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- Paper, joint conference ‘The Deep
History of Stories’, organised by The International Association for
Comparative Mythology and The Traditional Cosmology Society,
Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom, 28-30 August 2007
- by Wim van Binsbergen
- (African Studies Centre, Leiden / Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus
University Rotterdam)
- binsbergen@ascleiden.nl
- revised and expanded version, 9 September 2007
- © 2007 Wim van Binsbergen
- This presentation is available at the following URL:
- http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/edinburgh.htm
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- I am indebted to the African Studies Centre, Leiden, for funding my
participation in the present conference, and the extensive research on
which the present paper is based; to Emily Lyle in her capacity as
convenor; to Stephen Oppenheimer for highly illuminating feed-back both
at the conference and in private; to Mark Isaak, without whose
painstaking inventory of flood stories worldwide, and generous
collaboration, I could never have undertaken the multivariate
statistical analysis on which my argument is partly based; to Bambang
Sugiharto, for sharing with me
the issues of this paper and related research, and for inviting me to
present a highly positive general
assessment of the Sunda thesis (but without the comparative-mythological
application) before his Department of Philosophy, Parahyangan Catholic
University, Bandung, Indonesia, August 2007 – the present paper has
greatly benefited from the audience’s discussion in that connection; to
my PhD student Stephanus Djunatan, a Bandung lecturer, who – decades
after I vainly specialised in Indonesian studies, among other fields
(only to materialise as an Africanist from 1971 onwards) – , recently created
a context in which I could gather first-hand experiences of Indonesian
culture and thus bring – albeit to a minimal extent – the Sunda thesis
to life before my very eyes; to
Michael Witzel, for offering, ever since 2003, a highly stimulating
context in which the ideas underlying my current research could come to
fruition and receive expert critical feedback; to Steve Farmer, for constantly
and with his characteristic grace reminding me of the many pitfalls of
long-range research into comparative mythology; to the Nkoya people of
western central Zambia, who ever since 1972 have been the mainstay of my
ethnographic, historical and intercultural-philosophical work, and who
by adopting me into their midst have afforded me detailed and convincing
perspectives on the practical reality of a Sunda-related community in
the heart of Africa – even though it took me more than thirty years before
I could begin to see them in this light; to Yuri Berezhin, for advising
me on mapping of statistical material, and for suggesting one crucial
addition to my analysis of Judaeo-Christian-Islamic myth in the Sunda
context; to Fred Woudhuizen, my partner in Sea Peoples research, where
many of the issues of the present argument came to the fore; to the
Assyriological Study Group on Magic and Religion in the Ancient Near
East (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and
Social Sciences (NIAS), Wassenaar, 1994-95), for expertly initiating me
to many of the themes of the present argument; and to Patricia
Saegerman, my sparring partner in daily discussions on this central
topic of my research over the past few years.
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- Can we identify, with any justifiable claim to scientific
- validity and reliability, the ‘deep history of stories’,
- across vast stretches of space and time (i.e. across
- continents, and several millennia) – in other words in
- a long-range perspective?
- On what kinds of data, and what methologies, can we call
- to substantiate such claims?
- How can we argue the competitive plausibility of rival reconstructions
of such ‘deep history of stories’?
- In global long-range studies, can we become aware of, and avoid, such
biases (e.g. Eurocentrism, North-Atlanticism, racialism) as reflect our
own geopolitical and historical position, e.g. as inhabitants of an
ephemerally dominant part of the world seeking (with less and less
success) to maintain its hegemony over the other continents and their
human populations?
- These are – as our present conference has already amply demonstrated –
some of the core questions of comparative mythology today. They are also
central to the present paper, in which I will try to come to terms with
one, particularly courageous and inspiring, recent reconstruction of the
deep history of stories: Stephen Oppenheimer’s argument in his book Eden
in the East: The drowned continent of Southeast Asia (1998). (click here
for the present paper’s bibliography)
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- Here he develops at length and (although the book is primarily meant for
the general reader) with considerable sophistication two connected
theses:
- In the more recent cultural history of Anatomically Modern Humans
(AMHs), out-migration (7.5 to 5.5 ka BP) from the Sunda plateau (now
insular South East Asia, increasingly drowned because of the melting of
the polar caps) has been a decisive factor
- While eastbound Sunda out-migration populated Oceania, westbound Sunda
outmigration had a major impact on South and West Asia, the Ancient Near
East and the eastern Mediterranean basin, in that it brought from
Sundaland the core mythologies of the Ancient Near East, including those
making up the first chapters of Genesis: creation, paradise, the fall of
man, the first murder, the flood.
