in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory
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Ancient models of
thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory |
| Important
notice: List of publications Wim
van Binsbergen Over the years, the Shikanda portal (of which the present page on African religion has attracted the largest number of visitors) has grown to such size, and its internal structure has become so complex, that visitors have had increasing difficulty finding their way, even despite the internal search facility which appears on all the index pages of the various constituent websites. Since Wim van Binsbergen's main output consists of texts for publication, an updated list of publications with hyperlinks to all available fulltext digital texts seems the best remedy. Thanks to the good services of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, in the course of current retrodigitalisation of its members published work, many more digital texts have recently come available, so that now the list of publications could be greatly improved and given a more prominent place in the Shikanda portal. This list is now being provided with clickable links to these uploaded publications. Since that time-consuming process has not yet been completed, of many articles listed, fulltext or draft versions are in fact available in the Shikanda portal, even though no links yet appear in the list of publications. Therefore, please also look at the separate webpages within the Shikanda portal, and use the internal search facility (see below). |
Ancient models of thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory, examined by an Africanist anthropologist turned intercultural philosopher. Topics include extensive long-range comparative / historical analyses of myths especially African creation myths; the anthropological and philosophical theory of myth; the comparative historical analysis of geomantic divination and mankala board-games; a theoretical model of magic in Ancient Mesopotamia; an archaeoastronomical analysis of cupmarks as star maps and as a possible origin of mankala board-games -- stating the case for the view that Neandertals made stellar maps; and a detailed analysis of animal symbolism (especially leopard-related symbolism) across three continents and five millennia
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proceed to the Shikanda portal in order to access all other websites by Wim van Binsbergen: general (intercultural philosophy, African Studies); ethnicity-identity-politics; Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate; Ancient Models of Thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory; sangoma consultation; literary work |
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| ABSTRACT. This paper is one of a series of explorations that attempt to combine (1) the ‘Out-of-Africa’ scenario with (2) Witzel’s seminal idea (2001) of myth constituting an independent source on humankind’s remotest past. The project seeks to identify (in addition to other cultural, linguistic and religious elements: Anatomically Modern Human’s near-universals) some putative ‘Out of Africa’ original mythological package (designated ‘Pandora’s Box’), consisting of a few specific Narrative Complexes (NC). Moreover, it attempts to trace this package’s subsequent transformations and innovations in the course of global spread, identifying (in space and time) a handful of specific Contexts of Intensified Transformation and Innovation (CITI) in which that process made leaps, closely associated with historic advances in the field of modes of production and language families. Emphasis is on the development of an explicit methodology, without which the entire exercise would be pointless. The first paper in this series was presented at Kyoto, 2005 (van Binsbergen 2006a). The present paper seeks to develop that argument in a number of ways: making explicit its theoretical background (universals, the status and nature of myth); adducing ample prehistoric iconographic corroboration of the NCs identified; situating the model more firmly in molecular genetics (Forster 2004); suggesting several Neanderthal connections to the long-range development of Anatomically Modern Human’s mythologies; and proposing major alterations for the format, the dating, and the specific geographical path of the unfolding of world mythology as stipulated by the model. For four NCs their global history (200 ka to present) is tentatively reconstructed. This brings out the close association between the emergence and spread of specific NCs, and specific mitochondrial DNA types, and thus offers new opportunities for dating the NCs. The model stresses and explains the high rate of continuity between present-day sub-Saharan African mythologies, and those of the rest of the Old World: partly as a result of the initial universality of Pandora’s Box, partly as a result of the (genetically well established) ‘Back into Africa’ movement from Central Asia from c. 15 ka BP. This clearly steers away from essentialising Africa, and a penultimate section refutes the allegation that the present model would be Afrocentrist. The conclusion considers the many implications of this model for comparative mythology. | An
extensive restatement and elaboration of Wim van
Binsbergen's aggregative diachronic model of world
mythology is now available as:
NB this is a large PDF document (c. 10 Mb), with dozens of high-resolution illustrations, so rather than opening it from inside your browser, use 'Save Target As..' |
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Wim
van Binsbergen (2007), Extensive table of Old World
mythological continuities, classified on the basis of 20
Narrative Complexes (NCs) as found in a corpus of
sub-Saharan African cosmogonic myths collected in
historic times: including mythologies from Ancient Egypt,
Graeco-Roman Antiquity, the Bible, and selected other
literate civilisations of the Old World, outside
sub-Saharan Africa. (Note: this
