I wonder how long oral history lasts. What’s the oldest legend that has some clear fragment of truth in it?
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West Hunter 
ten minutes, tops.
The Black Sea deluge hypothesis, being the origin of the different deluge myths around the Middle East?
People have lived in river valleys for a long time now, and they flood. I mean, deluge myths could also go back to the end of the Ice Age, when many lands went underwater as sea level rose. But how can you tell? Now if there was a one-time thing that had a special identifying trait, say purple rain, that might be convincing.
Do dire warnings to children on the cusp of puberty about the dangers of predatory male sexuality count as “true”? If so–Little Red Riding Hood seems pretty old
https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/31/3/611/2340394/Oral-fairy-tale-or-literary-fake-Investigating-the
I think Greg is talking about specific events, not timeless advice on ever-present dangers.
You want details of specific events of historic child molestation? I hesitate to give any on the grounds that they would be considered “Islamophobic”
Only if you can show one is the likely source of Little Red Riding Hood.
To repeat what I said above: I think Greg is talking about specific events, not timeless advice on ever-present dangers.
And even if it did derive from from an actual case, it would be unlikely to have involved a Muslim. Child molestation was certainly around before Islam, and the story appears to be European and date to before there were Muslims in Europe.
Your weird association of the fairy tale with Muslims actually does sound Islamophobic!
The Quran states that the Prophet, in his sixties, married a girl of nine. Can you find anything comparable in other sacred traditions?
My understanding is that the Koran mentions Mo only three or four times. Is that one of the three or four?
Two notes:
The Quran was not based on oral history.
Child marriage, like some other cultural behaviors associated with Islam, appear to be continuations of local tradition rather than having been introduced by Islam.
I thought some scholars do not believe (based on linguistic evidence) that the Koran was written down at the time of Mohammed but was written down later from oral recounting of his sayings.
It existed in written form within a generation of Mohammad’s death.
Ask Roy Moore’s supporters: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/11/09/alabama-state-official-defends-roy-moore-citing-joseph-and-mary-they-became-parents-of-jesus/
Would the rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age been perceptible in a human lifetime?
Peter
~ 500 years. 20-25 generations.
Trojan War to Homer penning the Iliad.
The massive floods after the Younger Dryas seem highly likely to have created the various flood legends.
Closer to home, the Homeric oral histories of the Trojan War have pretty much been confirmed by archaeology..
A site that plausibly corresponds to Troy has been found. What else in the story has been confirmed?
“A site that plausibly corresponds to Troy has been found. What else in the story has been confirmed?”
Various things:
The boar’s tusk helmet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar%27s_tusk_helmet
Sites that were important in the Mycenaean Greece but were unimportant later on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pylos
I’ve often wondered if the various hairy humanoid stories, e.g. yeti and sasquatch, were folklore based on Neanderthals, but that isn’t clear.
There isn’t any real evidence neanderthals were hairy.
Also, they were tool users – hunted with heavy spears, lived in small groups, and shorter in stature than modern man, and practically all the legends, whether from North America or Asia describe apes that are as tall, or taller than man, and typically solitary.
There’s a lot of stories about hairy men. Even the old testament has some – Esau is described as being born covered in reddish hairs. Probably just fertile imagination, as had there been a separate species of man in the past, by now, someone, somewhere would have found a skull looking a little bit different.
What about the hobit? Didn’t the native of Flores have stories about little men?
Probably trolls, the pre internet conception, I bet. Strong ugly intelligent creatures few in number and lurking about in ambush or hiding places, displaced by the advance of man
Would probably be the winning oldest legend by tens of thousands of years if so
“Clear fragment of truth,” eh? Well, there’s Troy. Troy VIIa fell around the 1190, and the ILIAD was composed circa 750 BC….That’s about 440 years..And the ILIAD is usually held to have been written down around 560 BC…So that’s another 190 years….440 plus 190 = 630 years.
There are some things in the Iliad that hark back to Mycenaean times, like those boar-tusks helmets. But a lot of later stuff is mixed in.
There used to be people who suspected Schliemann of ‘planting’ some of the material he found at Troy. There were others who thought that Calvert’s identification of Hissarlik as Troy was wrong. But I’ve never come across anyone who reckons that there never was a Troy of some sort, which strikes me as odd.
For example the dead are cremated in Homer but cremation seems not to have occurred in Mycenae. There the dead were entombed.
“But a lot of later stuff is mixed in.”
Sure. I mean, I’m pretty damn positive that Achilles was fictional…..But there are are still “fragment[s] of truth” in the Homeric epics
Some people think that the Klamath have legends that describe a volcanic eruption that occurred over 7,000 years ago…
http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/05/09/the-surprisingly-accurate-myth-of-the-creation-of-crater-lake/
There are similar claims for some Australian Aboriginal stories.
One problems is that there have been a number of more recent eruptions of other volcanoes in that area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods
There is this high mountain peak in Caucasus, Mt Kazbek. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Kazbek). It is pretty impressive (16,558 ft); turned out, it is a dormant stratovolcano, that has been quiet for a while -last time it erupted was 6000 years ago. Nothing since year 4000 BC. Yet there is a legend in Georgia, part of traditional Kartvelian folklore, that a hero named Amirani had stolen fire from the skies atop of this peak and given it to the people; eventually ended up chained on the mountain peak as punishment by the deities for his crime. Obviously, a cognate of Prometheus myth; but might also be related to the volcanic activity of Mt. Kazbek. Considering that the last eruption of Mt. Kazbek had been 6000 YBP and Prometheus myth existed in oral form in ancient Greece until perhaps 8th century BC (when it had been put in writing), it gives the legend at least 3000 years of oral existence with some grain of truth in it – fire coming from Mt. Kazbek. (or Caucasus in general, in the Hellenic version, where the exact location of the peak had been lost).
5300 years ago Iry-Hor lived. He is the earliest man whose name we know.
Good grief! Fascinating; thank you.
Somebody already mentioned the Australian Aboriginals. As I understand it the claim is that several [21] different groups retain a memory of large scale flooding to places that were only underwater 7000 years ago. Astounding, if true.
Media: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indigenous-australian-storytelling-records-sea-level-rises-over-millenia
Original article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539?journalCode=cage20
Perhaps related to the draining of Lake Agassiz?
Aborigines remember a time before the Great Barrier Reef but also a time when you could walk from the mainland to Tasmania.
http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/blogs/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-rise-sea
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/
I once talked to a museum curator in Scotland who suspected that the Scottish legend of Sawney Bean might have originated in the Bronze Age.
