Oldest Oral Legend

[Tuckerfan]

I saw this piece on CNN, which mentioned that a supernova which occured some 700 years ago, is still spoken of in oral legends today. That got me to wondering what the oldest oral legend would be.

[bdgr]

Probably, the poodle in the microwave, or the Microsoft Email tracking thing....Take your pick.

I think both of those go back to pre-columbian times.

[Ferret Herder]

My wild guess of the still-surviving ones, though passed down in writing these days, would be the legend of Gilgamesh, which is something like four or five thousand years old.

On preview, I see I prefer bdgr's answer.

[pravnik]

The oldest surviving ones would probably still be pre-historic and undateable, hunter-gatherer folklore and what have you. Hard to say.

[samclem]

It would appear that the answer has been ferreted out.

[pravnik]

I'm not so sure. We know about the epic of Gilgamesh and mesopotamian mythology because of a protoliterate people who eventually obtained literacy late in the game (for the record, Gilgamesh himself doesn't appear till the late Assyro-Babylonian period). What about peoples who never advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage and never achieved literacy? We can't date their mythologies.

[Squink]

Stories of the first Chinese ruler Fu Xi (~2950 - ~2700 BC) reportedly date back as far as those of Gilgamesh (~2700 BC).

[Tuckerfan]

Originally posted by pravnik
I'm not so sure. We know about the epic of Gilgamesh and mesopotamian mythology because of a protoliterate people who eventually obtained literacy late in the game (for the record, Gilgamesh himself doesn't appear till the late Assyro-Babylonian period). What about peoples who never advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage and never achieved literacy? We can't date their mythologies.

Not necessarily. In the article which inspired this question the oral legend was inspired by a supernova which we know from modern astronomical research to have occured some 700 years ago (and from a part of Africa where written language is a relatively new thing). If there's some other oral legend out there which discusses either a major geologic event or something which can be verified by astronomical research, then we can pin down the rough origins of the legend.

[Hrdygrdymn]

Two possibilities:

1. God made man from mud. This story (made famous in both Biblical and proto-Greek mythology) appears to be at least neolithic, popping up in Mesopotamian text. A reasonable story from a society that made everything out of mud.

2. The great flood. Although there are flood legends globally (due largely to the fact that people tended to settle in flood plains) there does seem to be some consistency within the Babylonian/Biblical flood stories (which also appears in the Gilgamesh story).

[pravnik]

True enough. We can tell the age of some legends if they point to externally verifiable events. But can we tell how old, say, the creation myth of the African San is?

[pravnik]

Whoops. My post was in reply to Tuckerfan's. Quote, prav, quote!

[Tuckerfan]

Originally posted by pravnik
True enough. We can tell the age of some legends if they point to externally verifiable events. But can we tell how old, say, the creation myth of the African San is?

Possibly. IANAL (I am not a linguist), but every language evolves over time and I know that certain documents/stories/whatever you have been dated using the type of words involved. For example, if a tale from a Native American culture has a word which means "horse" then we know that the tale originated some time after 1492 (or at least parts of it). Also, if we know that Society A didn't interact with Society B until X point in time, and that after that point, the languages borrowed words from one another, then a tale can be dated to a rough time period as well.

I've seen a map which gives the spread of the various languages and traces them all back to one "mother tongue" but I don't remember any of the details.

[Wikkit]

Some people argue that the tale of Noah's Ark is based on dam breaks from the glacial lake Missoula. That happened 12000 years ago, but is obviouly impossible to prove. And since it's a religion thing, seperating the wheat from the crap is a bit difficult.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Originally posted by Tuckerfan

I've seen a map which gives the spread of the various languages and traces them all back to one "mother tongue" but I don't remember any of the details.

You may be thinking of the Indo-European language tree. This is a huge family of languages which includes most western and near eastern languages. This is the largest traceable family that I'm aware of. I don't there is a holistic tree which can trace ALL human languages back to one "mother tongue," as you called it (and maybe that's not even what you meant) but this is probably what you saw.

