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.
However, the importance of written memory is not in the preservation of specific items. Nobody doubts that memory techniques exist that can preserve even elaborate and extensive selections of text for many generations; the point however is that these texts are preserved out of context. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the Vedic collections, and so on, survive, but absolutely no notion of their context or even age remains, except for what you can get from the texts themselves. What the rise of archives and libraries does is to provide a temporal and spatial framework for thsse things: poet X was born at Y, while King Z was busy conquering the kingdom of A, and in his lifetime there was a famous famine in A and B. This is still frequently casual rather than systematic, and important figures may be dated with decades, sometimes even centuries, of disagreement; but it is available to be used, and it survives individual memrory without need to be specifically committed to onerous and uncommon memory techniques.
However, the importance of written memory is not in the preservation of specific items. Nobody doubts that memory techniques exist that can preserve even elaborate and extensive selections of text for many generations; the point however is that these texts are preserved out of context. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the Vedic collections, and so on, survive, but absolutely no notion of their context or even age remains, except for what you can get from the texts themselves. What the rise of archives and libraries does is to provide a temporal and spatial framework for thsse things: poet X was born at Y, while King Z was busy conquering the kingdom of A, and in his lifetime there was a famous famine in A and B. This is still frequently casual rather than systematic, and important figures may be dated with decades, sometimes even centuries, of disagreement; but it is available to be used, and it survives individual memrory without need to be specifically committed to onerous and uncommon memory techniques.
Reply
Leave a comment