I have never heard of any evidence of any memory in Western Europe of the clearing of the wildwood, which occupied the Neolithic and (I assume) much of the Bronze Age. There are, however, spurious ‘memories’ in England of widespread reforestation during the Dark Ages, and subsequent clearing, and in Scotland of the Great Caledonian Forest. and its destruction by various parties e.g. the Vikings.
There are spurious memories of what Enclosure involved in England, and of the iron-masters clearing woodland to make charcoal for their furnaces. There are spurious recent memories in Ireland of forests being destroyed to make barrels for Guinness. So a different line of enquiry would be about how fake oral (or partly oral) history has been created of comparatively recent events.
My favourite landscape historian points out that nobody has any idea how the devil the wildwood was cleared in the British Isles (and therefore, I assume, in neighbouring parts of the Continent) which shows how complete the lack of memory is.
There seems to be a consensus that there was a massive die-off, perhaps on the order of 90%, in the America’s that started somewhere around 1492 AD that was completed before most of the natives had ever set eyes on a white man.
Is there any Native American folklore that hearkens back to this? You’d think that would be a pretty memorable event for the survivors, that nearly everyone you knew and loved started getting sick and dropping dead that you might tell some tales about it to your descendants.
If it began around 1492 that would have been too early for it to have been due to diseases spread from the Spanish arrival in the New World. There is a claim that English seafarers had reached the coast of North America about 1470. John Cabot definitely landed on the North American coast in 1497 sailing from Bristol.
This did not happen in a single wave but took mutiple waves in different decades.
Many diseases would “burn out” before reaching the Americas before about the time of Columbus. However, chicken pox can be caught from shingles, which may occur decades after the original chicken pox infection. Has anyone checked for chicken pox in the Americas around the the time of the Vikings in Vineland?
Seems that I recall that was about the time that the Mississippian culture in the midwest and the Mayans in Central America had a major population crash.
White men showed up shortly thereafter and took control of history. And gave them more immediate problems to remember.
I don’t know what your criteria for “clear fragment of truth” is, but maybe the Inuit legends that point to a collective memory of them eliminating the Dorset people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture
‘Inuit legends recount them encountering people they called the Tuniit (singular Tuniq) or Sivullirmiut “First Inhabitants”. According to legend, the First Inhabitants were giants, taller and stronger than the Inuit but afraid to interact and “easily put to flight.”‘
Aryan invasion?
Well, if you feel like sailing into deep waters, some people have speculated that the Indo-European myth of the War of the Functions (Cf tales like the Rape of the Sabine Women and the Aesir-Vanir War) might be based on an actual event…..
Greg has said as much, hasn’t he?
He’s mentioned it, but I’m not sure how much weight he attaches to it…..
Ian Morris’ The Use and Abuse of Homer addresses this very question: the oral survival of facts that occured before writing. Here’s his first paragraph:
SOONER OR LATER, all those who study Dark Age Greece must ask themselves what value to attach to the Homeric poems as sources for social history. Most of the leading archaeologists and historians of early Greece have, as a result, outlined their own approaches to the texts, to such an extent that this problem may be said to have replaced the single/multiple authorship debate as the Homeric Question.1 In the last thirty years, historians have generally concentrated attention on the institutions found in the poems and on the question of to what stage of early Greek history (if any) they belong. The problems arise from the general agreement on three points-first, that the poems were oral compositions; second, that they reached substantially the form in which we have them in the course of the eighth century B.c.; and third, that they purport to describe events taking place in the thirteenth century B.C.
Morris is very careful in making an argument. You may have read his Why the West rules for now which seems true and accurate in all its particulars except that the reader pretty much knew the facts more or less before picking up the book. Morris’ Homer article was published in Classical Antiquity, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Apr., 1986), pp. 81-138 and is available through JSTOR.
I might have mentionned that Morris argues that almost everything Homer speaks of reflects 8th century BC Greece, not 13th century BC Iron-age Mycenean Greece. However, he grants that Homer does refer to a very small set of things that seem to date from the latter times. I need to reread it.
Down 8 points with 17 seconds. I’ve heard there’s even video. All I have to contribute to an otherwise fascinating post and comments
Depending how narrowly you define legends, E. J. M. Witzel in “The Origins of the World’s Mythologies,” (Oxford, 2012) argues that identifiable components of Eurasian myths can be traced back to 40,000 ybp, and some African mythical elements to perhaps 100,000 ybp.
King Midas or his father?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas#Possible_tomb
Etruscans coming from Anatolia (Herodotus)?
The early Genesis stories have some pretty obvious parallels with the beginnings of agriculture. If this where they really came from, it means they were orally transmitted for a good few thousand years before being written down.
How much do we know about the beginnings of agriculture?
We know people quit lolling around hunter-gathering and started farming, which is pretty much the broad outline of Genesis 3:17-19, if you squint and leave out the Jehovah part.
Bit of a stretch to call it historiography IMO, but then I haven’t had a drink all night.
The Icelandic sagas and the stories about Vinland.
And the sunstones, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_(medieval)
They were written down.
The Song of Roland was written down in the 12th century. I’ve read that records from the time of Charlemagne list a Frankish warrior by the name of Roland. Of course could be a complete coincidence. If the song of Roland describes an actual battle it would have been written down more than 300 years later.
“Rome” is totally built on historical truth. Vorenus and Pullo were real people.
Not right when they happened.
Only after quite a delay.
Sometimes there is no legend left but there is still a toponym.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_ring_fortress
The existence of the fortresses was forgotten but the localities were still called “borg” (fortification) or “ring”. Note how many are called Trelleborg or some variation thereof.
Norse: Borg = ring fort
Hebrew: ma’gal = circular camp during David & Goliath story
Basque: magal = protect, shield
Hebrew: magen/mogen = shield
Maya: pacal = shield
Malay: macan = tiger blind (shield)
Balinese: mbo = mother
Chinese: gulu = circle
Mbuti: mongolu = dome hut
archaic: mbongolu/mborg – ring of mother huts = mbuangdualua/mom-dwell
The words themselves tell the true oral history if you listen very carefully.
Sometimes they tell of a Jesus in a piece of toast, even.
Or Elvis (Wotan) in a 7/11 (hill fort).
Vikings had roundshields, what were they called?
Geolwe(Beowulf) a roundshield
Patar(Sanskrit) = protect
Aha(AncEgypt) = shield
Gurum(Sumer) = around, dwell
!hxaro(!Kung) = etched shell cheltia(Aztec) = shield
spara(Persian) = shield
targa(Celtic) wicker roundshield
skjöldr(Viking) roundshield [carried on shoulder?]