[Philosophocles]

Oral Roberts

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Linda Lovelace

[MC Master of Ceremonies]

The Deluge legends (e.g Noah, etc.) are generally believed to be the oldest surving legends and one of the oldest known versions appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it is probably even older than Gilgamesh as it appears in other cultures too for example, there was remrkably simlair Hellenic legend.

[Bob55]

I always heard it was Beowulf

[Opus1]

I've heard that certain Australian aborigines have a legend about an island that sunk into the ocean 10,000 years ago, but have no reputible verification of that.

[NDP]

Some people argue that the tale of Noah's Ark is based on dam breaks from the glacial lake Missoula. That happened 12000 years ago, but is obviouly impossible to prove. And since it's a religion thing, seperating the wheat from the crap is a bit difficult.

Actually, you may be thinking of the formation of the Black Sea and its relation to the great Deluge legends. A couple years ago, there was a "Nova" episode about this where they took soil samples from the bottom of the Black Sea and found traces of human-built artifacts (e.g., pottery shards) dating from about 7,000 to 9,000 years ago. This has led to a theory that the Black Sea was originally a smaller land-locked freshwater lake during the Ice Age with a substantial population surrounding its shores. When the Ice Age ended, the ice caps melted and receded causing the ocean levels to rise. Eventually, a wall of salt water built up and flooded into the Black Sea basin.

[Tuckerfan]

Originally posted by Opus1
I've heard that certain Australian aborigines have a legend about an island that sunk into the ocean 10,000 years ago, but have no reputible verification of that.

Which would kind of match the timeline for Plato's tale about Atlantis, wouldn't it? (Not that there's any connection, of course, but it's an interesting coincidence if correct.)

[Wikkit]

Originally posted by NDP
Actually, you may be thinking of the formation of the Black Sea and its relation to the great Deluge legends.

No, I'm quite sure that I was thinking of the glacial lake Missoula and the half a billion cubic miles of water that were released.

[MC Master of Ceremonies]

Originally posted by Bob55
I always heard it was Beowulf

The Beowulf legend orginated in the sixth century (AD), it is the oldest piece of English literature though.

[MC Master of Ceremonies]

Originally posted by Wikkit
No, I'm quite sure that I was thinking of the glacial lake Missoula and the half a billion cubic miles of water that were released.

I always thought the generally accepted view was that the deluge occured in the Euphrates basin.

[kambuckta]

The 'Dreamtime' legends of the Australian aborigines are said to go back over 20,000 years....the problem is that being oral legends, it is hard to prove (or disprove) such claims. However, given that all cultures have come up with some sort of creation mythology, there is no obvious reason to doubt the dating of these.

[pravnik]

Exactly. Australian aborigines have been in Australia since about 40,000 years ago, most likely arriving at the north coast from Southeast Asia. 20,000 years? Why not?

[MC Master of Ceremonies]

Yes but its difficult to say how long an oral legend will persist before it is either forgotten or becomes so changed that it bears no resemblance to the original.

[Tuckerfan]

Originally posted by kambuckta
The 'Dreamtime' legends of the Australian aborigines are said to go back over 20,000 years....the problem is that being oral legends, it is hard to prove (or disprove) such claims. However, given that all cultures have come up with some sort of creation mythology, there is no obvious reason to doubt the dating of these.

Have these been collected and published anywhere? I'd like to read them.

[trader_of_shots]

Originally posted by Tuckerfan
Have these been collected and published anywhere? I'd like to read them.

Hehe .. yeah. They are pretty funny to read.

My favorite is Tadalick (sp) the frog the held all the water.

http://www.story.freeserve.co.uk/stories/tidalick.htm

Also the legend of the Rainbow Python.

The majority of Aboriginal mythology ... opps mythology is history recorded by preists yeah ?.. Better make that Aboriginal History occurs during " the dream time" - Animals had voices and the land was alive.

