Why weren't earlier civilizations interested in preserving their history?

I guess no language is a problem. No paper? Or, did these people simply not care?

 

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name the civs in question please

 

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I've pondered this exhaustively.
The conclusion that I've come to is back in those days, I'm sure that humans put a higher priority on surviving rather than recording history. I don't think the lack of a language was a big reason, as is shown by all those ancient drawings/paintings on cave walls.

 

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Perhaps they were not doing anything that was that important to them to

record.

 

Hard to name the civilizations, since they left no record. How about the civilization just prior to the Egyptians?

 

I too am not sure what you mean by "earlier" civilizations. Earlier than whom? The Greeks? Since there have been historians in the west since the time of the Greeks (albeit not always consistently), I'll assume that.

History is likely something that the average person needs to see to appreciate. If you've never read and enjoyed reading history before, it might not be so easy to see the value in it. If you don't see the value in it, you will not do it. Add to that that it is a limited universe of people who could engage in it, since you need to be literate to be an historian. You also need a way of preserving your scrolls/tablets or whatever, and libraries may may not yet have been a common concept.

 

But oral histories have been around since Adam. The big difference appears to be writing it down.

 

And a considerable amount of effort was usually put into preserving them and adding to them, by almost every human culture.

So what was the question, again ?

 

There were no civilizations without language. Why would you write anything down when you can remember it all? Oral histories work fairly well unless there is some interruption. Some cultures use art instead of writing.

 

Since Adam? A telling turn of phrase, that is. Oral legends have been around since "Adam." (Who, so far as evidence can tell us, never existed) I see that as people making up fanciful stories about those they assume might have existed in the past based on snippets of what they know and a lot of imagination.

History is the process of attempting to faithfully record the present, without embellishment so far as natural human myopia and bias will allow. I view the story of Adam and Eve or the Trojan War as about as much "history" as I do Beowulf, Ivanhoe, the legend of Robin Hood or Saving Private Ryan. They have historical elements but are fundamentally about something different than the "mere" recording of the past.

A few parts of the Bible come close to being history, but ultimately the focus on expressing theological beliefs is more important than providing an accurate account of events, and I think that colors the account enough to remove it from history.

 

Spidergoat. "Why would you write anything down when you can remember it all?" You write things down because it's damn hard to remember it all.

 

Ancient cultures turned their legends and myths into song. If your tribe is nomadic, it doesn't make sense to carry around alot of books. Memory is more reliable.

 

You don't have to regard oral histories as reliable to recognise the amount of effort people have put into them.

Obviously most earlier civilizations were interested in "preserving their history".

Those with writing wrote it down. Those with painting or carving skills and suitable substrates made pictures on their family tipis, totem poles, ceremonial buildings, etc. Those confined to oral repository often established formal training regimens and apprenticeships for their historians. IIRC every Polynesian male from some island cultures was expected to memorize the names and notable attributes of something like 2000 of his paternal ancestors - the historians of course had a lot more to remember.

 

How can you have speech and not writing? Don't they go hand in hand?

 

Not at all.

 

A lot of effort goes into obliterating histories. Wasn't ever Aztec codex, save one or two, destroyed in Inquisitorial flame? Wasn't Beowulf saved the same fate? Is not much of Genesis about a bunch of backwards Jews destroying the civilized people around them "utterly and completely"?

 

Genesis was ripped off earlier stories. Good call roman. Even the guys who wrote everything in stone, often lost entire histories to Vandal types. Nothing has really changed to present day.

 

"The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

So what you read here is not what I've written. It's what I've said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don't really care whether my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read (of course, there are exceptions, but the exceptions only prove the rule)."

- Russell Means: FOR AMERICAN TO LIVE, EUROPE MUST DIE!

http://www.russellmeans.com/speech.html

...

 

Though luck then..

 

I think he meant for the culture to radically change rather than people actually dieing. :shrug: