense of "speak of the Devil" in Christian societies, or naming Bloody Mary three times. Those stories you might only hear on special occasions.
Interesting. I do like the documentation for immortality but with stories there is an obsession with "the actual" or "the original" and many people equate legibility with originality. "Source? The original documented here is blah blah".
Sampling a continuous process once and describing it as the process.
"The original value of sin(t) is sqrt(3)/2."
I come from a background with a strong folk singing tradition, and this reminds me of the two camps of folk singers within it: the purists who want to preserve the "original" tempo, lyrics, melody as it was recorded and documented a century ago and who frown upon deviation from that, and the modernists who adapt, improvise and reinterpret folk songs as they see fit.
Its impossible to tell, but the sense of passage of time must have been dramatically different in earlier periods of human development.
Persistent rituals passed on from elders to youngsters, oral transmission of huge poems and other such "low tech" information tools must have given some structure to what otherwise might have felt as an eternal reboot.
I read somewhere (don't recall exactly where) that your sense of the passage of time is directly related to how much things change because that impacts how many memories you form. Essentially, when every day is the same, not many new memories are created, so you don't notice time passing (New Years was just a few weeks ago, how can it be July already!), but when things are constantly changing, time passes much more slowly. When you're a child and non-stop learning and exploring, 3 months seems like an eternity.
I wonder if technology development has a similar effect. When the world essentially remains unchanged for your entire life, things must seem much faster with days blending together.
Having been to jail, here's what they say, "the days pass like years, and the years pass like days." Which is a hugely accurate interpretation of what happens. Nothing happens all day, and every day is the same, so the days drag on in the most mind-numbingly tedious fashion. But then you wake up and you notice six months have passed without you being able to name a single thing that happened.
The persistency that you're describing is key. I'd like to think that previous generations were far more content with time and what is associated with it. The mundane of the day-by-day, aging, death, etc.
Herzog talks about this a bit in his cave-painting movie[0]. It's fascinating to think that for thousands of years, our ancestors lived without any significant change to their world. I like to imagine that they were pretty happy with that (subject to the normal animal stresses of survival) -- but as you say, it's impossible to tell.
When you understand it you call it "science" or "technology". When you don't understand it you call it "religion" or "ritual".
These are smart people. Just like us. Time is money for them just like it is for us. They probably had a very good, practical reason to do this "ritual". As surely as tapping keyboards.
I think you're assuming they're a lot smarter than us, not "just like us."
Not smarter, just different. People in Germany speak German. I can't speak German. That doesn't make them smarter.
Incorrect. "Science" is "science" because it works in a reproducible fashion--same applies to "technology", "modern medicine", etc. We don't have to fully grok a how a medicine works (example: SSRI anti-depressants) understand basically that it does work. We do need a double-blind study however.
"Rituals" need not have any efficacy at all. Surely burning a stick smeared in kangaroo fat does nothing to cure ailments. It's entirely possible the only reason is "this is what our tribe has always done." Certainly rituals create tribe cohesion and can have a placebo effect, but it is a fallacy to equate these things to science-based medicine. "Tapping keyboards" is not a "ritual"--we are not typing to appease the great silicon gods--we are doing it as means of communication and performing economically valuable work.
Rituals which do seem to work, e.g. plant-based medicine, can be used as an "intuition pump" for scientific study. The fact that a plant has been used for thousands of years is a good sign that it may have some effect, but that effect still needs to be verified.
slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat.
Wait, what? Where did they get human fat from…?
Australians practiced ritualized cannibalism and infanticide as late as XIX century.
In two books I've read recently (Conquistador about Hernan Cortes, and Civilized to Death which contrasts the lives of modern humans with ancient ones) the authors mention how fat was often poached from the dead -- animals and people alike. It was used like a grease for all sorts of things, including filling wounds to prevent infection. Pretty interesting stuff.
I also found this concerning.
Its always awesome to read about finding early human tools and techniques. But, could the sticks have been 12,000 years old, but the event far less?
Lots of people asking how they had human fat... you poke someone's wound with a hot stick, there is probably fat on it after. So they may have been using cauterization.
They may also have been cooking small animals while trying to avoid the light, smell, and smoke plume a larger fire creates. Which would attract predators.