Most Aboriginal stories are about how certain animals came to be ( they are really people you see) also there are stories of "the good and the bad" of the dream time , specters and angels if you will.

The aboriginal stories - on the most part - are childish and silly but are always cute and funny.

[clairobscur]

Legends change and evolve. In a legend which at first glance appears to refer to a relatively recent period, due to the places involved in it or the items and way of life mentionned, a folklorist can find themes, elements of structure, derived characters which allow him to trace its origins back to a much earlier period. I'm thinking here for instance to french folk tales which appear to refer to say a XVIII° or XIX° century setting while actually various more or less hidden elements show they're are related to celtic myths.


But in order to know where and when a particular legend originated, we would have to be at least somewhat familiar to the original culture. For instance, these celtic legents could themselves have been derived from even older (say neolithic) tales. But not knowing anything about the cultures present before the celts, it's impossible to tell.


So, I doubt anybody could pinpoint exactly when a particular legend appeared, except in some very peculiar instances (like in the case of your african myths about a supernova). And even in these instances, the more time pass, the more the tale will change, and past some point, it will be essentially impossible to establish the link between the tale and the original event (that's assuming that there's actually an "event" at the root of the tale. I would guess that the majority of tales originated in myths, not in actual events).

Take the well-known urban legend about the mysterious hitchicker who warn a driver about a dangerous curb on the road before dissapearing and then is found out to have been dead for many years. Despite its content, the tale is way older than cars. Essentially the same story can be found in much earlier periods. Some guy coming back from the market on his cart see a woman clad in white on the side of the road who ask him to bring her home. She stays silent, except for one warning or another (on whatever issue, often not about a danger related to the road) she gives to the cart driver. Then he drops her in front of some house and on the following day, when he comes back to enquire about her, he's told she has been dead for several years, or find only ruins where he had seen a house.

So, this urban legend is merely a very old tale modernized and set up in our current world. How old it is? For all we know it could be 50 000 years old....There's no way to tell. At some point, legends can't be traced back anymore...

[clairobscur]

Just to add something about the the UL I was refering to. Take an old version of it and a modern one :


-The cart driver is told by the mysterious woman to take care of his fireplace when he'll come back home. So, despite being tired, the guy check it before going to bed, notice the fire had not be properly covered and could have caused a fire, then go to bed. On the following day, he comes back to the woman's house only to discover only burned down ruins. Asking the neighbors, he's told that the woman he met died in an accidental fire in her house years ago. Someone show him a brooch which has been found in the charred ruins and he recognize the brooch the mysterious woman was wearing.


-The driver is told by the mysterious hitchiker to pay attention to a dangerous curb on the road. He slows down. Then, either the hichicker has vanished from her seat while the driver was paying attention to the road, either she's still there and the driver drops her by her house. When he comes back to the house, or when he report the weird event to the police, he's shown a picture of the person, recognize her and he's told this woman died in a car accident at this dangerous curb she warned him about.



So, the legend has evolved a lot, but the core elements are still the same :

-Someone is on is way back home
-He displays kindness to a stranger (offers her a ride)
-The stranger warn him about an impeding danger
-The stranger turns out to be the ghost (and there's often a proof : the brooch, the picture) of a person who died in the exact circumstances the kind man was warned about.

That's the core of the legend. All the rest is dressing to adapt the legend to the way of life the listener is accustomed too. And more generally, this legend is only a particular example of a whole family of tales where people who died a violent death come back to warn the livings and avoid them the same fate. There's no way to tell how old this theme is. Possibly as old as humanity itself.

[Exapno Mapcase]

The oldest legend is that there are gods that affect mankind and that there is some sort of an afterlife.

[sugaree]

Originally posted by Wikkit
Some people argue that the tale of Noah's Ark is based on dam breaks from the glacial lake Missoula. That happened 12000 years ago, but is obviouly impossible to prove. And since it's a religion thing, seperating the wheat from the crap is a bit difficult.

