MYTHS OF CREATION
5. Myth-making in the Neolithic, Bronze & Iron Ages
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5. Myth-making in the Neolithic, Bronze & Iron Ages
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1) The Late Neolithic
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We must begin again where the subject matter began, and take our beginning from the start of the matters which we seek (cf. Vico, New Science 314). "We must therefore go back ... and fetch it from the stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha, from the rocks of Amphion, from the men who sprang from the furrows of Cadmus or the hard oaks of Virgil (Vico, New Science 338)" — the first fathers and mothers of the human race.
What we today, archaeologically speaking, refer to as the late Neolithic (Stone) Age seems roughly equivalent to the mythical age of the gods, in which ancient peoples believed they lived under the rule of divine or celestial governments, and everything was commanded them through the auspices and oracles of one or more figures present among the celestial order (cf. Vico, New Science 31). -- During this era, human language seems to have been largely a language of signs and physical objects ... a hieroglyphic and sacred or secret language of ideograms or ‘idea-writing’ (rather than ‘word-writing’), having natural relations to the ideas they wished to express (Vico, New Science 32). This included public pictographs and petroglyphs carved, chiseled, painted or inscribed on stone -- featuring signs and symbols with seemingly unfathomable meanings, but which resemble the sun or moon or familiar groups of stars. These are the most famous manifestations of our ancient ancestors' earliest-known astronomy. <insert map, chart and images of examples here> |
2) The Bronze Age
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Similarly, the archaeological Bronze age seems largely equivalent to the mythical age of the heroes, in which demi-god-like figures reigned over small scattered communities everywhere (cf. Vico, New Science 31). The material record of this era largely consists of logographic word-writings (in which a single sign stands for one or more words of the language) as well as inscriptions recorded in a proliferation of phonetic alphabets.
Systems of writing and suitable writing technologies began to spread in Mesopotamia and Egypt (where cuneiform and pictographs were inscribed on stone and clay tablets); somewhat later in India and China (where ideograms were incised in bronze and on oracle bones); and later still in Europe (where ...). — The kings of Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, the Hittites and Persians all sought to preserve their glorious deeds for posterity in monumental inscriptions. Intended for enduring display, these were executed in lasting material, such as stone or metal. — Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China were the first to make historical records, which took the form of lists of gods and kings and ancestors, making these lists among the earliest annals. Middle Eastern cultures employed clay tablets for writing, which they fired to insure their soundness. Minoan and Mycenaean archivists in ancient Crete and Greece used perishable temporary clay records; in Egypt, records on papyrus have also survived (on account of the low humidity). In most of these same places, these lists were kept in the temples as sacred records, intended to perpetuate the glory of the gods in whose service the kings had accomplished their great deeds. — In addition we find widespread use of sacred or heroic emblems and images (Vico, New Science 32), visual symbols and anthropomorphic amplifications depicting many of the gods and monsters described by the well-known mythos of a given community or city-state, sometimes accompanied by local heroes and/or kings. The earliest-known documents of the exact sciences, from ancient Babylon, Egypt and China, for example, are recorded not only in mathematical signs but are also surrounded by mythological images. The development of myth was simultaneous and even synonymous to the development of the sciences; the mythopoeic observations of the ancients were indeed scientific discoveries. Although distinctions were later drawn between the two sciences, the early documents make no such separation and establish no contrast. — Incidental inscriptions, not originally intended for preservation, included graffiti scrawlings on walls and casual records that were made on cheap writing matter such as potsherds and scraps of papyrus. At first, it seems to have been a perceived need for adequate representation of proper names -- especially the names of gods and kings, and other sacred things -- which finally led to the development of phonetization. That the need for indicating grammatical elements of more commonplace names, places or objects was of no great importance in the origin of phonetization can be deduced from the fact that, even after the development of phonetization, writing failed for a long time to indicate grammatical elements adequately. Then a new phase set in, stylized by the writing down of the epic creation myths and other mythological accounts. These include the oldest examples of poetry that we know of, many of which are presumed to have been based on even older songs sung communally in earlier ages. The first men and women to write them down had no documents or archives to draw on, but rather had to capture something that previously had only been transmitted orally, transmitted from mouth to ear for untold generations before ever being recorded. -- This is when the older oral histories conserved by mythopoeic matriarchal societies in their ritual recitals became the official written histories of patriarchal city-states. <insert map, chart and images of examples here> |
3) The Iron Age
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And lastly, we may duly consider the archaeological Iron age as equivalent to the mythical age of men, in which were established popular commonwealths and monarchies, and the more modern cultural institutions and forms of government we are by and large still familiar with today (cf. Vico, New Science 31). -- Until these cultures came into more direct contact with one another, each mythic tradition was, separately, spared the task of taking other peoples’ viewpoints seriously, or wondering about the limits of their own vision of historical truth. But now the more plentiful and easily available cultural records disclosed how surprisingly aligned and strikingly similar their mythic cosmologies really were.