“Evidence from skaldic poetry suggests round shields. Snorri Sturluson, writing well after the Viking age, says that in earlier times, shields were decorated on the border called the circle (baugr, which also has the meaning of “ring”). Thus, Snorri says that in poetry, shields should be referred to as a circle, suggesting that shields were round. Snorri gives several examples of verse which use this reference (Skáldskaparmál 49).
Other kinds of shields are mentioned in the sagas, including targa (target) and buklari (buckler), although it’s not clear from the stories how these differed from normal shields (skjöldr). In translation, the two words are usually rendered as “small shield.” ” http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/manufacturing/text/viking_shields.htm
Note: Boss or umbo refer to the central handle cover, related to (m)borg, ring fort.
skjöldr(Viking) roundshield, shelter of soldier, parallel to cheltia(Aztec), both having lost the maternal prefix (ma, mo, mbo, bu) while buckler retained it.
“Stories about ‘misbehaving’ or exploding lakes had circulated in the region for many years before the 1986 explosion, and continue to circulate. This article summarizes eighty years of myth collection carried out by ethnographers, historians, administrators and missionaries who visited prior to the 1986 explosion. It also adds information about myth transformations and new folklore explanations for the Nyos explosion over 13 years following the explosion, and contributes to the discussion of implications for disaster relief in any large-scale catastrophe.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240675567_Exploding_lakes_in_myth_and_reality_An_African_case_study
http://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/273/1/165
The Irish “Myth”, “Lebor Gabála Érenn” – describes how Ireland was conquered successive times, by successive peoples. Its written origins are at least 1,500 years old. But it’s oral origins could be much older.
Among its claims are that the Gaels originated in Scythia – which actually conforms to the Steppe Hypothesis, and has been confirmed via Ancient DNA.
Other claims are that the early Gaels settled and built a city in Galicia, NW Iberia, called Brigantia. There are tribal groupings in SE Ireland and Northern Britain called Brigantes, which seems to be related. The Brigantes are also associated with St Brigid, the keeper of the Holy Flame, and related to the Goddess Birgit. So it seems that the Brigantes kept alive some sort of Fire Worship. As a kid in Ireland, living about 20 miles from Kildare town, where St Brigid lived, we would make “St Brigid Crosses” around Easter every year to commemorate her. The cross is really a slightly attenuated Swastika. Both Fire Worship and Swastikas are redolent of early Indo-Aryan and Scythian cultural practices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebor_Gab%C3%A1la_%C3%89renn
There were Celts in Galicia, and there’s thought that there was more than a bit of maritime traffic down the Atlantic coast in the old days
Some speculated that Britain was repopulated from Iberia after the last Ice Age – this is from 2005, don’t know what the current view is
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lina0785/ARTICLES/2005/Iberia%20was%20the%20European%20demographic%20reservoir.html
A lot later, after the Saxon invasions, Britons returned. I knew they’d gone to Brittany, but not to Galicia. Northern Spain even today is remarkably “Celtic” – bagpipes, cider, rain, remains of those round beehive stone huts like the ones in Ireland,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britonia
“It was established in Kingdom of the Suebi, in the Roman Gallaecia, northwestern Hispania, in the late 5th and early 6th centuries AD by Romano-Britons escaping the Anglo-Saxons, who were conquering Britain. Britonia is therefore similar to Brittany in Gaul (present-day France) in that it was settled by expatriate Britons at roughly the same time.”
The Tower of Babel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel#Etemenanki.2C_the_ziggurat_at_Babylon
There’s this claim of an Australian Aboriginal memory going back 30,000 years:
http://www.abroadintheyard.com/dna-evidence-aboriginal-myth-origin-australian-palm-trees/
The story of Egil Skallagrímsson.
http://www.viking.ucla.edu/Scientific_American/Egils_Bones.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egill_Skallagr%C3%ADmsson
I found that extremely interesting. But the sagas are written not oral tradition. I’ve always been fascinated by Skallagrimson. He was an incredibly gifted poet and a sociopath. He had a running feud with Erik Bloodaxe. When he captured the Erik’s young old son he gut stabbed him and threw him in the ocean to drown. Years later he fell into the hands of Bloodaxe who was going to kill him. Bloodaxe let Skallagrimson go when the skald composed – literally overnight – a drapa, a very difficult elegaic verse form, in honor of the Earl. Although this seems hard to believe, there is a drapa that Skallagrimson wrote called something like “Head Price”. IIRC, it is the first known example of skaldic verse with an end rhyme. Despite Dr. Johnson’s famous reflection on how imminent death concentrates the mind It is hard to conceive the talent required to compose a poem like this in the night before one’s expected execution.
Egil was certainly real, but lived only 1,100 or so years ago.
I read something about Russian linguists investigating this. They found oral tales about General Yermolov the earliest that aren’t a legend. That is, ~120 years
The earliest manuscript versions of the Nibelungenlied date to the 13th century. The events are loosely related to actual historical events of the 5th century. So some oral transmission of historical events over perhaps as long as 800 years if the 13th century manuscripts were the first written down.
RE: untangling actual historical events and personages from myth and legend,
Obviously, it’s pretty damn tough. In most cases (THE ILIAD, the Pentateuch, etc), we simply lack the proper controls (literary sources written down at a time reasonably close to the events in question). Hence, we have to rely on a combination of archaeology plus intuition.Was a city sacked at roughly the proper time? Does a given individual appear to be based on a real person?
The SONG OF THE NIBELUNGS, though, is a much easier job. It quite clearly grows out of accounts of the Fall of the Kingdom of the Bergundians in AD 436 and the death of Attila after his marriage to the Germanic princess Ildikó in AD 453.Note, though, how the narrative scrambles the actual chronology for the sake of a good story.In The Nibelungenleid Kriemhild (the Ildikó-figure) marries Attila before the Fall of the Burgundians, and Flavius Aetius (the Roman who actually was responsible for the destruction of the Burgundian Kingdom) is nowhere to be seen.And Dietrich of Bern (aka Theodoric the Great) is inserted into the tale, despite the fact that Dietrich/Theodoric was born after Attila’s death ( Theodoric: 454 – August 30, 526)
As for Siegfried, the narrative’s central hero, he is obviously pure myth*. Someone simply decided to insert this legendary dragon-slayer into the story of the Nibelungs because it seemed like a good idea.