Do you have a link? Or a book? I'd love to listen to someone trace a middle Eastern myth back to a flooded Montana, Washinton, and Idaho.

[SandyHook]

I'm thinking, from some dimly remembered PBS programs, that there were two, "Great Floods," in North America in the last 10-15,000 years or so.

The larger of the two, which was the first one, happened when the ice cap melted. A large pool of fresh water captured in Canada was suddenly released into the Atlantic. There was enough fresh water in it, according to the show, to affect the salinity of the ocean and upset how the major currents behaved.

The second in the Pacific Northwest was a good bit smaller, but still rather impressive.

Wikkit's claim that a half billion cubic miles of water was released is probably a tad high. That would take a body of water 7,500 miles in diameter and 3 miles deep.

For what it's worth, I'm thinking the first legands had to be god/creation myths formulated so far back as to be impossible to trace.

[Wikkit]

Yeah, looks like half a billion was a bit off, considering that there doesn't appear to be that much water on earth. I just took the first number I found. Looking again, 500 cubic miles sounds better.

I also can't find any arguments that it was the basis of the biblical flood, just claims that either the Missoula flood proves that scientists could still be missing the evidence for the biblical flood, or that something as huge as the Missoula was identified and proven shows that the biblical flood would be as well. Standard stuff.

I'll just shut up and go read the aboriginal Australian stories now.

[DRomm]

Thor Heyerdahl's Early Man and the Ocean deals with the sea routes taken to and from the Americas, but overall is a good examination of how oral history gets passed around.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...922864-4620807

The flood legend may be old, but it's only the third creation story mentioned in the Bible; the first two chapters of Genesis are the first and second (see http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Genesis.htm , near the middle).

The Adam and Even story (esp. Eve) seem to be remnants of a much older Akkadian pun (see http://www.womenpriests.org/body/baring3.htm , under figure 5): "The Sumerian word for ‘life’ was ti, which also meant ‘rib’. Ninhursag, the Sumerian mother goddess, once healed the rib of Enki, god of the sweet waters, by creating Nin-ti, a goddess of childbirth, who made the bones of infants in the womb from the ribs of their mothers.(4) The Sumerian name Nin-ti could mean either ‘the lady who gives life’ (the traditional title for a goddess) or ‘the lady of the rib’. The Yahwist writer of Genesis 2 and 3 was undoubtedly aware of this double meaning, since in selecting the rib version of it he still accords to it the magic of birth.")

[NoClueBoy]

Seems to me that there couldn't possibly be a verifiable answer to the OP. If a story is so old as to be prehistoric, and is oral... Well, you see my point.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

Originally posted by kambuckta
The 'Dreamtime' legends of the Australian aborigines are said to go back over 20,000 years....the problem is that being oral legends, it is hard to prove (or disprove) such claims. However, given that all cultures have come up with some sort of creation mythology, there is no obvious reason to doubt the dating of these.

I suppose the trick would be to find an authentic legend that described a dateable event, such as a volcano first appearing, or an animal that is now extinct. But oral legends being what they are, if such a one were to be discovered now, one would have to doubt its authenticity.

As for North American aborigines, I could never understand why, if Old World creation legends go back at least 5000 years, they seem to have no legends concerning the huge beasts such as woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses that must have been here when they arrived. IIRC it's fairly well established that they did hunt them, and one would think that successfully bringing down one of these giants would have been something long remembered in the culture. Of course I wouldn't have expected them to call them mammoths and rhinos, but merely reference "monsters", or some such, that formerly existed and were successfully hunted by their mighty forefathers.

[Motog]

Originally posted by Tuckerfan
Have these been collected and published anywhere? I'd like to read them.

There's a lot of hardcopy compilations available but I suspect you won't find them in your local bookstore except in Australia.