It had kangaroo fat too, leading me to infer that they were trying to create a super-race of human-kangaroo hybrids.
I mean not much else to do back then but poke shit with sticks, am I right?
It's not the first time that I read hypothesis of Aboriginal oral traditions that stayed for much longer than anywhere else in the world. I wonder why it would be the case there and not elsewhere
Probably because they were some of the only ones to remain almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world while civilization was happening elsewhere. They never developed writing. The rest of the word was quite likely very similar to them before writing.
The article mentions that because we have invented writing, passing down oral traditions became much less important to us, and hence our societies have "lost" some of the old tales, paradoxically. That's because while people write down things they think is important, they couldn't have known that unlike oral information (which adapts as language evolves, imperfectly but enough to keep the basic structure of the original), the means on which they write decay rapidly, and due to the speed at which language evolves (without modern technology, a few hundred years is enough for isolated regions to develop their own language branches), much of what was written in the distant past would become unintelligible even to people living in the area, even if it managed to survive (though modern techniques using computers seem to have made it easier to do so). Not to mention that in much of the world, civilizations were constantly being replaced by newer ones or migrating to different areas as their neighbors expanded and faded. Much of the ancient texts in any given area would make no sense to the new inhabitants, who would have no qualms about destroying everything (in fact, they probably burned everything down as soon as they conquered a new area).
Basically, the written word turned out to be much less resilient than people probably believed it would be. I think we are making the same mistake with digital information. It may look "eternal" but try to find websites from the early internet, for example. Almost everything is disappearing quickly.
Probably because they were some of the only ones to remain almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world while civilization was happening elsewhere.
and, migrating farthest from Africa (can tell by red-shift :) they git the oldest branch of our oldest stories
"Australia kept the memory of its first peoples alive thanks to a powerful oral tradition that enabled it to be passed on," Delannoy said.
"However in our societies, memory has changed since we switched to the written word, and we have lost this sense."
I sort of think that this is a "what's water?" thing, because a lot of our ancient prehistorical traditions and practices that continued into the historical era and beyond are so embedded with how we see how ourselves and act and behave that it's impossible for us to even notice them. There's a lot that we have looked at in ancient sites and have just known what the purpose was for because we still do the same thing now, or at least we had recorded uses for it from historical texts, it's just said to be "obvious" and not really worth commenting about how interesting it is that we preserved these oral traditions.
There's a kind of exoticism/noble savage thing going on here, I think.
Yeah. I can think of one ritual that's probably even older: burying the dead.
However what interesting about this tradition is the degree of specificity that was preserved with this ritual (e.g. stick of same type of wood, coated with fat, put in a small fire to break), none of which has any real practical purpose.
In Indonesia there are 35k+ year old cave "paintings" of hand imprints, and apparently it is still a custom for some in the area to put their hand imprint on their house. It's probably in the same area where just today they announced finding the oldest cave painting: https://www.reuters.com/science/worlds-oldest-cave-painting-....
One stick was 11,000 years old and the other 12,000 years old, radiocarbon dating found.
so there were two sticks, at the same site/ritual, but one stick was a 1000 years older than the other?
does that mean the ancestors of the present day people were coming to this location for the ritual for a 1000 years? but then for some reason stopped?
This is so fascinating!
Interplanetary Generation Ships might have a chance?
One thing that caught my eye was "both were coated in human or animal fat" and "throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat".
I mean the "human fat" part, that seemed strange.
Getting human fat non-lethally is probably impossible using technology from 12000 years ago. If the fat was obtained from a human corpse, it would rule out at least burying the body. But still, wouldn't obtaining the fat from a non-buried corpse disturb the deceased on some religious-spiritual level?
Or was it common to mutilate dead enemies or something like that?
Edit: Oh, OK, I saw others asking the same question and replies which shed light on this.
Hopefully Rio Tinto don’t blow it up:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/26/rio-t...
Another article on the same topic:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/indigenous-au...
Had those people lived by our enlightened standards, it would never have come to that. Replication of ritual would have drawn lawsuits for copyright infringement and brand dilution. No wonder they never became filthy rich.
Imagine a smartphone lasting even 12 years
Slightly off-topic, but I recently learned that the Aboriginals may have had contact with Tamil people from South India.