This body of texts also includes the vast majority of the earliest known astronomical records we have recovered. While Bronze age precedents may be supposed for most if not all of these examples (and a small amount of Bronze age dated materials have indeed been recovered as well), most of the actual texts themselves appear to date from the early to middle Iron age, or later. It was also during this era that the older traditional mythopoeic ways of life began to be abandoned or rejected by the so-called ‘modernized’ (and largely ‘demythologized’) mindset adopted by metropolitan peoples near and far, especially in the rapidly spreading imperial cultures of the European Mediterranean area and the Near East. Thus, supplemental to our more direct access to the otherwise vanished mythos and cultural ways of life of mythopoeic peoples, we may also employ the writings of the early philosophers, scholars and historians. Classical historians among the Greeks, the Chinese and the peoples of the Near East made the first systematic efforts to find out what had really happened in prehistory. Greek historiography, for example, stemmed from the activities of a group of writers called “logographers,” who compiled prose accounts of older oral traditions relating to the origins of peoples and places. Combining geographical with cultural information, their histories were not always distinct from legends and folklore. Stories of supernatural events were solemnly recorded, side by side, with secular narratives, in what may be seen as early forms of cultural anthropology. Thucydides declared at the beginning of his account that down to his father's time the Greeks were quite ignorant of their own antiquities, to say nothing of other peoples. His older contemporary Herodotus was among the first to attempt to address this lapse. Like the logographers, Herodotus’s approach was both historical and anthropological. He questioned the priests in Egypt at Memphis, Heliopolis and Thebes, for example, expressly to try whether the priests of each place would agree in their accounts. He proposed to faithfully record the traditions of several nations, realizing that in order to know who the Egyptians and all other "barbarians" really were, the historian must find out who they themselves thought they were, where they had come from, and where they went. And the only way to get this knowledge was to take their historical myths seriously. After Alexander's conquests, the Greeks became aware of the religions of the ancient Near East, and frequently sought points of similarity with their own. Additional historical research into the foreign and forgotten included early instances of comparative mythology -- such as the interpretatio Graeca, used by Greek historians to identify the Greek names for the gods of other peoples; and the interpretatio Romana, employed by Roman historians to identify the Celtic and Germanic gods with those of their own pantheon. Identifications of this type were especially common during the height of the Roman empire, when Europe was flooded with oriental cults. And even though these similarities were sometimes very superficial and identifications were widely varied, the early histories became standard references for knowledge of foreign cultures that were later conquered and forcefully demythologized. Polybius, a Greco-Roman historian writing in Greek (who first offered key insights into the development of the Roman state and discussed aspects of Roman society that the Romans themselves had hardly noticed) was perhaps the first to sound the need for a universal world history. “Up to this time the world’s history had been, so to speak, a series of disconnected transactions. ... But from this time forth History becomes a connected whole: the affairs of Italy and Libya are involved with those of Asia and Greece, and the tendency of all is to unity” (Polybius, [...]). At the same time, some of the older sacred glyphs, emblems and symbols identified with earlier mythopoeic traditions were reappropriated by the new monotheistic religions and cultural institutions (and even the nascent sciences) -- while other examples were rejected, forgotten or lost among the buried ruins of the Bronze age. In all cases, after being lifted out of their older mythological contexts, the original or traditional meanings of these images became increasingly obfuscated and obscured from this time forward. In this period also the political laws of the people were put into the vulgar tongues of their day, and henceforth fixed the meanings of the cultural norms by which the nobles as well as the plebs were bound (cf. Vico, New Science 32). These laws, however, often retained traces and signs of the older myth-making traditions, quite often serving to retain previously established cultural norms — but now without the original mythopoeic impetus that initially stimulated such shibboleths and taboos. — Henceforth, the vulgar tongues of the world served the common uses of life in most instances we know of; although the priestly class of the new religions in some cases retained use of particular older tongues as ‘secret’ or ‘sacred’ languages, alongside their respective selections from the older glyphs and emblems of the mythopoeic age. <insert map, charts and images of examples here> |