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Post by James Hannam on Feb 11, 2015 11:19:01 GMT
Sorry, but you don't understand Australian Aboriginal concepts of time and reality and so are trying to apply western conceptions that simply don't apply. I can't pretend to understand these things to any great degree, but there are common conceptions across all indigenous Australian traditions that are totally contrary to our purely linear conception of time. The "Dreaming" is an eternally present past - a kind of archetype of how things are/always have been/always will be. Anything "new" or "now" is seen as a transient or subsidiary wrinkle in the "Dreaming" of a particular clan, place or concept. So those vanished island are eternally "there" even when they are not there because they are fixed in the lore. They are part of the Dreaming of that country and the fact that they have disappeared doesn't mean they don't get passed down because the Dreaming archetype of that country retains them. I'm not disputing any of this. What I am disputing is that oral traditions can be passed down thousands of generations and retain any degree of objective accuracy. It doesn't matter if the users of the tradition have a different view of time or see the distant past and present as much the same. The distant past and the present are not much the same - they are separated by thousands of years and the tradition must pass from one time to the other. It can only do this via good old physical means of talking, listening or (as does not appear to be so in this case) writing. The Dreaming is not a metaphysical reality where the ancient past is still literally in existence (at least, I assume that isn't what you mean). If any tradition was to claim it preserved authentic facts from tens of thousands of years ago, I'd be very, very sceptical. I would not be less sceptical just because that culture believed it remembered things for a long time and had constructed its traditions on this basis. Best wishes James
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Post by ignorantianescia on Feb 11, 2015 19:34:54 GMT
I don't think we can say these tests were first written down in the tenth century. You are right. I misremembered it, most scholars date the writing-down to the sixth or seventh century AD. That means twelve centuries of oral tradition on the minimal view, but likely considerably more. That's still not bad. That is just the date that our versions date from. But there are Sassanid commentaries on these hymns dating from the third century AD onwards and traditions of texts existing long before that. Those mostly West-Iranian commentaries do not tell much about when the Avesta were written down. The hymns themselves would have still been transmitted via oral traditions at the time. I don't see any evidence for a prolonged period of oral transmission, and certainly not up to the tenth century. All scholars I know of would disagree very strongly. These Iranian cultures were extremely wary of committing their religious texts to writing for some reason, a feature also seen in the traditional religions of several other ancient cultures. The Zoroastrians had access to a script for at least a millennium before they would preserve their holy traditions on a written medium. That has to say something. So the Gathas still offer an example of a long reach of oral memory, though I stand corrected on the exact timespan. Here's some more on the main topic: genealogyreligion.net/tag/nick-reid
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Post by ignorantianescia on Feb 11, 2015 22:08:40 GMT
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Post by sandwiches on Feb 11, 2015 23:13:12 GMT
What I am disputing is that oral traditions can be passed down thousands of generations and retain any degree of objective accuracy.
How long do you consider a generation to be?
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Post by timoneill on Feb 12, 2015 8:49:00 GMT
What I am disputing is that oral traditions can be passed down thousands of generations and retain any degree of objective accuracy. I just explained how and, more importantly, why aboriginal lore does precisely this. Yes, actually, it does. And in aboriginal cultures they must stay the same as they do so. Even when the landscape they are describing changes. Said the white English person. To them, that is precisely what it is. Sorry, but I can't resist picturing you wearing a powdered wig and buckle shoes as you say these things. "Such notions are preposterous!" Hannam sputtered into his claret, as the other gentlemen agreed that these benighted savages simply made no sense at all.
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Post by James Hannam on Feb 12, 2015 10:41:41 GMT
What I am disputing is that oral traditions can be passed down thousands of generations and retain any degree of objective accuracy.How long do you consider a generation to be? Sorry, hyperbole. I suppose we are talking about 500 odd 20 year generations. J
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Post by James Hannam on Feb 12, 2015 10:49:42 GMT
There are stories about floods and inundations throughout the world, of course. And I can't think of any stories about the sea receding. I'd put this down to floods and tsunami being cataclysmic events that are easily remembered in folklore, although we can never say which flood refers to which legend, IMHO. I'm as sceptical about ideas that the Black Sea flood was the precursor for Noah or that Lyonesse tells us something about when the Sicily Isles were united. So really, this is all very weak. It depends on some serious arm-waving about Aboriginal culture which I'm not buying. What is nice to see is that it shows no one is sceptical about everything. We all have weaknesses where we lose our critical faculties. And yes, me too! Best wishes J
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Post by unkleE on Feb 12, 2015 20:20:45 GMT
If any tradition was to claim it preserved authentic facts from tens of thousands of years ago, I'd be very, very sceptical. The sea receding and creating islands out of peninsula is only a small part of al that happened back then. Obviously many, many facts from that time have been lost (as occurs in all history), some may have been altered with time, and only some are still accurate. I think these memories are quite modest and simple, albeit still amazing.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Feb 12, 2015 23:34:25 GMT
I'm as sceptical about ideas that the Black Sea flood was the precursor for Noah or that Lyonesse tells us something about when the Sicily Isles were united. Well, the Bible narratives (and probably other varieties of the deluge stories as well) are not as specific about the location as the Aboriginal tales. In fact, the Genesis account is as generic as it can get, not pinning down any specific location. The word for land can both mean all the land or just an entire country or region. There isn't anything that would conclusively link it to the Black Sea flood, unlike at least some of these Aboriginal stories that do mention verifiable locations.
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Post by unkleE on Feb 14, 2015 9:53:07 GMT
Just a little more on this.
Botany Bay is a major water body in Sydney, home to a major port and Sydney airport. Into it flow two small coastal rivers, Georges River and Cooks River. 20,000 years ago, the sea level was 120m lower, and Botany Bay would have been a wetland at the junction of the two rivers, which then flowed out to sea about 15-20 km further east than the present coastline.
A report in the Sydney Morning Herald today reports that a Dharawal elder was told this story by her mother. A long time ago, a tribe living in the Botany Bay region divided into two. The elders went inland while the younger group stayed on the swampy land near the coast. The elders later returned and found the area had become a bay and the two rivers were no longer joined.
It is hard to see how this story could have been invented. I had a professional interest in coastal ecology when I worked on environmental planning for the scores of coastal lakes and scores of coastal river valleys in NSW. Part of that work included commissioning a major geomorphological study of the Botany Bay environment, its history and its likely future geomorphic trajectory. I therefore knew of the sea level rise and the likely state of the bay area prior to the rise. But I am doubtful if many of the general public knew or cared about any of that, and certainly few would have been aware of the depths in the bay and the extent of sea level rise, and hence of the likely state of the area 20,000 years ago.
So it seems most plausible that the Dharawal tribe did indeed pass down that information. As reported, the story seems to suggest that the elders who returned were the same elders, when obviously they would have had to have been scores of generations later. So it seems to me that we see some accurate memories together with ones that have become more mythical or inaccurate.
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Post by timoneill on Apr 3, 2015 21:25:27 GMT
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