As this shows, epics are stories, not histories.And story-tellers are interested in what makes a good story.So, take a real event (the fall of the Burgundians) and then toss in whatever will add spice to the tale: Attila! Siegfried! Dragons! People (e.g., Theodoric) who weren’t even alive yet! etc, etc,.
*Yeah, I’m familiar with the fringe theory that he’s based on Arminius. I don’t buy it.
While we’re at it, let’s use the lessons learned from The Nibelungenlied and apply them to The Iliad and The Pentateuch.
Iliad:
Historical kernel: The Sack of Troy (Troy VIIa, circa 1190 BC)
Actual Historical Personages: ? Perhaps Paris, seeing as how the Hittite archives refer to an Alaksandu or Alaksandus (Paris is also called Alexander in The Iliad). Unfortunately, this possible prototype for Paris was a grown man circa 1280 BC (cf the treaty with Muwatalli II ), which indicates the kind of temporal scrambling that we saw in The Nibelungenlied (e.g., Theodoric being alive before he was born, the marriage of a Germanic princess occurring before the Fall of the Burgundians instead of after, etc).
Other possibilities: Maybe Agamemnon? He seems like the kind of great King figure who might have been remembered in song, and Mycenae (his palace) was an important Mycenaean citadel.But that’s sheer speculation on my part.
Clearly fictional: Achilles.Also Odysseus. Also Helen.Also, etc.
Pentateuch:
Historical Kernel: ? Maybe the expulsion of the Hyksos?People have been toying around with this notion since Josephus. The problem, of course, is that the Hyksos were rulers of Egypt, not slaves. So, if this is the kernel, then it is a massively distorted folk memory with no historical value.Plus, the narrative of the conquest of Canaan bears no relationship to what the archaeologists have unearthed.
Actual Historical Personages: ? Seemingly none.Tellingly, the Pharaoh is unnamed, a pretty good sign that he is a stock character and not modeled on a real person.
Clearly Fictional: Pretty much everybody: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, etc. Frankly, we probably don’t encounter real people until we get to Samuel and Saul and the United Monarchy.And by real people I mean real people like King Arthur or Dietrich of Bern, the Germanic epic version of Theodoric the Great. In other words, legendary figures who are very loosely based on real people. So, if David lived, he probably bears little to no resemblance to the figure that we meet in Samuel and Kings.
Of course the epics or Biblical chronicles are not literally accurate history but that is completely consistent with them having a relation to actual historical events. Probably in the aftermath of the devastation wrought by the Sea Peoples or “Peoples of the Islands” nomads invaded to grab what they could. The Old Testament tells a story of nomads from the desert conquering long settled cities. That probably happened even though the details in the Bible are all wrong.
About the Paris/Alexander/Alaksandu thing. I thing it is now generally accepted that the Hittite name “Wilusa” is referring to the same area as the Greek “Illios” or “Willios” in archaic Greek. The name “Alexander” is Greek though meaning “Thrower of Men”. I believe that the only writing ever found at Troy is in Luwian.
The epics and the Bible are stories true but they often do have a historical basis. Saying that epics have a historical basis is not the same as saying that they are literally accurate. I think it’s likely that there was some sort of Mycenaean siege of Troy but I certainly don’t believe the story of the Trojan horse.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned that the story of the Trojan Horse is from the Aeneid not Homer.
It’s mentioned in the Odyssey. “What a thing was this, too, which that mighty man wrought and endured in the carven horse, wherein all we chiefs of the Argives were sitting, bearing to the Trojans death and fate! “
Genesis describes the Edomites as distant kin of the Israelites, descended from Jacob’s elder brother Esau, and certain Egyptian sources may or may not link the Edomites to the Shasu, a tribe of Sinai-dwelling nomads who may or may not have had some affiliation with a place or a deity called “YHWH”. (Only a couple of highly ambiguous inscriptions sustain this theory, so take it for what it’s worth). Ancient Jewish law allowed Edomites and Egyptians to immigrate, convert to Judaism, and be naturalized after three generations, a privilege denied to other close neighbors such as Ammonites and Moabites, so it’s not unreasonable to think they had some kind of ongoing ties of kinship and trade to Sinai and Egypt. Hebrew scripture probably jumbles together memories of the Hyksos and Sea Peoples with the tales of merchants and traders who travelled caravan routes back and forth from Egypt and Mesopotamia. Given the Tel Dan Stele, I’d hazard the likely existence of a real historical king called David, but I doubt whether we will ever be able to independently confirm any other facts about his life.
The Hyksos invasion of Egypt is about 1650 BC. They were mostly expelled by about 1550 BC. The Bronze Age Collapse begins about 1200 BC. Since the Philistines were one of the “Sea Peoples” I think the Hebrew scriptures are (very loosely) describing a time long after the Hyksos.
Hyksos in Egyptian means I believe “foreign chieftains”. They don’t seem to have been a single ethnic group. One study of their names gave results as I recall of about 60% Aramaic, 30% Hurrian and 10% Aryan.
The word “Hebrew” might be derived from “Habiru,” a group not so much a tribe as a social class of brigands who lived on the outskirts of cities in the Middle East. Their expulsion from Egypt might be the basis of Exodus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habiru#Egyptian_sources
Russell Gmirkin has an interesting theory that the Pentateuch was composed around 273-272 BCE by Jewish scholars at Alexandria.
It’s not clear that this is based on oral tradition though. There can be lost texts intervening.
There are poems about the same events in the Poetic Edda that have to be well before the 13th century, for example.
I’m partial to the notion that the “forbidden fruit” was wheat, making the Garden of Eden a story about the dawn of agriculture, and the story of Cain and Abel the first conflict between settled farmer and semi-nomadic pastoralist. That would make it perhaps 6 millennia old when first written down.
8 millennia, sorry.
The story of Cain and Abel is indeed the conflict between the agricultural and pastoral ways of life
Spurious preachy thundering: They have rejected civilization!
But perhaps a position not without merit. Beginnings of old testament tribalism though
But surely it would have been written down earlier wherever it originated – in Iraq or Egypt, say.
Not necessarily. A people != a geographical area. History and prehistory are filled with migrations and expulsions — one of them an Exodus from Egypt.
But not The Exodus, which is clearly a fabrication.
I don’t know much about that, sorry.
I thought it was interesting that the closest modern population genetically to the ancient Egyptians recently genotyped was probably Yemenite and Iraqi Jews.
https://mobile.twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/869911274137817088/photo/1
Based on f3 stats, it’s highland Sardinians.
