Ads
related to: ancient oral history booksebay.com has been visited by 1M+ users in the past month
Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Ancient literature comprises religious and scientific documents, tales, poetry and plays, royal edicts and declarations, and other forms of writing that were recorded on a variety of media, including stone, clay tablets, papyri, palm leaves, and metal.
Jan Vansina, who specialised in the history of Central Africa, pioneered the study of oral tradition in his book Oral tradition as history (1985). Vansina differentiates between oral and literate civilisations, depending on whether emphasis is placed on the sanctity of the written or oral word in a society. The Akan proverbs translated as ...
While oral tradition is an integral part of ancient Southeast Asian history, oral history is a relatively recent development. Since the 1960s, oral history has been accorded increasing attention on institutional and individual levels, representing "history from above" and "history from below".
The following is a list of the world's oldest surviving physical documents. Each entry is the most ancient of each language or civilization. For example, the Narmer Palette may be the most ancient from Egypt, but there are many other surviving written documents from Egypt later than the Narmer Palette but still more ancient than the Missal of Silos.
Types of information held by oral repositories includes lineages, oral law, mythology, oral literature and oral poetry (of which oral history is often entwined), folk songs and aural tradition, and traditional knowledge. In many indigenous societies, such as Native American and San, these roles are fulfilled in a general sense by elders.
An oral tradition of epic poetry may typically bridge a few centuries, and in rare cases, over a millennium. An extreme case is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda : the earliest parts of this text date to c. 1500 BC, [ 1 ] while the oldest known manuscripts date to c. 1040 AD. [ 2 ]
The series was received with appreciation and positive reviews from both scholars and book reviews. For example, Edward Rothstein wrote in the New York Times that "the publication of 'The Landmark Herodotus' (Pantheon) which includes a new translation by Andrea L. Purvis, and extensive annotation by scholars is such a worthy occasion for celebrating Herodotus' contemporary importance."
In this sense, oral lore is an ancient practice and concept natural to the earliest storied communications and transmissions of bodies of knowledge and culture in verbal form from the dawn of language-based human societies, and 'oral literature' thus understood was putatively recognized in times prior to recordings of history in non-oral media ...
Ads
related to: ancient oral history booksebay.com has been visited by 1M+ users in the past month