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Want more mind-blow? Consider this: the oral tradition of the Aborigines in Australia has been scientifically confirmed to extend back to 70,000 years. We, th
by fit2rule 8y ago
Want more mind-blow? Consider this: the oral tradition of the Aborigines in Australia has been scientifically confirmed to extend back to 70,000 years.
We, the modern era, can hardly keep our oral traditions going for a 100 years.
Another fascinating fact: they did this, by fundamentally using a form of signed key - stories (oral traditions) were to be told in multiple languages; the language of ones own tribe, and of the tribe to which you journey. Only if those stories could be told in the same languages, were they persisted ..
I honestly think one of the biggest travesties of the modern era is that we ever considered such cultures 'inferior' to our own. They even had a version of the Hippocratic oath way before us .. we had 'miasma theory', they knew already about the antiseptic nature of plants .. they've operated the longest-still-operational mine in human history .. its just staggering.
- hprotagonist 8y agomuch younger, by comparison, but my favorite "early checksum" example is the Torah. Since every glyph in hebrew has a numerical value, the sum of all rows and the sum of all columns of a page can be computed. When making a copy, if these values don't match the master, that page is cut out and burned. There's been an effectively zero error rate in copies of the Torah for the last ~3,000 years.
- genericone 8y agoI did not know about this, so this is why the Jewish people can have good certainty about how far the origins of their religion indeed go. Very fascinating stuff, I learned something new today.
- hprotagonist 8y agowith occasional empirical evidence, no less: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/ancient-sea-scrolls-bible.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/ancient-sea-scrol...
- opportune 8y agoWell, the error rate since the written Torah was written may be low, but the Torah was already describing events that had occurred hundreds or even thousands of years before
- empath75 8y agoMore like 1200 years. They didn’t start the checksums until ~900
- hprotagonist 8y agoAh, you're right. I flipped BCE/CE on when the Masoretes existed. IIRC, though, most of the texts of the dead sea scrolls, which are much older, were effectively identical too -- see the En Gedi copy of Leviticus from ~ 300 CE which was word-for-word identical.
- HarryHirsch 8y agoWell, yes. People had developed cuneiform by 2500 BC. Kings and princes had book collections a few centuries after, and it's not surprising that in their scriptoria they developed proofreading methods.