- My aim in this paper is to put Oppenheimer’s two theses in perspective
and argue their continued relevance:
- of the first thesis, as a candidate for addition to mainstream models of cultural pre- and
protohistory
- of the second thesis, as a timely invitation to further sharpen our
theoretical and methodological tools in comparative mythology.
- Oppenheimer’s 1998 book was written over a decade ago, and of course his
own work and related studies by others have progressed in the meantime.
Although that is a source of rejoicing, it is not too relevant in the
present context. My primary aim is to argue the continued relevance even
of the 1998 book, and to further its (critical) reception within the
circles of comparative mythology, where it deserves to have a greater
impact than so far despite its minor setbacks such as an anachronistic
reliance on Frazer (1918).
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- In the background a number of relevant themes should be mentioned:
- After the heyday of diffusionism in anthropology 1850-1925 (when lack of
a theory of culture allowed scholars to contemplate the worldwide
peregrinations of isolated traits without a perspective on local
function, integration and transformation), the dominant paradigm in that
discipline has been that of local, and locally integrated, fragmentation
of human culture into ethnic groups, nations etc., so that any
long-range perspective has been anathema (cf. Amselle 2001; despite the
neo-diffusionism of recent globalisation studies); claiming a deep
history of stories unfortunately still means going against the grain of
mainstream anthropology. Not himself an anthropologist, Oppenheimer
unflinchingly and refreshingly (though anachronistically) does just
that:
- …my analysis of folklore links —
building on Frazer's pioneering work — confirms a prehistoric East-West
connection and provides a logical basis for the original meaning of
much Western myth and folklore. (Oppenheimer 2001: xiiif; my italics ).
- The tremendous advances in genetics since the 1980s (Cann et al. 1987;
Forster 2004; Oppenheimer 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2004d; Hill et al. 2006;
and the literature cited there) have afforded us a much more detailed
and grounded perceptive on the movements and ramifications of
Anatomically Modern Humans (AMHs) over the past 200 ka, -- and it is
AMHs that we consider the owners of stories par excellence. These
developments are at the heart of Eden in the East:
- … the new genetic evidence I shall present shows that
Polynesian-speaking people began their great Pacific dispersal from
Southeast Asia, not China. (Oppenheimer 2001: xiiif; my italics ).
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- Scholars’ increasing awareness, in the second half of the 20th century,
of the distorting influences which hegemony and Eurocentrism exert on
the global production of knowledge (cf. Said’s Orientalism debate;
Bernal’s Black Athena debate (1987-); Mudimbe’s Invention of Africa (1987);
postcolonial theory in the work of Spivak, Bhabha, etc. Oppenheimer does
not today consciously identify as anti-Eurocentrist, and scarcely seems
aware that such an epithet could be meant as an accolade of honour; yet
his 1998 stance is implicitly anti-Eurocentrist: in his opinion
Sundaland, a South East Asian periphery, is nothing less than the source
of [the elements of] Western civilisation
- ‘In this book I describe my own exploration and analysis of the
evidence for the peoples of the lost continent who fertilised the great
cultures not only of the Far East but the Middle and Near East as well
[ and, as Oppenheimer stresses elsewhere, substantial parts of Africa –
WvB ] over 7000 years ago, and provided Eurasia with its library of
folklore. (…) I believe that I am the first to argue for Southeast Asia
as the source of the elements of Western civilisation. ’ (Oppenheimer
2001: xiii).