I think you just found out the roots of every religion.
Yup. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 18th century BC) caused quite a lot of controversy when it was translated in 1870 due to its striking similarity to many parts of the Hebrew Bible (which was written MUCH later).
Similar controversies erupted over the stories of Osiris (c. 25th century BC).
By the 10th century BC, almost all of the story themes that we ascribe to more modern authorship had already been written.
The similarity between the EoG and Genesis flood stories can probably be laid to the fact that the first major human societies were built around flood plains of rivers in regions that have otherwise stable climates. When your society spends centuries in that situation, floods are the single most important natural event that happens to you. If would be shocking if they didn't feature prominently in your stories.
Why do we think peoples of the past would be unable to distinguish between a normal river flooding and a “world ending” flood? What about the ~450 feet of sea level rise in the last 15k years?
They almost certainly could, but also they would also almost certainly be prone to the same kind of embellishments of such stories as they are passed on.
The other quite reasonable hypothesis is that these are tales of the fairly rapid sea level rises that accompanied the end of the last ice age as the breaking of ice dams in the north released massive glacial floods into the North Atlantic and Pacific.
The whole premise of our present civilization is that every one before us was a nose picking drooler, and that we have more to say to the past then the past has to tell us about ourselves.
We lack the collective self consciousness to see ourselves through the eyes of the people of other times, thinking through what it means to be understood through artifact, and the distortions it produces.
The closest we come is prophesying that future generations will blame us for the destruction of the natural world and climate of earth. That is a thin mask for our age's narcissistic fixation with producing myths of its own apocalyptic world-ending power.
The people of the future probably won't think of us as bad, evil doers, that destroyed the natural world for future generations with no care but for ourselves and our consumption, if they are anything like us, they will more likely think of us as having one hand digging for gold where the sun don't shine while the other stuffs hot, fresh cheeseburgers into mouth, unibrow freshly dripping with sweat.
Theres a lot to unpack here...
At the most accelerated rate of sea level rise, meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels rose at about 1-2 inches per year (about 10 times current sea-level rise rates, FWIW).
While it's commonly used as an explanation for the prevalence of flood myths throughout the world, I just don't buy it. That level of sea level rise just isn't going to come across as world-ending flood; it's going to be noticeable over time, but even sedentary cultures along the coastlines who are the most impacted by the rise are going to easily capable of dealing with it.
To me, the more parsimonious explanation is... it's just extending the metaphor of a flash flood. There's already a pretty consistent metaphor of ritual cleansing among multiple cultures. Flash floods are pretty common in many climates, and especially in an alluvial flood plain, the utter devastation of a major flood is readily apparent. Combine the two of them with a metaphorical story of the world being so wrong that everybody needs to be swept away and... why not use a flood to explain the destruction of the entire world? What other disaster would you choose instead?
> That level of sea level rise just isn't going to come across as world-ending flood
I'm entirely open to being skeptical about meltwater pulse 1A being responsible for the universal flood myth, but I don't agree with this refutation.
Many of our stories do not exist to relate literal events, they exist to explain natural phenomenons. And there are many ways for humans to frame these explanations, but for whatever reason the human brain seems hardwired to prefer stories, so the explanations that survived to be transmitted through the ages were the ones that happened to take the form of stories.
So rather than saying "the pulse event wasn't rapid enough, therefore it can't explain the story" is IMO too hasty. Consider a sedentary people living on the coast, where a child asks her grandmother where their ancestors are buried, to which the grandmother responds by gesturing out at the Persian Gulf where, 60 miles from shore, their village once clung to the coast 500 years ago. It only takes one curious child asking "why?" and one bored grandmother willing to come up with a story to get the ball rolling on a tale that still gets told 10,000 years later (a tale that, indeed, would likely also have been informed by the experience of annual river flooding).
These people's "world" would have been a relatively small area.
The similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis flood story are far too extensive to be due to chance.
For example, compare the following passages, describing how Noah / Utnapishtim let out birds to search for dry land, after their boats get grounded on a tall mountain.
Genesis 8:6-12:
After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.
Epic of Gilgamesh:
Historically, much of Genesis was likely written during the Babylonian exile. It's not surprising at all that the authors of Genesis borrowed a story that was extremely well known in Babylon.