table is not in portrait but in landscape format; your
PDF reader has a button to rotate the page 90 degrees
clockwise, in order to allow you to read the table
without difficulty)
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| Wim van Binsbergen, 2007, 'A new Paradise myth? An assessment of Stephen Oppenheimer’s thesis of the South East Asian origin of West Asian core myths, including most of the mythological contents of Genesis 1-11’, proposed paper for: THE DEEP HISTORY OF STORIES: Annual Conference, International Association for Comparative Mythology, Edinburgh 28-30 August, 2007 | ||||
| While rewriting my paper: 'Further steps towards an aggregative diachronic approach to world mythology, starting from the African continent', read at the International Conference on Comparative Mythology, organized by Peking University (Research Institute of Sanskrit Manuscripts & Buddhist Literature) and the Mythology Project, Asia Center, Harvard University (Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies), May 10-14, 2006, at Peking University, Beijing, China (convenors Professors Duan Qing and Michael Witzel) -- I feel the need (as a form of theoretical, methodological and empirical justification) to spell out the research itinerary that has led me, from my first anthropological and historical fieldwork in 1968, to my present concentration on long-range studies, involving connections across many thousands of years, and across and between entire continents. Hence this special web paper, that is ultimately intended as draft for a book in which I collect some of the intermediate results over the years which so far have not yet been published except on the Internet: | ||||
| Wim
van Binsbergen, 2006, 'Further steps towards an
aggregative diachronic approach to world mythology
starting from the African continent', summary paper for the International Conference on Comparative Mythology, organized by Peking University and the Mythology Project, Asia Center, Harvard University/Sanskrit Department, to be held May 10-13, 2006, at Peking University, Beijing, China (convenors Professors Duan Qing and Michael Witzel) |
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| at long last: Global bee flight, a 500-page book drafted in 1998-2001 and announced as a professionally Africanist contribution to the Black Athena debate, never made it into print, and contrary to the author's habits not even to the Internet, for a number of reasons now (2006) gradually being overcome. Find here, as a first instalment, the 1998 version of chapter 5, lavishly ammended with 2006 Postscripts in the light of the author's intellectual progress since 1998: his increasing acquaintance with Ancient Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age, and (as a background throwing the particular Africanist and Egyptological argument into relief) his increasingly successful long-range comparative historical research into Old World symbolism, myth and cultural history, going further and further back in time and now reaching the pre-out of Africa phase of Anatomically Modern Humans (before 140,000 Before Present). | ||||
| 'Mythical archaeology and the visual arts', short presentation made at the Conference on Creation myths and the Visual arts, Leiden, 16 December 2005 (convenors Mineke Schipper and Daniela Merolla) (click for slide presentation) | ||||
| 'Divination
through space and time': keynote, Conference Realities
re-viewed/ revealed: Divination in sub-Saharan Africa,
Leiden 4-5 July 2005, National Museum of Ethnology
(convenors: Philip Peek, Walter van Beek, Jan Jansen,
Annette Schmidt) (click here
for final programme) abstract: African divination, the central topic of this timely international conference, does not exist in isolation – just as little as Africa itself does. All literate civilisations of both the Old and the New World possessed elaborate, multiple divination systems – and usually these systems came under the spell of astral divination (astrology) as history proceeded. Two millennia ago, Aristotle, Cicero and Plutarch, and many of their philosophical colleagues, reflected on the rationality and credibility of divination, establishing a philosophical tradition of reflection and debate on divination that has extended to Augustine, Ibn Ezra, Aquinas, Popper, Feyerabend, etc. I am not aware of any non-literate society in historical times that lacks all forms of divination – but there are severe limitations to my cross-cultural overview, and I may be mistaken; we shall come back extensively to the point of divination as a possible cultural universal. Divination, in Africa and elsewhere, tends to pose a strange Janus face to the North Atlantic epistemologist: apparently irrational in its choice of sources of knowledge, it subsequently pursues the acquisition of knowledge in a rational fashion: systematically, intersubjectively, with insistent recourse to causal reasoning and usually with at least the appearances of logic (underneath which often communicative tautologies may be detected). Today the study of divination is the, somewhat disreputable, privilege of anthropology, African Studies, the classics, Sinology, and the history of ideas. Their contention is that divination as a form of knowledge production is nonsensical pseudo-science, but that it is interesting as a cultural phenomenon, especially as a form of local wisdom helping people to sort out their small-scale social and psychological crises. Since 1990 I have been both a practicing African diviner, and a professor of intercultural philosophy/ cultural anthropology. In that period, globalisation and long-range comparative research have been major themes in my work. All this brings me to address, in this key note, the epistemological puzzle of divination, as well as its ramifications in space and time at the descriptive and comparative level. |
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| Wim van Binsbergen's path-breaking