- In comparative mythology, a characteristic recent advance is exemplified
in the type of work of Michael Witzel (2001 and in press1):
- World mythology offers insights, in its own right, into the ancient
history of AMHs, and is thus complementary to genetics, linguistics,
archaeology and comparative anthropology
- These insights (far from being mere figments of the imagination imposed
on the impenetrable mists of deep time: Farmer) reveal not a fragmented
and disorderly chaos of mythical themes, but a sustained process of
global proportions, albeit that a few fundamental cleavages may be
discerned in that process (e.g. Witzel’s proposal to distinguish
between Laurasian and Gondwanan mythologies)
- My own recent work in comparative mythology is greatly indebted to this
approach although it takes some critical distance (van Binsbergen 2006;
in press1 and in preparation1, 2)
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- We live by the stories we tell about reality, and that is the case
- not only for other people’s mythologies and for the clearly narrative
elements in our personal lives,
- but also for our products of scholarship – the latter are primarily
narratives (cf. van Peursen 1992; van Binsbergen 2003b), albeit
narratives subjected (e.g. in conferences such as the present one) to
systematic methodologies and public and collective critical scrutiny
aimed at the creation of professional intersubjectivity, both within
and across disciplines
- In other words, as narratives
about reality, our scientific arguments are not inherently untrue (just
like, contrary to contemporary usage especially in the social sciences
and in journalism, ‘myths’ are not inherently untrue), but yet they are
(as modern philosophical thought has reminded us, from Kant to Gadamer)
inevitably incomplete and distortive representations of reality, not to
be mistaken for reality itself. And like all narratives, such scientific
narratives have their own saving grace, as well as their own dangers. We
may try to reach some agreement as to what could make our scientific
arguments come somewhat closer to reality, but the positivistic dream of
absolute scientific truth (and of absolute scientific untruth) implied
in Farmer’s (2007) devastating deconstruction of long-range comparative
mythology, is in itself another obsolete and fundamentalist myth and
nothing more.
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- Wat justifies long-range comparative mythology’s claim to being
scientific, whilst inevitably being mythical at the same time, is the
combination of
- Painstakingly collected empirical evidence (even thugh this is
invariably shaped by our underlying paradigms anyway),
- theory (which is usually predicated, positively or negatively, on
the current paradigms of a particularly scientific discipline,
and
- a critical reflexion on method
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- Stephen Oppenheimer’s work, precisely because of its scientific
qualities, is excellent as a demonstration of these three interlocking
concerns of comparative mythology. Therefore it is incomparably better
than most work in the Gothic history of claims of intercontinental
cultural continuity:
- Tylor, Frobenius, Elliot Smith, Perry, Baumann, Heyerdahl, etc. – as
far as once-mainstream anthropology is concerned;
- Afrocentrism and Black Athena
(Bernal 1987 etc.; Lefkowitz & McLean Rogers; van Binsbergen 1997
(webpage) / pdf and in press2; Berlinerblau 1999), for the (rightly)
anti-Eurocentrist but (wrongly) monocentrist variant yet claiming –
with varying success – the trappings of modern scholarship. Oppenheimer
is not dogmatic about monocentrism, and ultimately suggests a
potentially multicentric intercontinental network, yet he does have
strong lapses into monocentrism:
- ‘My journey told in this book started with a chance comment by an old
man in a Stone Age village in Papua New Guinea. It took me from the
rather technical considerations of human genes and malaria in that
island to a realisation that dispersals of Southeast Asian coastal
cultivators and sailors followed a succession of post-glacial floods,
and led to the cultural fertilisation of the rest of Eurasia. Echoes
of this are still detectable in the West in such ancient texts as the
Epic of Gilgamesh and the first ten chapters of Genesis. Themes from
these myths still permeate the whole corpus of literature from ancient
to modern.
- And what remains of
Southeast Asia today can only give us a glimpse of the Eden that once
was.’ (Oppenheimer 2001: 485; my italics)
- […SE Asia as, no less than ] ‘the source of the elements of Western
civilisation’ (pp. xiiif; my italics )
- and a whole suffocating and alarmingly proliferating literature on
Atlantis, Mu, etc. for New Age and its antecedents from Plato; cf.
Blavatsky, Churchward, Temple, etc.
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- I have the greatest admiration for Oppenheimer’s tour de force in his
1998 book, which largely (though not entirely) steers clear from these
unsatisfactory approaches. Of his two main theses
- I will greatly welcome, and adopt, one (the overall Sunda thesis, for
which I will even indicate additional evidence; also cf. van Binsbergen
2007),
- whilst however largely rejecting the other (Oppenheimer’s application
of the Sunda thesis to the core mythologies of the Ancient Near East
including the first chapters of Genesis),
- and such partial rejection again will be based not on my opinionated
likes or dislikes, or on some ideological stance that could have brought
me to consider the primacy of Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical
narratives as sacrosanct (as could be the case if I were a believer in
the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition of world religions, or a
Eurocentrist – but I am neither),
- but on painstaking, multivariate statististical analysis
- of the kind that regrettably may carry little weight in the
predominantly Humanities context of current comparative mythology,
- but on which also the whole edifice of modern genetics is based – and
Oppenheimer is a geneticist
- And which incidentally constitutes a major concrete example (although
overlooked by Farmer 2007) of the latter’s claim to the effect that new
tools now allow us to produce better comparative mythology (although
even such a tool does not allow us to break entirely out of the vicious
circle to the effect that even a science of myth inevitably has
mythical aspects).
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- Being trained in mainstream anthropology in the 1960s meant
internalising a fragmenting socio-cultural paradigm, that stressed
socio-political relations over religion and myth, and that presented
ethnic groups as closed within a local and presentist horizon, so that
the world appeared as a patchwork quilt of essentially autonomous and
unrelated ‘cultures’. Long-range approaches, of whatever vintage or
level of sophistication, only deserved to be ridiculed.
- In the course of my main fieldwork projects from 1968 on (popular Islam,
Tunisia; Christian churches, Zambia, 1972- ; urban-rural relations,
kingship and spirit mediumship in
Zambia, 1972-; healing cults in Guinea Bissau, 1981- ; urban culture and
spirit mediumship, Botswana, 1988-
), and my extensive writings based on such research, I more and
more steered away from that oppressive and myopic paradigm, becoming a
specialist in African religion and in myth analysis. Finally (1998) I
even shifted from anthropology to intercultural philosophy in the
process – not only in criticism of neo-classic modern anthropology’s
stance vis-à-vis long-range approaches, but also on more general
epistemological grounds, in which the global politics of knowledge (and
my anti-Eurocentrist, anti-hegemonic preferences there) have played a
major role (van Binsbergen 2003).
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- Meanwhile I had become more and more of a long-range cultural historian
myself, searching for far-reaching connections in ever increasing
stretches of space and time, gradually extending into proto-history and
prehistory – until my work of the last few years, in search of empirical
grounds for my philosophical position stressing the fundamental unity in
thought and conceptualisation of present-day humankind, brought me to
consider the unfolding of the earliest mythology of AMHs on the basis of
comparative mythology projected onto recent genetics. (van Binsbergen
2006, and in press1). Earlier stages in this process, partly still in
the process of publication, entailed a painstaking comparative
historical study of divination systems (especially geomancy) and board
games (especially mankala) worldwide; other formal systems such as those
underlying the nomenclature of clans and astronomical items worldwide;
the worldwide symbolism (and its amazingly converging lexical
expressions) of speckledness and scattering as found, especially, in
leopard-skin symbolism ; and the ethnicity of the Sea Peoples, who
destroyed the Hittite empire and seriously threatened Egypt at the end
of the Bronze Age, thus creating the conditions for ‘the rise of the
West’ – for the culture of Greece, Carthage and Rome to become dominant,
– which it has remained, more or less, till today (Woudhuizen 2006; van
Binsbergen & Woudhuizen, in press; cf. van Binsbergen 1997b).