Do a Google search on "Dreamtime stories", "Dreamtime legends", "Dreaming Aboriginals", "Aboriginal legends", "Koori legends", or any combination of these words and you should come up with enough to keep you reading for a while.

I had a look at Amazon and Borders but couldn't see any books I'd recommend

A.W Reed has written a lot of books on aboriginal fables and legends, particularly Dreamtime legends. Try checking one of the Australian booksellers websites such as:

www.angusrobertson.com.au
www.dymocks.com.au

and either search for A.W Reed or do a general search on any of the terms above. I'm sure they ship books overseas (for a price).

However, keep in mind that there were thousands of aboriginal languages/dialects, and tribes and language groups were often very isolated. As a result there are very few if any stories that would have been common throughout Australia. There are also many different stories to explain the same thing - I've read dozens of different stories on the creation of man. My point being: don't expect to find a definitive collection of aboriginal Dreamtime stories, there isn't one.

[Sampiro]

Originally posted by trader_of_shots
Hehe .. yeah. They are pretty funny to read.

My favorite is Tadalick (sp) the frog the held all the water.

[url]Also the legend of the Rainbow Python.

For some really interesting reading, Google a search with "rainbow python" and "Bruce Means". He's an FSU herpetologist who documented some really intriguing findings about that possibly not so legendary serpent. (He believes the "rainbow" to be the prismatic refraction of the light through water wherever the snake lived.)

[Sampiro]

Actually, use "rainbow serpent" instead.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv...exp071402.html
I got to attend one of his lectures, and his slideshow and anecdotes were fascinating even though I have a phobia of snakes.

[reprise]

Stories of the Dreaming

[Sampiro]

Oh- reason I posted that- it wasn't a hijack. Means' quest was to prove the origin of the Rainbow Serpent legend in fact.

[tisiphone]

Originally posted by javaman

As for North American aborigines, I could never understand why, if Old World creation legends go back at least 5000 years, they seem to have no legends concerning the huge beasts such as woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses that must have been here when they arrived. IIRC it's fairly well established that they did hunt them, and one would think that successfully bringing down one of these giants would have been something long remembered in the culture. Of course I wouldn't have expected them to call them mammoths and rhinos, but merely reference "monsters", or some such, that formerly existed and were successfully hunted by their mighty forefathers.

As a matter of fact, they do, up here. According to local sources, the last mammoths were butchered for meat around a hundred and change years ago. Seems to have been reported by both Gwich'in and Tutchone peoples, and there are several recountings of this sort in the early newspapers (Klondike Daily Nugget, 1899-1904 issues, whatever the heck the Fairbanks paper was called, and a couple other papers local to the North.)

They were reputed to be very tasty.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

Originally posted by tisiphone
As a matter of fact, they do, up here. According to local sources, the last mammoths were butchered for meat around a hundred and change years ago. Seems to have been reported by both Gwich'in and Tutchone peoples, and there are several recountings of this sort in the early newspapers (Klondike Daily Nugget, 1899-1904 issues, whatever the heck the Fairbanks paper was called, and a couple other papers local to the North.)

They were reputed to be very tasty.

But these were frozen-fossil mammoths, no?

[Spoke]

Originally posted by javaman
I suppose the trick would be to find an authentic legend that described a dateable event, such as a volcano first appearing, or an animal that is now extinct. But oral legends being what they are, if such a one were to be discovered now, one would have to doubt its authenticity.

Are there any "dreamtime" legends of giant lizards or dragons? At the time the Australian aborigines arrived, I believe there were still giant monitor lizards in Australia. HUGE ones. Do they survive in legend?

(Though I guess it might be hard to separate crocodiles from giant lizards in ancient lore.)