This is a Kabbalah thing? Awhile ago I thought that modern (from the 1860’s on) food weirdness was because of/or a byproduct of certain religious practices.
Not to my knowledge.
I’m partial to the thought that the “forbidden fruit” was a “cherry”. And I’ve a good idea of several names for the “snake”. In any event, it seems to me to be a story of growing up and having to take on the burdens of adulthood, albeit in an agricultural setting.
Also, you know how the snake gets punished by having to crawl on its belly (Genesis 3:14)? Prompting the question “how did it move before?”
According to palaeontological evidence, snakes originally had legs.
So either we have a 100-million year old folk memory, or else people noticed that snakes are unusually legless and came up with a story to explain it. One of the two.
Most of the Bible is seeded with truth, but you probably shouldn’t take it literally. Think of it, at best, as a conglomeration of metaphors inherited from some sand-people living before the invention of steel.
Except that there are actual bits of information in the Bible. During the 1917 Palestine Campaign, a British officer recalled a passage in 1 Samuel 14 about a military exploit of Saul’s son Jonathan. The passage mentioned a trail up the side of a valley – which turned out to be the valley the British were trying to cross, and the trail was still there, allowing them to flank a Turkish position.
What are the chances that a valley in a relatively densely populated desert region populated by herders would have a trail up it?
Is there any historical evidence for the existence of Saul? I know there’s none for either David or Solomon.
My intent was more to observe a cool alignment of the stars than to make a scientific claim.
Interesting blog, btw. Reading it now.
There are claims that the legendary Oghuz_Khagan (first recorded 13th century) is based on the historical Maodun (reign 209–174 BC).
What you are looking for: the Hmong of Southeast Asia supposedly have legends from the Ice Age, or at least describing snow plains and polar seasons. Their heritage funeral ritual of ‘Showing the Way’ to the ancestors is thought to imagine the ancestors’ abode as a land of ice and snow
This must have been long ago indeed and Hmong of historical times may have forgotten the original word for ice, so some interpretation is no doubt involved
The Aztecs had legends of wandering in a long trek from the far north through deserts to finally reach the Valley of Mexico. The Nahuatl language is a Uto-Aztecan language which seems most closely related in that group to the Tanoan languages of the Taos Pueblos. The distribution of Uto-Aztecan languages suggests that they dispersed from the Great Basin of the US. So the ancestors of the Aztecs probably did wander through the deserts of the Southwest US and Northern Mexico as narrated in their myths.
The aboriginal Australians have myths about a giant Moa that correspond closely with an actual species that became extinct soon after humans arrived in Australia. I suppose that fossil fragments might have led to the myths. But the idea of oral transmission is an intriguing possibility.
Not a moa, but Australia had other flightless birds that are now extinct. Strangely, one was a giant duck.
somewhere out in space there’s a planet of giant ducks
“The Old Testament tells a story of nomads from the desert conquering long settled cities. That probably happened even though the details in the Bible are all wrong.” But nomads attacking cities are such ordinary occurrences that the tales are worth nothing at all. It’s like mentioning that trading ships sailed from Phoenician ports. So what?
Actually nomads attacking cities isn’t all that common. Prior to the onslaught of the Sea Peoples the Egyptians, Hittites, the Kingdom of Mitanni and others fought each other over control of the Levant and it’s trade routes for centuries but the peripheral nomads don’t seem to have been much of a threat. Nomads do sometimes attack cities but it’s not an everyday occurrence. Prior to the Hyksos Invasion Egyptian cities seem to have been safe from nomad attack for over a thousand years.
Take Jericho. It’s walls were destroyed 150 years before Joshua purportedly brought them down. But is there any evidence that they were brought down by nomads?
Weren’t the babylonians of Hammurabi originally nomads? I wouldn’t be surprised if nomadic raids were a common occurance in the ancient world. I once did a little geneology project tracing my paternal ancestry and found on that one line, two generations had been kidnapped by Indians and ransomed back to completely different communities.
The Babylonians of Hammurabi were not nomads. Nomad raids on villages are not the same as nomads taking cities. In ancient history at most times and places nomads were not a big threat. However after the onslaught of the Sea Peoples and the collapse of the Hittite and Egyptian Empires peripheral nomads such as the ancestors of the Hebrews probably swarmed into the Levant taking advantage of the resulting weakness.
The ancestors of the Hebrews were already in the Levant. They were among the peoples comprising the Canaanites.
h-b-r is a generic Egyptian term for desert nomads. I doubt the Hebrews existed as a separate people prior to the Bronze Age Collapse. They probably were an amalgamation of various nomad tribes who moved into the area in the aftermath of the collapse of the great Bronze Age powers.
@Jim: The Late Bronze Age Collapse was between c. 1200 and 1150 BC. The Bronze Age Canaanite DNA was from about 1700 BC.
http://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(17)30276-8
Early Hebrew was a language, not an ethnicity, and those Hebrew-speakers who later went down to Egypt, were only a portion of the Hebrew-speaking people
The Phoenicians spoke the same language as the Israelites. There’s rabbinical complaints in the Talmud about Tribe of Dan (ie, Haifa area) boys running off to sea to make some easy money, or running around with Lebanese shiksas.
Wikipedia says it was an Egyptian campaign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jericho#Origins_and_historicity
Back we go: “The Old Testament tells a story of nomads from the desert conquering long settled cities. That probably happened even though the details in the Bible are all wrong.”
Why did it “probably” happen? The archaeology finds the tale of the conquest by Joshua to be bogus. So what did you have in mind?
After the onslaught of the Sea Peoples and the collapse of the Hittite and Egyptian Empires nomads may well have moved in to take advantage of the resulting power vacuum in the Levant. These nomads could have included ancestors of the Hebrews..
I once saw the point made that in all the Sanskrit writing about what we’d now interpret as the Aryan invasion(s) of India, there’s no sign that their earlier life on the Steppe was remembered.
Just pick the oldest legend still existent. Almost all such legends have some degree of truth in them, e.g., they represent people as needing to eat, engaging in hunting/farming and walking on 2 legs.
The problem is you want them to have a fragment of truth in some very particular sense, e.g., telling you about non-obvious historical details not merely that yup, 10,000 years ago people knew about hunting. Defining that usefully is going to be really hard.
Some clear fragment of truth? All of them. If it survived orally, then it must had something very true in it to be remembered by generations, each one distilling the truth further. Do we know how old are the stories in the Old Testament?
Have you ever played Broken Telephone at a party? I seem to recall the message gets increasingly wrong as it’s passed around the circle, rather than more accurate. Maybe I went to the wrong parties.