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- All these projects presented virtually insurmountable problems to me
(the reason why some of them are still in the process of publication):
- Not because of any lack of data suggestive of long-range connections –
these turned out to abound if I only could shed the localist paradigm in
which I had been educated
- And not only because my mainstream anthropological / Africanist
colleagues did not like them (Amselle 2001)
- But mainly because of my personal lack of an overall interpretative
framework that could encompass the many long-range strands I began to
perceive, and ground them intersubjectively and even interdisciplinarily
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- Here I believe I found a satisfactory solution in the combination of
two, by now widely accepted, ideas I borrowed from archaeology and
genetics:
- The distinction (Sokal & Menozzi. 1982, Cavalli-Sforza &
Ammermann, Barbujani, Renfrew etc.), between
- demic diffusion (where cultural items are carried along by population
movements; the idea to link comparative mythology to demic diffusion of
specific genetic types was first suggested to me by Villems 2005),
- and (non-demic but merely) cultural diffusion (where spread of cultural
items is through inter-population communication without specific
population movement being implied or required)
- A perspective I have shared with, among others, Michael Witzel and Yuri
Berezhin (in this conference) and with Richard Villems (2005): The more
detailed scenario of the Out-of-Africa movement of AMHs (needless to say
that the title of the present paper is a pun on ‘Out of Africa’):
- Emergence and intra-Africa percolation and cultural grown, c. 200-80 ka
BP
- Out of Africa exodus to West Asia, c. 80 ka BP
- First sally from West Asia, due to climatic conditions and
Neanderthaloid presence unable to expand except in a narrow estbound
path along the Indian Ocean coast and reaching Australia / New Guinea,
but largely abortive as far as the population of Asia and other
continents is concerned, 80-60 ka BP
- Second sally from West Asia to the rest of the world, c. 60 ka BP;
possibly cultural exchanges with Neanderthaloids, who due to climatic
deterioration (onset of last glacial) and possibly the inroads of AMHs
with greater adaptability, disappeared by 30 ka BP
- Non-demic cultural diffusion of African (largely pre-Out of Africa)
traits up North and North East, into Europe and West and Central Asia,
from as soon as AMHs appeared in the latter regions
- Venture into the New World, from Central Asia, no earlier than 30 ka BP
- Back into Africa movement from Central Asia via West Asia, and skirting
Europe, as from c. 15 ka BP.
- Since my entire argument is based on this scenario, I will have to
devote the next ten slides to a summary of that scenario, largely based
on the geneticist Forster (2004), but in my own adaptation. Point of
departure is the present-day global distribution of mitochondrial DNA
types – the practically indestructible genetic material that passes
unaltered from mother to child, and that in this intergenerational
transmission is only affected by mutations such as state-of-the-art
molecular biology can detect and locate with unprecedented precision.
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- On the next slides I present seven maps that sum up the genetic and
geographical history of AMH at the level of mtDNA types..
- The overall maps anda data derive from Forster 2004.
- The Neanderthal distribution derives from: Klein 2003; Cavalli-Sforza et
al. 1994: 61 (their Fig. 2.1.2 reproduced here), after Giacobini
and Mallegni 1989 and
Vandermeersch 1989.
- My own additions consists in the following:
- highlighting cultural non-demic diffusion of traits from Pandora’s Box
up N and NE from as soon as AMHs reached W Asia, N Africa and S Europ
- presenting the dynamics of the Neanderthal area (in conjunction of the
climatic conditions of which these dynamics are an indication) as a
possible postulated influence on the delayed expansion of AMH;
- the distinction between Sally I and Sally II from West Asia (with a time
lag of c. 20 ka), and the high dating of Sally I at 80 ka BP, and further adjustments in
Forster’s dating
- singling out the Back-to-Africa migration process; and
- highlighting the global significance of mtDNA type B (slides below,
purple circles with continuous or dotted lines)
- rejecting the idea that Sunda expansion to Madagascar was primarily
across the high seas, instead of through litoral navigation
- and in general postulating a modified and expanded Sunda westbound
pattern, all along the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf and Red Sea, along the
Atlantic coasts of Africa and Europe, and even into the Mediterranean
(cf. van Binsbergen 2007 in constructive reflection upon Oppenheimer
1998; also cf. Dick-Read 2005; more extensive discussion below).
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- (a) 200-80 ka BP
- AMH exclusively in Africa, with mtDNA type L1
- Neanderthals installed in SW Eurasia, c. 100 ka BP:
- In this period the mythological contents of Pandora’s Box is established
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- The 'Back into Africa' migration seems to be one of the constituent
factors of
- Africa's four language families today (Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan,
Niger-Congo
- and Khoi-San) – in other words, the demic flow from Central and West
Asia
- from the Later Upper Palaeolithic
onward suggests a considerable Asian
- contribution to these languages; hence some authors (Kaiser, M. & V.
