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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

> The notion of ‘prehistory’ simply does not work for cultures that rely primarily on oral communication. It was this division based on writing that gave rise to the widespread notion in the West that much of Africa didn’t have a history.

A rather asinine take. A culture without writing doesn’t produce a written record of its history. It would still produce an archeological record, but archeology alone doesn’t describe a history in very much detail.

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> A culture without writing doesn’t produce a written record of its history

But it can transmit an oral record, which seems to be the author's point. Paper, skins, and stone are not the only mediums for language.

The sort of oral record that is passed between generations will only let you know what people today (or people whenever it was first written down) are saying about the historical events, it does not provide testimony from the actual participants or witnesses to the historical events. They are secondary sources that are usually used to preserve mythologies rather than histories.

This is not true. For example, in India the oral tradition has preserved texts like the Vedas as they were around 500BCE. This is in absence of any strong written tradition around these texts.

We know that the contents are preserved due to linguistic evidence.

And how much else was passed down orally in India? Not much. Imagine if all we had of ancient Greece were the Iliad and the Odyssey!

we have a ton of other texts, the Upanishads, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and countless more. I just listed the most famous other example.

Yes but most cultures don’t have a rote-memorization culture like the shruti, which seems very much like the exception

> They are secondary sources that are usually used to preserve mythologies rather than histories.

> This is not true. For example, in India the oral tradition has preserved texts like the Vedas as they were around 500BCE

You could say the same thing for The Odyssey, or The Quran, which along with The Vedas, are all mythologies, not histories.

I was talking about the preservation technique, not the contents. There is not inherently anything preventing oral traditions from preserving historical events, just like theirs no guarantee that written texts capture only factual information.

If that were true then why have oral traditions only been used to preserve culturally significant mythologies? (and even then most frequently in form of a strict meter poem or song)

Because they haven’t been used only to document mythologies. Indian oral traditions have recorded scientific texts, medical texts, political texts, and more.

You're vastly underrating the value of oral records and overrating the value of written records. We have quite few surviving written records from Antiquity, and far fewer still if you discount those records which are (possibly edited!) copies of original works rather than original works themselves. Even for someone as consequential as Alexander the Great, we have exactly 0 surviving contemporary works (even in copied form) about him, and our oldest sources are 4 secondary sources (largely incomplete), some of which have clear bias in interpretation, drawing on the primary sources.

There's also the matter that the decision of which written records to preserve itself is a reflection of bias from people in intervening years. I mean, we have some pretty ancient extant religious manuscripts (in the sense of "this copy was produced around AD 300"), but manuscripts of those sects deemed heretical haven't survived, so most of what we know about, say, gnosticism comes from its ideological opponents.

> most of what we know about, say, gnosticism comes from its ideological opponents

Bad example. The Gnostic Gospels tells us quite a lot about what they thought, and in their own terms.

Secondly, saying "written records are incomplete and/or biased" does not say that oral records are any better. In fact, the Telephone Game grew up to illustrate their own weakness.

https://www.wikihow.com/Play-the-Telephone-Game

The Gnostic gospels were only relatively recently discovered (1945 per Wikipedia), perhaps I should have picked one of the other heresies in early Christianity that are virtually unknown outside of some early church father dismissing them.

And my point isn't that oral records are better than written records, it's that they're not really worse. Or put differently, written records are rather incomplete accounts: there's a tendency to treat written records as the ground truth of history which isn't particularly warranted.

I think they are worse, usually. But yeah, the written records are definitely incomplete and one-sided.

> A culture without writing doesn’t produce a written record of its history

But... they can still draw it. And they did it a lot in the caves. We have careful pictures of recognizable species of animals, sculptures and strange pictograms that could depict particular concepts so they take the same role as words. We even have entire narratives about hunter campaigns drawn in the cave walls with a specific number of male humans, dogs and specific animals chased, and how they chased it. Even their personal objects were shown. In this sense, this is literature. Sort of. Is just that we can't read all the symbols and can't know if those symbols had a sound attached, but we can understand easily a lot of the history depicted.

> they can still draw it.

yes, and we should study those and learn what we can. As people are doing.

However, the picture we get is pretty fuzzy, and there's no good way to increase the resolution sans DNA evidence or other newer techniques.

> But... they can still draw it

The study of ancient drawings is archeology, which I mentioned. It’s a useful historical resource, but only paints a very limited picture of a history all by itself.

Indeed, a dimwitted article. The author seems keen to uncover ‘racist tropes’ and so on: ‘Challenging the notion of history’ appears to be the preferred route.

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