The theme that folk tales are ancient is key to the collection of folklore compiled by Idries Shah, World Tales: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tales htt

The theme that folk tales are ancient is key to the collection of folklore compiled by Idries Shah, World Tales: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tales> I had the good fortune to be gifted this as a child. The book itself is a treasure, both verbally and visually (the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich commissioned illustrations specifically for the collection). But the real staying power is returning again and again to the stories, and recognising that these are ... not archetypes, but ... I'm struggling to find the right word, perhaps examplars of a type or class. This struck me a few years ago as I was re-familiarising myself with Greek and Roman mythology, and as I was reading of Pyramis and Thisbe realised "hey, this is Romeo and Juliet!" Sure enough, that seems to be a fairly well-established connection. And the idea that far older primordial tales have reached us, often through multiple paths and variations, seems highly probable. There's also the notion of a period in such traditions made their way from oral to written traditions, often in the context of urbanisation and the establishment of empires. This has strong relations to what's called the Axial Age, roughly 800-200 BCE, in which the great cultures of Western (Greek), Indian (Hindu), and Chinese (Confucian), amongst others, theologies and philosophies emerged. Whilst oral traditions can transmit information over generations, it's often lossy and inexact. Writing has as both a strength and curse the property of fixing ideas in a specific representation (though subject to its own agents of change and decay), as famously feared by Socrates in Plato's "Phaedrus". The concerns seem quaint to us, largely because we're in the world those influences created. Socrates was speaking from the Before Times. A condition we might apply to ourselves on occasion as well.