Shevoroshkin, 1988, ‘Nostratic’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 17,
309-29) have included them under Super-Nostratic. However, Africanists
including African linguists tends to work with the geopolitical
assumption of ‘Africa for the Africans’, and would consider a claim of
massive Asian influence on presennt cultural and linguistic patterns in
Africa little short of racism. As come Chinese critics have
demonstrated, one runs into the same difficulty when one seeks to
explain the whole of world mythology out of the original Pandora’s Box,
which inevitably was based in Africa. Our present attachment to the
geopolitics of continents is very much a construct of the last two
centuries, and cannot be essentialised in the face of a technologies of
locomotion (even those of hunter-gatherers moving on foot) that have
always contained the possibility of intercontinental exchanges. Meanwhile the specific admixture of Asian and
palaeo-African elements towards the present-day linguistic pattern in Africa
remains a puzzle.
- The diagrams underplay the geographical scope and the relative impact of
this 'Back into Africa’ migration (e.g., there is no indication of its
effect in the Southern half of the African continent, where Niger-Congo
speakers are now dominant, and where all Khoi-San speakers are found, as
minorities deriving from a mixture between Africans on the one hand, and
on the other hand West Asian ancestors who left for Africa c. 10 ka BP
(Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994; Semino et al. 2002).
- Yet do note the relative
stability, from a genetic perspective, of the Southwestern half of the
African continent – despite massive linguistic, cultural and
mythological change in the most recent tens of ka, yet a possible basis
for Frobenius‘ (1954) 'pristine Africa’, where, in a general east-west
movement across the African continent, shamanistic / possession /
affliction cults only penetrated very late if at all, and where ancient
sculpturing traditions have been retained. For years I have tended to
follow Frobenius in this interpretation, but recently, exploring the
amazing potential of the general Sunda thesis, I have begun to wonder if
this southwestern half of Africa is not simply the part where Sunda
influence is particularly strong – bringing artistic conventions (in
sculpture and music) that therefore do not go back to Pandora’s Box, but
at best to 7 ka BP and probably much less. However, the interpretation
is tricky because there are also indications that cults of affliction
such as the West African voodoo complex are considerably indebted to
Sunda (see below).
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- The analytical power of the combination of (1) the distinction between
demic and non-demic cultural diffusion and (2) the application of the
Out-of-Africa perspective to comparative mythology lies in the fact that
--
- to the extent (considerable, but never full) to which we may assume
cultural diffusion to have been based on demic diffusion !
- and to the extent to which forms attested in historical times may be
projected back into the remote past !; i.e. the moot point of the
permissibility of the comparative-mythological equivalent of mass
comparison as opposed to the comparison of reconstructed protoforms, in
historical linguistics
- to the extent to which the complexity and heterogeneity of myriads of
individual mythemes may be aggregated under a few dozen ‘Narrative
Complexes’
- to the extent (which, in the context of the present argument, I take to
be very considerable, but which of course would have to be argued in
every individual case) to which face-value similarity between mythical
forms may be taken as an indication of a genuine traceable historical
association, and not just of independent parallel invention
- and to the extent we have an explanation for long-term retention and
transmission of cultural items across tens of ka! (e.g. stone tool
industries, and the hundreds of AMHs’ cultural universals detected;
could initiation cults be the answer? Or environmental determinism?
Neurobiology? Or – flat against the very foundations of the social
sciences – perhaps a tendency for culture to become somewhat hereditary
after tens of ka??? ...
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- ....tendency for culture to become somewhat hereditary after tens of
ka???)
- To the (admittedly, never full) extent then to which these five
conditions are met, the combination of (1) and (2) allows us to read
even present-day world distribution diagrams of ethnographic traits,
mythemes, other formal cultural systems
- as if they were clearly
calibrated on a time scale, for instance:
- if a trait today occurs in all continents in other words appears to be
a cultural universal (e.g. the presence of kinship terminology, string
figures, or the mytheme stressing the Earth as the ultimate source of
all life), and if we have a convincing argument to exclude modern
diffusion, then we may postulate that that trait was part of the
original cultural package (‘Pandora’s Box’, I termed it) with which
AMHs left Africa 80-60 ka BP
- if a trait occurs in the New World and throughout Eurasia (but only
patchily in sub-Saharan Africa)
but not in Australia and New Guinea, it cannot have been in
Pandora’s Box, but is likely to be an innovation emerged in C Asia c.