That's very very unlikely, there's too much other stuff linked with it that is older than that. You might be able to claim that when it was set to paper, but there's no way Genesis itself is only from then.
According to Genesis Abraham lived at the time that Gilgamesh was recorded, with Noah living a little before then. It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from their stories, rather than the other way around. Genesis records how Abraham traveled widely telling his story, including to kings.
There are many linguistic and historical hints that the early chapters of Genesis were written during or after the Babylonian captivity: things like mentions of "great" cities that only became great during that era, borrowed Babylonian phrases, various stories borrowed from the Babylonians, etc.
There were certainly earlier stories that were included in Genesis, but the actual writing occurred long after those stories supposedly took place.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down long before there was even a Hebrew language. It's one of the most ancient written works.
At least portions of the Pentateuch certainly date prior to the Exile, because we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls.
At any rate both the Babylonians and the ancient Israelites were Semitic peoples, so obviously they had a shared background long before the Exile.
There are also many references in early Genesis that do suggest it originates in traditions much older, including references to great cities and powers that were long, long gone by the Exile. This actually sent me quite recently down some rabbit holes.
I wrote specifically that the early chapters of Genesis date to the exile.
The Bible is not a single book. It's really a collection of different works, written over the course of centuries by different people. Different parts date from different eras (and then were subsequently edited over the centuries).
From what I know, only very short fragments of a few prayers survive from before the exile.
Sure, I don’t think anybody disputes that the Bible is a not single book written at once.
But the claim that any part of Genesis dates to the Exile is a weak historiographical claim, based primarily on a few pillars of very weak circumstantial evidence: a) we don’t have many physical examples dated to a prior time - but that’s not at all surprising; the vast supermajority of texts don’t survive, and many of the most ancient copies we do have are relatively recent discoveries; b) it makes sense to some people to argue this based on (reasonable) speculation about the development of the Jewish religion and the pressures at different periods of its development and c) as a corollary to b, one mainstream opinion is that Genesis can mostly be attributed to two different sources by a stylistic analysis and one of them is simply believed to date around the Exile.
This corresponds to the general current fads in historiography and history but it is by no means definite, and we shouldn’t be surprised if it is all overturned in a night by a single discovery, as these things very often are. This type of historiography is not really rigorous in a meaningful sense and is based essentially on current academic trends and a few authorities.
So we can safely consider the arguments underlying the dating ourselves without getting in too much trouble, but we don’t even have to do that to address your particular claim that the portions of Genesis must have been devised by an Exilic writer due to Babylonian influence. This essentially requires engaging in a deliberate pious fraud, which then was taken up by the other Israelites without question and who accepted the new stories with no recorded debate, and which also received no pushback when the Israelites who did not go into Exile. We would expect the possibility of diverging traditions on this point, but for example, the Samaritans have precisely the same story on this point, although the dating of that is also a point of contention. Either way, we should keep in mind that only some Israelites went into Exile, and plenty remained in Israel and Judah and maintained their traditions through the 70 year Exile.
It’s possible that this did happen. But it’s also the case that Babylonian contact was not new in the Exile period. The Israelites didn’t exist in a vacuum, they were part of the tapestry of the wider Semitic world for their entire existence and would have had familiarity with all these stories and beliefs the entire time. Indeed, it’s most commonly believed that the Israelite religion was not unique, but a simple development into monotheism from a normal localized Canaanite religion. And indeed, at some point, they all shared a common origin. Rather than adapting a Sumerian-via-Babylon story in a very late period, it’s a much more parsimonious explanation that some version of the story always existed amongst the Israelites in their oral tradition regardless of when it was committed to writing.
Whenever you date the writing down of the early chapters of Genesis, it's clear that the flood story heavily copied directly from the Epic of Gilgamesh. The parallels, down to little details, are too strong to be simply due to similar stories floating around.
I don't see why this should be called a "pious fraud." Babylon was a massive cultural center of that time, and the land of Israel was a relative backwater on its periphery. Babylon would have exerted an enormous cultural influence on the surrounding peoples, including the Israelites.
But if the floods are a yearly phenomenon, why would you necessarily write about a single big flood?
For the same reason people in places where it snows every year still remember the really big blizzards: some floods are worse than others. Any given generation will have a flood they recall that set the (ahem) high water mark for comparison to future floods.
I don't know, if I know it floods every year, and there is a really big flood, I don't think I would act like the flood was something completely out of the blue. I would probably mention how it was much bigger than the normal floods.
For that reason, I think an event completely different from the yearly flooding is more likely, for example the Minoan eruption or Black Sea deluge hypothesis.
I have often wondered if these flood stories document something much larger that might have occurred as the major ice sheets collapsed and raised the sea levels to unseen heights.
But the one that is most intriguing IMHO is the mediterranean sea event that happened but it is 6M years ago. Could ancestors of genus Homo have passed that story long for all that time even across speciation???
https://www.uu.nl/en/news/first-direct-proof-of-mega-flood-i...
If it's based on a real flood, they presumably follow a power law distribution, where you have relatively frequent "normal" floods, and progressively larger floods are rarer and rarer, till you get an occasional gargantuan one.
My guess though is it's probably a plot device where the storyteller takes a known phenomenon and just exaggerates it to magical-mythical proportions, which may contribute to the story being repeated as it strikes the balance between the relatability of the real phenomenon and the attention-grabbing otherworldliness of its exaggerated version.
Hint: end of the Ice Age.
You’d love watching Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix. It essentially tracks this experience globally.
And is completely made up nonsense pseudoscience
The show itself sure, but Graham Hancock just happens to be the loudest proponent of this theory, there is solid evidence to support it, from Randall Carlson and a few other people I’m not remembering atm.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothe...
“Although initially sceptical, Wallace Broecker—the scientist who proposed the conveyor shutdown hypothesis—eventually agreed with the idea of an extraterrestrial impact at the Younger Dryas boundary, and thought that it had acted as a trigger on top of a system that was already approaching instability.”
There are other similarities between the epic of gilgamesh and genesis beyond just the flood, it's a very interesting subject imo. Ultimately both were originally oral traditions long before they were written anywhere, both emerging out of the ancient east mediterranean/west asian cultural milieu.
IIRC the current scholarly consensus is that the shared parts represent two surviving variants of an even earlier story that was widely told across cultures in that region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
https://www.livius.org/articles/misc/great-flood/flood6-para...
I established this comparison table with ChatGPT:
https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=a97c76a889aa42038b877bf25bd...
You would be interested to know that Abraham lived at the time of the Gilgamesh epic, and he traveled widely telling his story.
I'm aware there is no direct archeological evidence of Abraham, except for Gilgamesh, so now you need to decide which direction the knowledge flowed.
Did he, though? There is archeological and contemporary written historical evidence of an actual Gilgamesh. Not so with Abraham.
The Abrahamic tradition was orally transmitted by a people who for generations lived in Babylonian captivity (1300 years after the earliest surviving copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Old Balylonian, with the earliest partial texts appearing 1600 years before), and was finally written down 3 generations after they left Babylon.
Every ideology would be a more accurate story, though perhaps less satisfying.
Uh.. no?
An ideology can be seen as a collection of rituals in action, reasoning, and rhetoric situated among core beliefs about what life is, what the world is, and what's important to them.
And each ideology has a specific history of events, founders, and later elaborators that shape what these rituals and beliefs are.
Many ideologies reject deities or are at least ambivalent about them, but they're not really operationally different than religions.
So for as much as little bits of history linger in relgious rituals, both blurred and resharpened in later years, the same is absolutely true for ideologies.
The capitalism or feminism or humanism or atheism or whatever else you point to today is similar to the one sharing its name in the past, or in some other region, but is not the same, and these differences are all vestiges of little seed events that happened here or there.
I don't think anybody else would describe an ideology as a collection of rituals.
FWIW, that's incorrect. It's not at all unusual for ideology to get modeled and analyzed that way in sociology, anthropology, etc
Do you have an example? It sounds like a complete category error. That or you're using the word very differently than most people do..?
An adherent of an ideology might, like, have rituals. But the ideology isn't the rituals.
Here are some ideologies off the top of my head: democracy, marxism, environmentalism, libertarianism, atheism, the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion itself, utitarianism, humanism, empiricism.