Ever have people at the party tell several hundred people the same telephone message at a time?
Not to point a finger or anything, but it sounds as if your party might have been experimenting with Demon Rum.
The Klamath seem to have a legend inspired by the eruption that created Crater Lake, Oregon, 7700 years ago.
Also, (but not so ancient): the trend among archeologists lately has been to dismiss Exodus as a pretty complete fabrication. The best counterargument comes from this book, which makes the case that two different flights from Egypt, 17th and 15th century BC, have been merged into one story:
One factor that often erases any oral history is population replacement. if someone else comes in and wipes out the locals, it’s not likely that their legends will survive them. It seems that such replacements may not have happened quite as often in the New World as in Europe (judging from the language patterns and some genetic hints). Not counting Brazil, not counting the Dorset culture.
That said, if I were even a little bit skeptical ( and I am), I would doubt any claim for oral history going back very far ( > 2000 years). Among other things, it’s pretty easy to salt the mine.
New study published today: Based on ancient DNA, “We show that present-day Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, which therefore implies substantial genetic continuity in the Levant since at least the Bronze Age. In addition, we find Eurasian ancestry in the Lebanese not present in Bronze Age or earlier Levantines. We estimate that this Eurasian ancestry arrived in the Levant around 3,750–2,170 years ago during a period of successive conquests by distant populations.” “We found that the Lebanese can be best modeled as Sidon_BA 93% ± 1.6% and a Steppe Bronze Age population 7% ± 1.6%.”
http://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(17)30276-8
Lebanese, eh? Quelle délicatesse.
The story of the Kaali meteor impact in the Finnish epic Kalevala was passed down for ca. 3000 years until it was written down in the 19th century.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaali_crater
Native Americans have stories that they came from across the ice, which sounds like Siberia.
They also have stories of originally emerging from a cave, which sounds unlikely.
Well, it was just an idea.
I think that there are several “layers” of oral history. The first is what we might call “living” history– stories that someone heard from someone who heard directly from someone who lived through the event. Think, your grandparents, talking about their grandparents’ stories about when they were kids. This is the last point where you have any kind of knowledge of the stories from a personal standpoint (e.g. the personalities of the people involved). This is about 150-180 years, tops– say, Civil War era stories for me (my grandfather, who told me about his grandmother, who was a young girl and watched the Union Army march out to Bull Run bragging, and how they came scooting back after with their tails between their legs after). He knew her as a person, and I have his recollections of her personality and many rich details of the story (e.g. soldiers were straggling back all night long, trying to hide from their officers in my family’s hay barn and cursing when they were found, etc.). But beyond that, my ancestors are more remote, impersonal; and stories can drift much easier, have fewer details, and are starting to become myths.
Beyond that are the ethnic stories of key leaders, major societal events, battles, religious events, etc. Some societies put far more emphasis on these than others (e.g. by having bards or poets memorize large numbers of these sagas and gain status by reciting/singing them at key rituals). These can probably go back a millenium or more, at least in some societies, and almost all societies can go back 300-400 years with accuracy, including names and datable events. (Think, stories about how my family first moved to America in the late 1600s: I know their names, where they lived, what their jobs were, etc.) It’s hard to say, though, because if you don’t have writing, then how do you verify the historicity? And if you do have writing, then it’s a written tradition, right?
And then beyond that… well, it’s super hard to say, isn’t it? Stories either lose the details which make them datable and precise, or they could be conflations between more than one event (devastating floods, volcanic eruptions, crossing deserts/mountains/snow fields, etc.), or loose allegories rather than tight histories, or whatever. Are the stories about meeting big, hairy, scary foreigners and fighting them– memories of meeting Neanderthals 40,000 years ago, or meeting a very foreign ethnic group 2,000 years ago (or 200 years ago), or invented stories to scare kids into staying home at night, or a story they heard from another group and liked enough to keep telling (whether it’s true or not), or an archetype/allegory about how the world is scary and dangerous… or maybe all of them, somehow combined? How would you know?
The story of Adam and Eve was almost certainly handed down in oral tradition for centuries before it was finally written down. As for its grain of truth: https://goo.gl/uikvFb
One test might be family history. What’s the oldest thing you know about your family that isn’t written down? For me it is that a great grandfather moved to America to escape being drafted into the Czar’s army.
“One test might be family history. What’s the oldest thing you know about your family that isn’t written down? For me it is that a great grandfather moved to America to escape being drafted into the Czar’s army.”
Trick, though, is to find a way to falsify the family lore. For example, one of the oldest stories in my family involves a man (my great- great-great uncle) who served in the campaign against Geronimo. Well, a few years back, one of my relatives decided to see if he could verify the tale, and it turned out to be true. He found my great- great-great uncle in army records of the Geronimo Campaign .
Oldest that comes to mind involves my great-great-great-grandfather. There was an informal debate between Lincoln and Douglas in my home town: Douglas ( well-known Senator) would give a speech and Lincoln would follow. Not yet part of the organized Lincoln-Douglas debates. The Douglas supporters called this ‘stealing the crowd”.
According to family lore, Lincoln was being taken to Freeman Grove, with Andrew Cochran driving the wagon. Douglas supporters tried to block them: Andrew Cochran cleared a path with his bullwhip.
My great grandfather did it in 1867 at the age of 19 to avoid an expected Prussian draft for a looming Really Big War (after the wars of 1864 and 1866). It came in 1870 while he lived in Louisiana. He returned home to Schleswig after a decade and did really well.
But that is all written down. You made me realize both that I actually have knowledge of branches of my family going several generations further back (with photos, even!) but that none of that is oral knowledge. Perhaps we have been too good at writing things down 😉
One thing I didn’t know until a few years ago was that I had a distant family member who died in the earthquake/fire in San Francisco.
The oldest story that we don’t have proper sources for is about one of the Russian POWs from the first World War. They were distributed around the countryside in Germany to provide labour as a replacement for the men at the front. One of them is supposed to have gone home to Russia/the Soviet Union only to find out that his wife had thought him dead and remarried. Then is supposed to have returned to the village where he was a POW and worked for one of the farmers he worked for during the war.
There has been very little research into Russian POWs in Danish since Denmark was neutral and it happened in a part of Denmark that was temporarily German 1864-1920. Probably almost all the relevant published historical research is in German/Russian and if I want to dig into it myself the old stuff will be in German (not a big problem) and Russian (aarg!).
One member of my family supposedly was called Dombrowski/Dąbrowski, went to America, fought and died in war and was assigned a plot of land. I am pretty sure this refers to real events during war in Texas before 1840, i.e 180 years ago.