As for North American aborigines, I could never understand why, if Old World creation legends go back at least 5000 years, they seem to have no legends concerning the huge beasts such as woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses that must have been here when they arrived. IIRC it's fairly well established that they did hunt them, and one would think that successfully bringing down one of these giants would have been something long remembered in the culture. Of course I wouldn't have expected them to call them mammoths and rhinos, but merely reference "monsters", or some such, that formerly existed and were successfully hunted by their mighty forefathers.

Though Bigfoot is certainly a hoax, there are Indian legends of giant, furry woodland creatures. Those legends have been used as support for Bigfoot believers, but might in fact be derived from ancient oral legends of the giant ground sloth. If so, those legends would be around 11,000 years old, dating to the time before the giant sloth became extinct.

As far as ancient legends of the Near East go, aren't some of the elements of the story of Moses supposed to be very old. In particular, the idea of placing an infant in a basket in a river shows up in the Moses legend, the legend of Gilgamesh, and the legend of Romulus and Remus.

[tisiphone]

Originally posted by javaman
But these were frozen-fossil mammoths, no?

Nope.

Chase 'em down and kill 'em type legends.

According to the sense of the legends I've heard, they were not common, but eagerly hunted when they were found.

[CaptEgo]

I'm inclined to think that people are missing the point of this particular question when they include 'Gilgamesh' and 'Flood' stories as part of 'Oral tradition'. Having the stories written down and then picked up again by future cultures doesn't really seem 'Oral' to me at all. And I don't get the sense that there are too many Sumerian storytellers kicking around lately.

Certainly there is merit to the idea of very ancient Australian Aboriginal tales that are actually still circulating by word of mouth.
On this side of the world I've heard tell that the tradition of the Finnish Kalevala is likely thousands of years old...and legitimately so, passed on from Rune singer to Rune singer over ensuing millenia.

[Tuckerfan]

Originally posted by CaptEgo
I'm inclined to think that people are missing the point of this particular question when they include 'Gilgamesh' and 'Flood' stories as part of 'Oral tradition'. Having the stories written down and then picked up again by future cultures doesn't really seem 'Oral' to me at all. And I don't get the sense that there are too many Sumerian storytellers kicking around lately.

Certainly there is merit to the idea of very ancient Australian Aboriginal tales that are actually still circulating by word of mouth.
On this side of the world I've heard tell that the tradition of the Finnish Kalevala is likely thousands of years old...and legitimately so, passed on from Rune singer to Rune singer over ensuing millenia.

You're right, CaptEgo, I'm familiar enough with the Greek legends and Gilgamesh, and didn't really count those, since it seems more likely to me that their stories have survived longer as written traditions, than as oral ones. In going over my copy of T. W. Doane's Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions today, I came across this rather interesting passage:

The idea that the Fall of the human race is connected with agriculture is found to be also often represented in the legends of the East African negroes, especially in the Calabar legend of the Creation, which presents many interesting points of comparison with the biblical story of the Fall. The first human pair are called by a bell at meal-times to Abasi (the Calabar God), in heaven; and in place of the forbidden tree of Genesis are put agriculture and propagation, which Abasi strictly denies to the first pair. The Fall is denoted by the transgression of both these commands, especially through the use of implements of tillage, to which the woman is tempted by a female friend who is given to her. From that moment man fell and became mortal, so that, as the Bible story has it, he can eat bread only in the sweat of his face. There agriculture is a curse, a fall from a more perfect stage to a lower and imperfect one.

Which seems to indicate that in many societies, their creation myth is dated to the period of time when they stopped being a hunter/gatherer tribe, and settled down as farmers. I don't know the date at which time the group he mentions became farmers (though, it should be possible to do so through archelogical means), but that would enable one to pin down an approximate date for the events. I doubt, however, that these tales could be older than the mammoth hunting ones mentioned earlier.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

Originally posted by tisiphone
Nope.

Chase 'em down and kill 'em type legends.

According to the sense of the legends I've heard, they were not common, but eagerly hunted when they were found.

I wonder if any of the native languages in your area have words for 'mammoth'?