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Comment by utkarsh858 | Hacker News Reader

In India, there is a custom of passing ancient knowledge through poetic verses. Every poetic verses is sung in a specific 'meter'. If there is a discrepancy in recitation then remembering and passing knowledge 'letter by letter' can not succeed. Many of the verses are thousands of years old. I read some describing an ancient extinct river ~7000 years ago, later rediscovered through satellite imagery (don't know the right term).

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That’s clever and all, but how can you actually be sure the message was completely unchanged over 7000 years without an original written record? I get that special recitation tricks can make it harder to mess up, but I don’t think you can definitively say the information never once changed.

The people who follow this tradition of oral recitation where trained from childhood in a special school (kind of boarding) where certain values facilitating the lossless transfer of meaning like truthfulness, honesty etc, were imbibed deep into students. It was strictly not allowed to edit (add or subtract) the original verses( if one does so he/she can write another book). After certain years has passed by, only those who were capable enough and 'morally' qualified were authorised to become teachers and pass on the knowledge. Even today in some places in India(not so rampant as in like 100 years ago) the same culture is followed.

Because it was taught that the accents contain the meaning beyond the linguistic meanings of the words. It was sacred and you're not allowed to mispronounce it.

7000 is a bold estimate. But they remained intact for 3000 years in the face of significant religious changes.

Today modern Hindu hardly knows whats there in the Vedas, and religious customs are significantly different. But these verses are letter-to-letter same across India.

That's an interesting way to do a checksum

The metre is a basic checksum, but there are more elaborated systems (pathas) of chanting verses that aids in correct learning and memorization.

Some of it is described here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant#Oral_transmission

An example in action - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdq15ptqUs

An example of this may be the healing spells found in the Merseburg charms, which probably came from a common Indo-European origin somewhere in the Eurasian steppes.

The river is the Sarasvati.

Isn't that how ancient Greek texts (that are attributed to mythical Homer) have been passed down too?

yes, many cultures had/have oral traditions that include poetics. The Finnish "Kalevala," is another epic written down from an oral poem/song.

I'm 99% confident (I have no sources because I'm lazy) the written versions of the various bible books were originally orally passed-down stories as well. Weren't the stories about Jesus written down ~70 years after his passing?

Yeah, in language that suits HN, formal poetic structure amounts to error correction in oral tradition.

It dramatically narrows the possibilities of what idea or word or sound or whatever could fit in any particular place in the verse, making it easier to memorize and accurately recite. Clever (and some blundering) poets and changes in language still set up these recitations to evolve away from whatever they originally were, but the original seeds linger a long, long time.

Yes poetry is a sort of decent checksum.

However I think parables are an even better checksum, as they can be translated also, but if the meaning is altered the story fails to be coherent. Parables are imo, the best form of information transference across time, imo.

This is what Manly P. Hall described as "acroamatic cipher" in his book "The Secret Teachings Of All Ages" [chapter "The Cryptogram as a factor in Symbolic Philosophy"]

Meaning is culturally contingent, though - the appropriate “moral” of a parable can change as culture changes around it, which can lead to changes to the parable itself.

For a contrived example, 100 years ago, the idea that one would defy one’s parents and pursue one’s own dreams would have been frowned upon, and any parables referencing that action would clearly contain the moral that one should listen to one’s parents. Today, that would be an almost unthinkable moral - discard your dreams and stick to whatever hidebound business your parents were in? Surely we got something wrong in the translation here.

Written in meter, though, clearly the only word that fits here is “shan’t”, not “must”.

I bet you've not seen a mustard seed, but you still get what is being said, in the parable of the mustard seed.

If the parable is talking to a foundational reality, rather than cultural situations, I think it can endure.

I get what you are saying, but even parables don't have 'the truth'. I would imagine that there may even be parables that argue the opposite position. And both, opposing positions could be right, depending on the context.

This is tangential, but have people really not seen a mustard seed?

Seeded/whole seed mustard was commonplace in my family.

Poetic structure is such a strong framework that linguists have been able to recover information about the dialect and pronunciation of English in the time of Shakespeare, from Shakespearean works.

    Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
    In the forests of the night; 
    What immortal hand or eye, 
    Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

If you're alluding to the pronunciation of symmetry, I'm pretty sure eye and symmetry was specifically meant not to rhyme in order to throw off the reader slightly. Guess that hints at how difficult recovery of pronunciation can be.

But language itself and pronunciation of that language shifts over time. Probably better than hand transcription, but 7000 years is a long time.

“A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.’”

The old Sumerian joke?

I love reading the posited explanations for that joke in academia and when it’s posted randomly people usually have a stab at it too.

Hmm. Blind people called dogs, because they have to use their nose instead of their eyes?

Not sure how that's funny though.

Makes me wonder, dogs supposedly have evolved to be better companions of humans, and lateral gene transfer is a thing. I wonder of they had much poorer sight 7k years ago, or perhaps, a popular local breed did.

(Naturally, to support my blind hypothesis, and walking into a bar instead of seeing it)

IIRC it's a pun on the "not seeing" verb being literally "having one's eyes closed".

One correction guys, river had started drying around 4000 years ago and took 500-1000 years to dry completely.

The Saraswati description in the RgVeda is not 7000 years old. The text itself is believed to be only around 3500 years old

The river itself dried in around ~5000BC. The text attributed itself as being authored in 3000BC. The idea that text was written in 1500BC (3500 years ago) was proposed by Max Muller which was contested by his contemporary western and Indian scholars alike ( they proposed earlier dates) In his late life, Max himself admitted that the dates he gave were hypothetical, they were to considered minimum and it could actually be more than that.

"Scientific data and new evidence converge on the understanding that between 3000 and 2000 BCE (about 4,000 years ago), the river's demise began when Sutlej diverted from the present-day Ghaggar-Hakra valley to join the river Beas. By around 3792 BP (c. 1800 BCE), the river had completely dried up."

https://theprint.in/opinion/first-we-lost-saraswati-river-no...

Thanks for the clarification! I was referencing from an archaeological website of India and had confused BP with BC along with many other things:P

I encourage you to read research literature from the last century. Given that all of our linguistic estimates put Proto-Indo-European itself at around 3000 BCE, it makes no sense to claim that the RigVeda was composed earlier at that time. Indeed, Sanskrit likely did not exist at that time.

I can't trust the linguistic estimates fully as they are vague and are prone to many assumptions and approximations in their calculations. Just like change of stance of Max Muller, such estimations change depending on whether much older antiquities have been excavated or not. Like RigVeda described Saraswati during its time as alive.( I was mistaken that river dried in 5000bc, it dried around 3000bc to 2000bc ). It's only a matter of time since new evidence are discovered that pushes such estimates further back in time. What they do very well imply that certain developments happened a 'minimum' of years ago. Authorship's mention of time as in rig veda cannot be completely discarded out of consideration.

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