# Oldest accurate oral traditions? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 5, 2018, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oldest-accurate-oral-traditions/822512 "2018-10-05T17:33:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2018, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oldest-accurate-oral-traditions/822512/41 "2018-10-07T20:44:59Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > Okay, I didn’t dig up one specifically about crossing the Bering land bridge, but [here](http://www.meteorite-list-archives.com/2007/oct/0267.html) is one that he thinks is a record of a comet impact 13,000 years ago. Anyone who thinks that is a valid record of a comet impact should really _love_ [Velikovsky,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky) who had the uncanny knack of finding hundreds of such legends, “interpreting” and believing them. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2018, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oldest-accurate-oral-traditions/822512/42 "2018-10-07T21:11:50Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > Anyone who thinks that is a valid record of a comet impact should really _love_ [Velikovsky,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky) who had the uncanny knack of finding hundreds of such legends, “interpreting” and believing them. Oh, this guy (who I’m familar with from postings on a meteorite related mailing list a decade ago) believes that every unexplained disaster to befall mankind came from impacts of fragments of Comet Encke. ([And occasionally some other comet](http://www.meteorite-list-archives.com/2015/jun/0073.html).) [This](http://www.defendgaia.org/bobk/ccc/ce090400.html) is a very long post, but you can get to the heart of it by searching for instances of the word “impact.” (That post concerns only the new world, but he has plenty of events from other continents, too.) ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2018, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oldest-accurate-oral-traditions/822512/43 "2018-10-07T22:59:48Z")
I think the best way of summing up Velikovsky would be to say that when conventional history and well-established astronomy conflict with ancient works like the Bible, conventional history is wrong or distorted and legends more accurate (he says). The possibility that these are merely tall tales, imaginative legends or religious fantasies is not seriously considered. Among his many postulates are that Venus & Mars passed close (very close) to the Earth in historic times, causing such diverse phenomena as the biblical pillar of fire, the biblical plagues in Egypt, and Joshua’s long day. This requires serious alteration to well-proved physics and celestial mechanic laws, but that didn’t deter Velikovsky in the slightest. He just invented new laws. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2018, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oldest-accurate-oral-traditions/822512/44 "2018-10-08T03:11:32Z")
> [@Yllaria](#): > > The idea is that there was a “priesthood”, an elite group whose purpose was to remember things that the population needed to have remembered. They used many mnemonic aids, only shared the full data set with people who had been inducted into the group and trained by them, and reviewed the songs, dances, etc. in a regular cycle, providing quality control. Our accurate stories aren’t anywhere near that old, but for the Basque people, the people who were in charge of history were the women. I’m not talking about someone teaching “ex cathedra” (for some reason a lot of men seem to think I do): history is one of the things that defines who we are, one of the basic things you learn along with how to wash your hands or set a table. So, it was taught by the same people. As has been sadly proven repeatedly, the men simply couldn’t be trusted with not turning trouts into whales by the time they got from the river to the village green 😛 No, seriously: I’ve been in the situation of a guy telling a story which was recorded “as told by the women” in the 15th century (\*), which the women still tell the same way 6 centuries later (without having read the book, again \*), and which the man mangled miserably, turning a 7-foot tall man into 8-feet tall, making him lift a horse which had fallen on him (no damnit, the actual story specifically mentions he luckily didn’t get trapped by the horse), etc. etc. While sheer numbers indicate that there have to be guys out there who are capable of not inflating things, apparently the pressure from all the women in your family works better if you’re a woman yourself. Now, those histories do compress things, and leave things out, and simplify - just as written histories do. The way I was taught History, repeatedly and from several written books, every legal jurisdiction in Europe and in our overseas colonies was under the Ancien Régime until 1789; there was no attempt to explain our own (and multiple) parliamentary regimes, none of which matched the French system (for example we had Parliaments containing at most one noble, and that’s if he was presiding). To me one thing that’s interesting about both oral tradition and written records is seeing which parts are emphasized, which are hidden as ugly, which discarded as irrelevant, and which get distorted by mistake. - The first Prince of Viana was such. A. Nerd. Well, so was his maternal grandfather (Carlos III of Navarre), but definitely not Daddy Dearest (Juan I of Aragon). One of the many nerdish things the Prince did was write a History of Navarre in which he did something nobody did back then: cite every single source he used. And, more often than he would have liked (he preferred written documents), the source was “what the women say”. The story mentioned is about King Sancho II “the Strong” in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212); Sancho’s inordinate size and details of his physical description as told by the women have been proven by forensic analysis, and details of the battle match written documents from other kingdoms both Christian and Muslim. But the Prince’s History was despised by scholars for centuries, due to that strange obsession with giving credit where credit was due and that even stranger… thing of citing what _the women_ say (the women! Who cares what the women say! As if they were worth listening to!). ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2018, 11:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oldest-accurate-oral-traditions/822512/45 "2018-10-08T11:25:54Z")
[this example would be of an oral tradition surviving for a few centuries rather than several millennia, but let me hijack a little while the experts are here.] When did Scandinavia become literate? Snorri Sturluson’s _Heimskringla: The Chronicle Of The Kings Of Norway_ describes Odin’s arrival with “Kings of Huns.” I’ve heard that this may correspond with the historic return to Sweden of an entourage of royal Goths in the late 5th century — that entourage probably included allied warriors of Asian descent. Is this plausible? Or just crackpottery? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oldest-accurate-oral-traditions/822512.md?page=2)