Also, Gall Anonymous chronicle written in early XII century (before 1116) records events from X century, and is considered pretty reliable source of information. Some the most basic facts are the names of the dynasty members, that they were great conquerors. If true, it would record names of people living almost 200 years before. Not much compared to thousands years mentioned in this thread, but also much more certain that it was true.
For me, it’s a story about how several relatives of a great-great grandfather on my father’s side of the family died when the Italian fireworks factory in which they worked exploded. It probably would have been in the last decade of the 19th century. I suppose it would be possible to find a historical record, but that certainly would take time and effort.
Peter
Also, as a kid in Ireland we would sing:
“Ring a ring a rosie,
Pocket put of posies,
Asha asha,
We all fall down!”
This rhyme refers to the Black Death or Bubonic Plague of the Middle Ages.
WKPD”: ‘Urban legend says the song originally described the plague, specifically the Great Plague of London, or the Black Death, but folklorists reject this idea.’
It’s a bugger trying to be confident of anything in oral history, or even written history. Example: Roman writing says that their legions marched into northern Scotland and fought barbarians there, who lurked in a great forest. Pollen studies show that to be rubbish – no such great forest existed at the time.
Interpretation: barbarians-in-the-forest had just become a standard literary trope about Romans fighting in northern Europe.(based, perhaps, on their experiences in Germany?).
And if you can’t trust a Roman who can you trust?
As for the Gaels and Scythia: how can we guess what “Scythia” meant to the Gaels thousands of years ago? Did it mean “towards the rising sun”? Somewhere specific? Or just “once upon a time, long ago, in a faraway land”?
oops, “Pocket full of posies”
The Gilgamesh epic (forget which version, maybe both) seems to contain a memory of the transition to farming and bread baking, in the opening lines. I’ve read Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving story.
In my own personal case, family legend says that my Conroy name is derived from “Conn na Reata”, (Conn the Runner), which was Anglicized to Conraghty and then Conroy.
The story went that one Conn O’Duinn (Dunn, Dunne, Doyne) was on business in the Pale town of Athy, in 1599, when he got word of an impending English invasion. This force was led by the Earl of Essex, and was amassing troops in Athy, to cross the river Barrow into Gaelic territory and attack the O’Mordha (O’More, Moore) Clan and their allies, including the O’Duinn Clan. Young Conn immediately left Athy and ran about 25 miles to warn the Gaelic lords of this invasion. They had just enough time to set a trap, which resulted in the famous Battle of the Pass of the Plumes, where the English forces were ambushed and massacred.
My Y-DNA test results confirm that all my closest matches are Dunn/Dunne/Doyne/Conroy from the chiefly line – so that’s a 400 yo oral tradition, that you won’t find written anywhere.
http://clanomore.com/html/plumes.html
Ran 25 miles, eh. Why it might almost be a recycling of the tale of Marathon.
Dearieme,
The family legend of:
Conn O’Duinn –> Con na Reata –> Conraghy –> Conroy
Does not depend on the number of miles ran, it depends on the DNA matching, and it does match.
“Crom Abu”
Cheers,
Paul Conroy
Agus “Mullach Abu”
The Admonitions of Ipuwer, describing the disasters of fall of Old Kingdom Egypt, very similar to the Ten Plagues in the Book of Exodus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipuwer_Papyrus
I remember once reading a Welshman who explained how his uncle had seen the troops that Churchill had sent in 1910, to Tonypandy in Wales, and had watched them shooting down striking miners.
In fact, endless investigation by historians has established beyond doubt that it never happened. No troops fired; no miners were shot. It was all balls. As one commenter said “In 1967 an Oxford undergraduate wrote that Churchill had actually accompanied the soldiers with tanks, which was very prescient of him, since they had yet to be invented.”
If such twaddle can be repeated endlessly, in the face of conclusive evidence of its falsehood, what can oral history be worth?
In case of doubt, let me say that I am no Churchill worshipper. I do feel, however, that even that self-aggrandising and reckless politician should not be slandered.
This story is told and debunked in “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey, which is full of things like this.
The undoubted fact that oral history includes complete nonsense does not show that everything in oral history is such.
In Exodus 4:26 there is the following fragment
25 ותקח צפרה צר ותכרת את־ערלת בנה ותגע לרגליו ותאמר כי חתן־דמים אתה לי׃
25 Then Zipporah picked up a flint, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, “Surely a bloody husband art thou to me.”
The Torah was written down about 2500-3000 years ago during the Bronze age. This fragment describes the event of a woman performing a circumcision on a male child with a stone knife, which is how this was traditionally done in the Neolithicum, at least 3000-4000 years earlier. The scene may be the memory of female priests cutting off the foreskin from that most male of appendages, to substitute for the sacrifice of male newborns.
“The Torah was written down about 2500-3000 years ago during the Bronze Age.”
2500 years ago wasn’t in the Bronze Age in Palestine. 3000 years ago is too early for the Torah in the view of the scholars of the issue. Further there probably wasn’t a Jewish people 3000 years ago. The ancestors of the Jews – or maybe they should be called Hebrews at that point – had not yet differentiated themselves from their fellow Canaanites by adopting their cultic practices e.g. food taboos. Or so the archaeology suggests.
Good points, but I was claiming there was a description of what to me can only be a Stone Age event written down for the first time, AFAIK, in the Bronze Age, irrespective of who the people who did this or who write this were.
Hello,
in Wikipedia, there is a description of the concept of a “Mytheme”, as an atom of narrative structure (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mytheme). In the German edition of Scientific American, there is a long article about the longevity of mythemes as building blocks of fairy tales, myths and sagas. The author Julien d’Huy, an anthropologist from Paris, argues that mythemes can be analyzed with similar tools as used for genealogical trees, and that some mythemes and basic combimations thereof would be very, very old. That does not prove the link between an original historical event to a mytheme, though. It simply gives an argument that narrations can be very old and propagated wildly.
Cheers,
Henrik
Link to the original article (text is in German, but there are some useful illustrations):
http://www.spektrum.de/news/die-urahnen-der-grossen-mythen/1376932
Peoples have notions of their origins, and those legends have been generally confirmed by science. For example, the Phoenicians knew they had migrated to modern Lebanon from the Gulf (Iraq) thousand years before. Ancient Greeks thought the Pelasgians Πελασγοί indigenous and themselves as latecomers, but it seems they were wrong. On the other hand, place names seem to stick forever.