30 ka BP, and from there spread both to the New World (from perhaps 25
ka BP on), and (in the process of the Back into Africa migration, from
c. 15 ka BP on; Hammer et al. 1998; Cruciani et al. 2002) to
sub-Saharan Africa, in a
feedback process that complements, and partly obscures, the original
(though not unchanging) contents of Pandora’s Box left behind in Africa
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- On previous conferences of our Harvard Round Table / International
Association of Comparative Mythology, and in publications (partly in
press and in preparation) based on those exchanges, I have developed
this model in some detail, into an ‘aggregative, diachronic approach to
world mythology’ across all continents and 80 ka.
- According to that model,
- a handful of identifiable initial mythological traits in Pandora’s Box
in sub-Saharan Africa
- were taken to Asia – and beyond, even ultimately back into Africa – on
the wings of demic diffusion,
- and on their way underwent very substantial (and to a certain extent,
reconstructible) transformations and innovations,
- proliferating into a few dozen of Narrative Themes (or coherent
complexes of mythemes) such as are more or less familiar from
comparative mythology
- such proliferation especially took place in the context of less than a
dozen Contexts of Intensified Transformation and Innovation – CITIs,
which are fairly well identified in time and space (see last slide) and
which largely coincide with the contexts in which new modes of
production and new (macro-) linguistic families can be argued to have
emerged.
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- (a) distinguished 2005-2006 before global flood myth analysis (basis for
next two slides)
- NarCom1 Separation heaven earth
- NarCom2 Reconnection heaven earth
- NarCom3 What is in heaven
- NarCom4 Lightning bird and World egg
- NarComS Mantis
- NarCom6 Rescue from ogre
- NarCom7 From the mouth
- NarCom8 The stones
- NarCom9 The moon
- NarCom10 The earth
- NarCom11 Primal waters and the flood
- NarCom12 From the tree
- NarCom13 Cosmic rainhow snake
- NarCom14 Duality Two children Twins
- NarCom15 Spider and feminine arts
- NarCom16 Shamanism /hones
- NarCom17 Spottedness / leopard
- NarCom18 Honey bees (honey-)beer
- NarCom19 Cosmogonic virgin et her lover son
- NarCom20 Contradictory messenyers bring death
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- This model constitutes my personal theory of the Deep (or rather,
Long-range) History of Stories. This model is not specifically under discussion
here, but admittedly it does set the theoretical and empirical background
to the rest of this paper. Meanwhile I can only stress its provisional
and over-ambitious nature, the huge empirical and methodological
difficulties entailed, and its dependence on interdisciplinary
borrowing, which almost inevitably lags several decades behind. And
while endorsed by some
participants in these conferences, the model was also considerably
doubted by some, notably on the following counts:
- Some disliked the pride of place given to Africa as the ultimate source of AMHs’
mythologies (criticism made by several Chinese interlocutors, Beijing,
2006; in order to answer this criticism, we will have to wait for an
Out-of-China alternative to the Out-of-Africa theory)
- Others disliked the reliance on demic diffusion and hence on
state-of-the-art (but contested) reconstruction models in genetics (criticism
made by Michael Witzel, Beijing, 2006; however, I cannot see how
comparative mythology is to benefit – as Witzel himself proposes – from
recent advances in population genetics without a recourse to demic
diffusion)
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- My own virtual rejection of Witzel’s – in my opinion somewhat
essentialising and hegemonic – Laurasian / Gondwana distinction, and
instead my insistence, for historical times including the present, on
massive mythological, and general cultural, continuity between
sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of Eurasia, has constituted a point
repeatedly contested between Michael Witzel and myself; e.g. Witzel 2005
and in press); meanwhile, I have argued such continuity for many
Narrative Complexes / mythemes in considerable detail
- The fact (Steve Farmer, 2005) that demic diffusion, however important
for the world cultural history of AMHs up to the Neolithic, simply
cannot account for the unmistakable and highly complex, possibly
intercontinental processes of non-demic cultural diffusion, which upset
(‘contaminate’, in Farmer’s apt choice of words) the neat systematic
applecart of demic diffusion, by cutting across such global distribution
processes as were specifically and identifiably tied to the spread of
the genetic subgroups of AMHs (e.g. in terms of mtDNA Types – see
Forster 2004 and above) across the earth.
