I would like to be sure, first, that we have a correct interpretation of the evidence (archaeology shows more than one instance of spectacular re-readings of accepted data), and, second, that this is not a freak. The sequence agriculture>urbanization>writing is not isolated in the Middle East; it seems to be present, in wholly independent sequences, in China and in the New World. (I leave out the Indus valley because connections with Mesopotamia are old in date, and Egypt because it is untypical - it did happily without any real cities until well into the virst millennium BC.)
i was wondering about the new discoveries in turkey also.
'the limit of oral memory, without the aid of written records, is about a century (this was demonstrated long ago by the great French anthropologist Van Gennep, and over and over again since), and that places a huge limit on what can be accumulated. Although men memorized lore and handed it down through the complex mnemonic technicques known to illiterate societies, survival was slow and random.' not aware of this but aren't some of the earliest texts in which you're interested such as the mabinogion and the sagas thought to arise from a much older oral/storytelling tradition?
Check what I said timentalguy about the Anatolian evidence. About the Celtic material, your example is ill-chosen. The Four Branches of the Mabinogi were written down in the form we have them in the 1300s - later than Dante, Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon, and at a point when the Celtic peoples had been familiar with writing for 1500 years and been Christian for 800. Whole Celtic legendary cycles - the Arthurian being the best-known but by all means not the only one - originate after Christianization, and the Mabinogi itself bears the stamp of long Christian experience in the importance of the Christian sacred year and of Christian clerical rank in its telling
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'the limit of oral memory, without the aid of written records, is about a century (this was demonstrated long ago by the great French anthropologist Van Gennep, and over and over again since), and that places a huge limit on what can be accumulated. Although men memorized lore and handed it down through the complex mnemonic technicques known to illiterate societies, survival was slow and random.'
not aware of this but aren't some of the earliest texts in which you're interested such as the mabinogion and the sagas thought to arise from a much older oral/storytelling tradition?
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