“On the other hand, place names seem to stick forever.” There are remarkably few Ancient British place names in England. The Romans (a little bit), the Anglo-Saxons, and the Danes largely replaced those names, even though the DNA apparently says that the English are about 70% descended from the Ancient Brits.
It must be possible that some ancient place names have been distorted beyond recognition but in the nature of things there’s not much useful to be said about that.
The most fascinating place name suggestion I’ve seen in the last decade is that Thanet (in Kent) comes from a Phoenician/Carthaginian place name.
By the way, what’s the evidence that the Phoenicians’ ancestors came from Iraq? Ancient DNA?
LOL
Have you heard of the Bard of Avon?
In Irish Gaelic “Abhainn” pronounced “OW-on” means River.
So:
Avon = River
We’re talking Common Celtic here!
Cloak of invisibility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloak_of_invisibility
This seems like a certainty, although the timescale is not the most impressive:
https://theconversation.com/the-legend-of-pouwa-ancient-myths-of-new-zealands-black-swan-confirmed-by-fossil-dna-81611
Several people have mention Aboriginal Australian oral histories; a prime example is the claim that Aboriginal people have an oral history about the island of Rottnest that was once connected to the Western Australian mainland and people could walk there, but is now only barely visible on the horizon to the naked (European) eye. The problem with such claims is that they could be fact checked in the 19th Century, when no Aboriginal people could have acquired any knowledge about the end of the LGM, but they can’t now, because it is impossible to rule out that all Aboriginal today might have got wind of the science, one way or another, and might ‘construct’ an oral history after the event – OK, probably not, but it can no longer be checked as a certainty.
“the timescale is not the most impressive”: but that adds to the plausibility of the claim.
Maori migration legends are a good baseline for what can be remembered across 500 years. Circa 1300 to the 19th century. Pretty vague but they knew they came in canoes a roughly the right number of generations ago. The name of at least one island of origin was remembered.
And there’s little danger of their tales having been polluted by literate outsiders. Does anyone here know whether the people of Madagascar had any tales of their Austronesian ancestors arriving from the East?
The mead halls in Beowulf were real.
The Scyldings seem to have existed (at least some of them, in some order). Saxo Grammaticus didn’t invent all his “historic” kings, either. We know from Frankish annals and treaties, etc. that there were kings/powerful people in Denmark and nearby with about the same names as some of those Saxo mentions.
If you look at the comment on this blog post, you’ll see that I think the post is relevant to oral history. Remember that some oral history takes the form of poetry.
http://reformclub.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/tillmans-poetry-corner.html
Two able historians Have Views on oral history.
http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/2013/kom378030.shtml
I vaguely recall reading a book of Native American legends about the origins of horses – none of which had anything to do with the actual reintroduction of horses into North America by the Spanish.
Oral history may have occasional inclusions of truth, much as stones in a mine may have occasional inclusions of precious metals, but it seems to be quite rare that as much of a nugget’s worth of reality is found at once. I suspect it’s not worth paying attention to.
Perhaps that the Aztec zodiac has 8 correlatable animals to the Chinese zodiac shows a long term oral link. Or maybe more recent trade across the ocean. Recent meaning +/- 2000 years
Moses, 3.
Moses didn’t exist.
The “Dorian Invasion” is probably a memory of an actual invasion from the north at the end of the Bronze Age. So it would have lasted in oral tradition during the Heroic Age for over 500 years.
the Albanians have an oral tradition that they are the descendants of the ancient Illyrians. Could be true. However the Hungarians at one time believed they were the descendants of the Huns but there doesn’t appear to be any particular relationship between the Magyars and the Huns.
What about constellations? de Santillana in his Origin of Scientific Thought:
“We have reason to think that…the Sumerian names for planets and constellations…were inherited from unknown predecessors. As concerns the Egyptian names of constellations, it is evident from the most ancient star lists that they were, even then, no longer grasped in their original significance.”
According to Tacitus the Germans still sang about the first man and first king, Mannus, the founder of their lineage. This is the same “Mannus” — Manu in their langue — that the Hindus revered as the first man. How long ago was the German Indo-Aryan split, at least 2500 to 3000 years?
Hello,
let’s stir up the discussion a bit! I simply propose to discuss that the giants from Norse mythology were Neanderthals, that the Fimbulwinter was the ice age, that Odin was one-eyed because he was a raven-tamer that was attacked by one of his ravens, that Ragnarök was a historical extermination war between Neanderthals and Aesir ending in a win of the Aesir (= genocide of the Neanderthals), that the Greek titan stories may be related, and so on. Here is a link to the draft paper:
https://www.overleaf.com/5450981kvcsqc#/17403622/
I do admit that somebody with a lot of knowledge (G.) read the draft and made very insightful comments that might be summarized as “nice try, but very unlikely”. But still, what do you think, please?
Cheers,
Henrik
An ancient village believed to be one of the oldest human settlements ever found in North America has been discovered during an excavation on a remote island in British Columbia.
The village, which is estimated to be 14,000 years old, has been found on a rocky spit on Triquet Island, about 500 kilometres northwest of Victoria, Canada.
It is estimated the village is older than Egypt’s pyramids….
According to Heiltsuk Nation’s oral traditions, stories of ancient coastal villages have been passed down for generations.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/14000-village-discovered-triquet-island-british-columbia-canada-oldest-settlment-north-america-a7673726.html
Some more:
https://theconversation.com/when-the-bullin-shrieked-aboriginal-memories-of-volcanic-eruptions-thousands-of-years-ago-81986
Newgrange, c 3200 BC. There’s no definite ‘when it stopped working’, but sometime along the roofbox was buried by natural movement of dirt. Yet in the 1800’s and 1900’s locals said at mid-Winters Day the sun shone all the way to the end, despite physical proof that it didn’t and couldn’t. In the 1970’s/80s (I can’t remember and won’t look it up) further exploration found the roofbox, a slab that allowed light into the passage and briefly lights up the room at the end.
It’s not 5000 years, but probably around half that.
Some settlements, (maybe some whole tribes) among the coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest in Oregon/Washington were largely wiped out by the last earthquake/tsunami on their coast. Their oral histories reflected this fact, pretty loosely, as of when late 1900s anthropologists/historians got around to being curious what truth there was, and specifically included a tale about a woman whose entire people was wiped out while she was traveling to visit a neighboring people, and included a number of generations ago that she had lived. If you poke around, you might find out what the range of estimates were for when that earthquake happened, before geologists/ecologists/Japanese historians got involved and pegged it at Jan 21ish, 1700.