Afrocentric synthesis of the history of world mythology: Mythological archaeology: reconstructing humankind’s oldest discourse: A preliminary attempt to situate sub-Saharan African cosmogonic myths within a long-range intercontinental comparative perspective, paper for the comparative myth section of the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) Pre-Symposium / 7th ESCA Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable on ‘Ethnogenesis of South and Central Asia’, organised by RIHN, NIHU / Harvard University, the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Kyoto, Japan, 6-8 June, 2005. now published as: |
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'The
Leopard in the Garden of Eating: From food for thought to
thought for food –
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'The
contemporary manifestation of Deep Structure in Africa' ABSTRACT: My complex argument will touch on zoology, genetics, archaeology and linguistics, and risks to drown in an attempt at empirical and comparative underpinning, yet it is essentially an an attempt to identify precisely what my title says: The contemporary manifestation of Deep Structure in Africa. I will gradually lay bare what I see as historical layers that inform the life worlds in which African actors situate themselves today, in which they make their perceptions and decide on their actions, in other words in which they constitute and effectuate their agency. Some of these layers are autochthonously African, and arguably over 150,000 years old. Many of them however can be specifically traced to have an incomparably more recent history, an history that is largely intercontinenta; as such a history in which the general pulse beat of human cultural history can be gauged. It would be foolish to aim at completeness. Using the case of leopard-skin symbolism is my index fossil, I will concentrate on one topic, that I loosely indicate in terms of the opposition between immanentalism (the paramount sway of the here and the now) and transcendentalism (when the life world is largely conceived, by the actors, as being composed or elements and forces that do not belong to the here and the now, but that constitute a distinct mode of existence, or realm, in themselves |
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The
leopard's unchanging spots: presented at the Round Table on Myth, Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, Boston (USA), 8-10 May, 2004; and the International Conference on Agency in African History, African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands, 25-27 May, 2004 |
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The astrological origin of Islamic geomancy paper read at The SSIPS/ SAGP 1996, 15th Annual Conference: ‘Global and Multicultural Dimensions of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy and Social Thought: Africana, Christian, Greek, Islamic, Jewish, Indigenous and Asian Traditions’, Binghamton University, Department of Philosophy/ Center for Medieval and Renaissance studies (CEMERS), October 1996 (PDF) |
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Rupture
and fusion in the approach to myth abstract | full paper | shortened paper as now in press with the journal Mythology |
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Archaeoastronomy: Cupmark patterns, |
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Diffusionism and ludology: geomantic divination and mankala board-games much revised and expanded version of: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1995, ‘Divination and board-games: Exploring the links between geomantic divination and mancala board-games in Africa and Asia’, paper read at the international colloquium 1995: Board-games in Academia’, Leiden, 9-13 April 1995; a somewhat shortened and adapted version was published as: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997c, ‘Rethinking Africa’s contribution to global cultural history: Lessons from a comparative historical analysis of mankala board-games and geomantic divination’, in: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ed, Black Athena: Ten Years After, special issue, Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, volumes XXVIII-XXIX/ 1996-1997, pp. 221-254 |
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Magic in history: The case of Ancient Mesopotamia van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & Wiggermann, F.A.M., 1999, ‘Magic in history: A theoretical perspective, and its application to Ancient Mesopotamia’, in: Abusch, T., & van der Toorn, K., eds., Mesopotamian magic: Textual, historical, and intepretative perspectives, Groningen: Styx, pp. 3-34. |
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African witchcraft, virtuality, and the kinship order van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2001a, ‘Witchcraft in modern Africa as virtualised boundary conditions of the kinship order’, in : Bond, G.C., & Ciekawy, D.M., eds., Witchcraft dialogues: Anthropological and philosophical exchanges, Athens (Ohio): University of Ohio Press, pp. 212-263 |
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| Black
Athena Ten Years After Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ed, Black Athena: Ten Years After, special issue, Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, volumes XXVIII-XXIX/ 1996-1997, ISBN 90-72067-07-X, 272 pp; currently being reprinted in a greatly augmented and updated version as: Black Athena Alive, Berlin/Muenster: LIT |
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proceed to the Shikanda portal in order to access all other websites by Wim van Binsbergen: general (intercultural philosophy, African Studies); ethnicity-identity-politics; Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate; Ancient Models of Thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory; sangoma consultation; literary work |
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| site established 7-4-99 with technical assistance from Vincent van Binsbergen; page last modified: 11-09-07 21:16:35 | ||||
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