If you cant show it is, the ascribing it to a particular faith makes the “most likely” part pretty religiously bigoted. Could be Jewish, Could be racists, could be Mormon. Could be just ignorant.
Show this is a common Christian meme, please. Personally I have never heard it before that post.
Which flood? In Egypt, there was one every year.
The Egyptian documents and temple carvings would show black slaves (and vanquished black warlords) because Egypt fairly regularly expanded into Nubia (Sudan) and slaves were part of that conquest.
Of course, when the Nubians occasionally returned the favour, their “documents” show Nubian overlords and Egyptian slaves.
It’s true I can’t conclusively prove that this particular piece of nonsense was made by braindead inerrant Christians.
But I sure do like my odds.
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It looks to me like what these people are doing is running fast and loose with generally accepted Egyptology chronology. For example, the Pyramids of Giza were built before Noah’s Flood, but Noah’s Flood destroyed all the works of the Sons of Cain, so the dating of the Pyramids must be wrong.
From here it’s just a matter of finding scraps of information in the Egyptian records that line up with the Bible, add a heaping dose of confirmation bias and it’s pretty easy to show that the Bible and recorded Egyptian history are an exact match … just a matter of adjusting how we date these fragmented records.
Human’s certainly witnessed jökulhlaup events, and how these tales made it to the written record after 10,000 years of oral tradition is anybody’s guess … the story in the Bible is plausible … but we may never know for sure.
Let me get this straight. Some people living in what is today Egypt wrote some stuff in ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphics. There’s a “flood”. There’s the Tower of Babel (when multiple languages are created) and people disperse, Egypt gets repopulated, these new, completely unrelated people pick up where the previous inhabitants left off using the same language and hieroglyphics! (As well as all other aspects of culture, technology, etc. Most not used anywhere else in the world.)
Well, that makes sense.
With almost no change??? Seems unlikely, and we can’t possibly know that, for obvious reasons.
There are people who could recite the bible or Quran by heart. Things like the Iliad or Odyssey were in fact (non-rhyming) poems, so more easily memorable.
Remember, these aren’t the type that watched a new movie twice a week and a dozen different TV shows. they sat around the campfire or fireplace and heard the same songs or stories repeated over and over for their whole life, sort of like a golden oldies station but without the variety. The trick I suppose was to get your new story on their greatest hits list.
Native Americans claim that this is literally true, as their memories are part of their religious process.
This cannot be proven. It can at some points potentially be disproven, if scientific evidence shows that conditions could not have been as their stories relate. It’s a matter of great controversy now, as the claims have been applied to ancestral lands, bones, and religious artifacts.
Such stories are known as folk memory.
Perhaps worth considering are the Vinča symbols, according to some a form of writing or proto-writing, according to others a probable forgery. (5300 BC).
Good book just released by Lynne Kelly, The Memory Code, gives a nice overview of how oral history worked in traditional societies. There were built in mechanisms to make sure that there was minimal ‘drift’ in narratives. Australian indigenous Dreaming stories traverse vast portions of country providing a thread of common knowledge that is curated and maintained by numerous people, and constantly corrected.
There are many instances of old Aboriginal men recalling and singing elaborate ceremonial songs and stories, even in languages they could not speak themselves, which they had seen in their youth.
Thank you so much for the mention, Banksiaman. I only just stumbled over this thread and there is so much I’d love to say, but it would mean writing another book in this post.
Part of the issue is the definition of writing. It’s something that keeps academics arguing and they will continue to do so for ever. Do you mean phonetic writing or symbols which can be read? If you want an alphabet, then when does Chinese become writing and not pictographic? Some posts earlier gave good sequences from cave art to the alphabet. The trouble is that it is a continuum although the phonetic alphabet is a massive leap in cleverness.
My PhD, academic book and now The Memory Code mentioned above are about the way non-literate societies, such as Australian Aboriginal and Native American, African and Pacific cultures, maintain vast amounts of practical information in memory. Entire field guides to all the animals, plants, navigation, laws, genealogies … the list goes on and on. Although singing songs and telling stories is critical, non-literate cultures all employ formal mnemonic technologies which are taught through initiation. Basically, the method of loci (aka art of memory) as used by the Greek and Roman orators, from Homer through Cicero and then into its changes in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was not invented by the Greeks. My research shows that Australian Aboriginal songlines, Native American Pilgrimage trails, Inca ceques … are all the same thing. Many handheld memory devices are just miniature versions - Australian churinga, African lukasa, Native American songboards and birchbark scrolls.
These memory methods are so incredibly effective that they enabled storage of massive amounts of information reliably. As mentioned above, oral tradition is not static, however some aspects of it are. They are kept pure through use of secrecy (avoids the Chinese whispers effect) and all sorts of rules.
How old? We have a continuous Aboriginal culture dating back over 40,000 years, probably at least 50,000, recorded in art. Oral tradition is so robust that there are examples of records of landscape changes which date back at least 7,000 years - the stories were recorded from the elders before science verified them. This is ongoing research in Australia. Two leading researchers, among many, on this are Nick Reid and Patrick Nunn:
So is the art and mnemonic devices which aid recall of these stories writing? Are the bark paintings documents? We have a treaty written in art on a bark painting, with the Yolngu people showing how their agreements were “written”:
So the OP is a fascinating question, but tied up in so many definitions that academics have a field day with it.
Lynne,
Thanks for the informative reply. As a fellow Aussie, I’ve often wondered about 40,000 years of oral tradition, and just how much “drift” had crept in over all that time. The traditions around secrecy of some things makes sense now in the context you’ve mentioned.
I’d be really interested in examples of where drift or change in the story has been observed, and how the change affected the story over time.
Are they any readily accessible examples of that?
cheers,
Hi vulcanbb18. What a great question! I’d love to research that - and a stack of other directions I could take with my research. One example which is well documented is the impact on Yolngu stories, rock art and language of the contact with the Indonesian Macassins / Makassins in Arnhem Land over the last few hundred years:
"The Makassar contact with Aborigines had a significant effect on their culture. Ganter writes “the cultural imprint on the Yolngu people of this contact is everywhere: in their language, in their art, in their stories, in their cuisine.”
from Makassan contact with Australia - Wikipedia which has a stack of good references at the bottom.
I use the Yolngu as my Australian case study because they were colonised much later than the east coast cultures and so the culture stayed on their own land and traditional enough for remnants of fully initiated knowledge to have survived. New knowledge is added, knowledge which is no longer valued is lost. That shows in the rock art which was continually overpainted and sometimes adjusted in shelters which were in long term use.
In terms of secrecy, restricted knowledge - “secret business”, think in terms of long term survival strategies. There’s research from Alaska and from Native American cultures (among others) that many highly restricted songs refer to the strategies to be used in really rare extreme resource stress - how to exploit plants and animals which would not usually be eaten, resources outside the usual area, agreements with other tribes and so on … which need to be kept accurate long past living memory. The research shows that they are held in higher levels of initiation and kept very restricted which stops inaccuracies creeping in. I guess those tribes that didn’t keep this information accurately died out!