None of those have, as far as I can tell, a single ritual inherently associated with them.
Democracy has rituals that its disciplines believe that if adhered to correctly and reverently they will bring prosperity to their tribe.
Some, but not all of those rituals even stand up to basic scrutiny. Others, not so much.
I personally don't associate those rituals with the idea of democracy itself, rather just its particular instantiation in modernish society.
And likewise, you can choose to not associate all the particular rituals surrounding the practice of any particular denomination of Christianity with Christianity itself.
Like, at its core, all it says is that there's one god, and he was his own kid, who died, and there's an afterlife, and you should live well.
Yet, I don't think you'd say that Christianity doesn't have rituals, even if no particular instantiation of it has the same rituals as any other one.
Well-I wouldn't call Christianity an ideology, either. I have problem disagreement with a religion or a practice of a religion having rituals. Those aren't category errors to me at all.
If you categorically define an ideology to be a system of pure concepts, independent of any practice of thought, speech, or action by a professed adherent, then you will inevitably see it as a category error, yes.
(You'll also have a hard time enumerating those concepts in a complete and consistent way)
But if you're even a wee bit of a subjectivist, as many (not all) social scientists and social philosphers are, then a definition like that isn't interesting or productive. From that perspective, ideologies are something that people profess adherence to and express statements about and behave in self-identified accordance to.
They gather in elections, they discuss power through the lens of capital and labor, they recycle or avoid eating meat, they recoil at government overreach, they expose fraud in purported miralces, they pray, they trade trolley problem memes unironically, they protest against inequality, etc
If these don't make sense to you as "rituals of ideologies" for people doing cross-cultural studies, that's fine, but then I have a sense that a lot of cross-cultural studies just feels like hogwash to you anyway. I doubt I could change your mind here. :)
Well, you're right about that. I suppose I don't see the point in calling what you're describing an ideology. Just call it something else so ideology can mean what it means to everyone else..? I see all your examples as like, social behaviors that happen to presently align with the ideologies. But in the past or future they won't, while the ideologies will persist, cause they live in 'idea space'.
(nor would I call any of those rituals, either, but I guess words don't mean what they normally mean in those fields)
I figured!
If you earnestly wished to "see the point", you're tripping yourself with by taking for granted "what it means to everyone else.." and things like "living in idea space"
There are traditions of study/thought that use ideology the way you mean, and traditions that don't. The variety of use is well-represented and has been since the word came into use. Likewise, "idea space" is a specific concept that some people accept as sensible and others don't. Again, the variety of relationships to it is well-represented (and stretches back millennia, on that one).
You can actually see an example of this kind of differing-perspectives-in-wide-use in the way use used "the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion itself" in your own comment above. While Platonic ideas predate Christianity and have much influence on its shape and study in the West, the that statement would strike most traditional and many modern Christian thinkers as non-sensical. To them, there is no sensible separation of Christianity's "moral basis" from its Church/people and trying to make some distinction is as alien and "pointless" to them as different senses of ideology are to you.
And yet, of course it's interesting to think about Christianity's "moral basis" as an ideology existing in "idea space" because it lets you relate that part of Christianity to other things that you feel are comparable using techniques that you know how to work with and have confidence in. That's pretty much exactly what's going on with social scientists/philosophers who think about ideology in the way I've been describing above.
I think the problem is that "is" and "equals" are often conflated - and there are some other issues in play too.
Interestingly, how to (or if we even should!) resolve such issues in our (use of) language is itself a highly ideological matter.
I certainly would (not as a comprehensive explanation though of course). The range of forms of conceptualization any one individual is capable of (or not) is strongly influenced by the ideology to which they subscribe (or are captured by).
If you simply consider how the human mind works, this "should" be fairly obvious. But one's ability or likelihood to think about such things is once again a function of the norms and accepted practices of one's ideology. That which is not known of, essentially does not exist.
King Arthur was probably an actual Welsh guy, who fought the Romans (and/or maybe Saxons).
Few hundred years later they give him a magic sword and a round table. Same idea, but with other cultures, religions, etc.
Not at all. Islam can be verifiably traced back to a single source, and mainstream Islam belief today is the same as it was 1400 years ago.