Pacal Wrote:
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>
> My main problem was your comment regarding writing
> serving has a barrier to knowledge of the past.
> Well writing enables us to have some sort of
> knowledge of a "reaL" deep past nothing like what
> a continously modified oral tradition would give.



I should have phrased this much more carefully.

Certainly writing will provide very accurate details of a great many events where the alternative would be a near total lack of reliable detail.

The big problem with writing is that many things are considered too unimportant to record but the information would be invaluable to us today. An example would be the lack of recording the circulating coinage in any given place at any given time. Most of what we know about this has to be inferred by what is dug up in modern times. There's also a lot of trivial sorts of information which isn't of great interest to writers and scholars. They may be aware of it in their lifetimes but not record it and it later becomes lost.

The accuracy of most of the oral traditions may never be known and most have probably been entirely lost. I'm sure you're right that some if not most or all, would degrade over long periods of time but still I suspect there were some fairly good ones surviving 3000 years after the invention of writing. By "good" I simply mean very ancient, and little changed.


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Man fears the pyramid, time fears man.