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- The last phrase, appropriately italicised, finally answers the question
as to why I like Oppenheimer’s Sunda thesis so much:
- Cultural diffusion from South Easts Asia / Indonesia after the onset of
the Holocene (Oppenheimer’s Sunda expansion) turns out to be the single
most important factor of relatively recent (proto-Neolithic and later)
cultural contamination (through mere cultural, non-demic diffusion),
cutting across the predominantly demic diffusion attending the
proliferation of world mythology (and other post-Out of Africa cultural
traits) in earlier periods up to the Mesolithic.
- So, thanks to Stephen Oppenheimer, we may now add one more major step to
the seven major steps recognised above for the cultural history of AMHs:
- Emergence and intra-Africa percolation and cultural grown, c. 200-80 ka
BP
- Out of Africa exodus to West Asia, c. 80 ka BP
- First sally from West Asia, due to climatic conditions and
Neanderthaloid presence unable to expand except in a narrow estbound
path along the Indian Ocean coast and reaching Australia / New Guinea,
but largely abortive as far as the population of Asia and other
continents is concerned, 80-60 ka BP
- Second sally from West Asia to the rest of the world, c. 60 ka BP;
possibly cultural exchanges with Neanderthaloids, who due to climatic
deterioration (onset of last glacial) and possibly the inroads of AMHs
with greater adaptability, disappeared by 30 ka BP
- Non-demic cultural diffusion of African (largely pre-Out of Africa)
traits up North and North East, into Europe and West and Central Asia,
from as soon as AMHs appeared in the latter regions
- Venture into the New World, from Central Asia, no earlier than 30 ka BP
- Back into Africa movement from Central Asia via West Asia, and skirting
Europe, as from c. 15 ka BP.
- Sunda outmigration, c. 7.5-5.5 ka BP.
- Therefore, to our series of maps setting out the scenario of AMHs’ mtDNA
scenario, we have to add the following:
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- In the mythological field, Oppenheimer’s principal application of the
Sunda model is to the core mythologies of the Ancient Near East, which,
as we know, were relatively recently (from 2.5 ka BP on) enshrined in
the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition (Genesis 1-12 and its less
extensive Qur’anic counterparts – oldest tangible attestation in
manuscripts from the 5th c. CE until the discovery of the Dead Sea
scrolls from around the beginning of the Common Era); but the first
textual and iconographic attestations of these ANE core mythologies are
much older, and date from nearly 5 ka BP.
- In the trappings of these world religions, and as a result of the
latter’s proselytisation, these ANE core mythologies found world-wide
distribution especially in the course of the 2nd mill. CE.
- So we might be tempted to jump to conclusions (particularly if we are
dismissively sceptical of long-large comparative mythology anyway;
Farmer 2007), and suggest that all evidence of that cycle, wherever in
the world, can be explained away as resulting from recent
Judaeo-Christian-Islamic proselytising.
- Such a facile argument would run counter to Oppenheimer’s – for it would
no longer need the Sunda thesis;
- it would also do violence to the very extensive world distribution of
flood stories, and of the firm mathematical features of that
distribution, as we shall shortly see.
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- Much to our relief, Oppenheimer has not been the only serious scholar to
claim a westbound general cultural influence from Sundaland/ South East
Asia in pre- and protohistoric times.
- The nautical historian Hornell (1934) already stressed ‘Indonesian
influences on East African culture’, and so did, with very detailed
musicological evidence especially on xylophones, the musicologist Jones
(1964).
- Frobenius (the leading German Africanist in the first quarter of the 20th
century, and a reliable fieldworker although, inevitably, obsolete if
judged by the standards of today) convincingly stressed (1931) the
coherence of a ‘South-Erythraean’ culture area stretching from the
Ancient Near East to Zimbabwe and the Indus, but did not perceive a
possible Sunda factor there.
- Swahili and Malagasy studies (Prins 1967; Neville, Chittick &
Rotberg 1975; de Vere Allen 1992; Knappert 1970; Middleton 1991; Nurse
& Spear 1985; Vérin 1975,
1989, 1990; de Flacourt 1661 / 1903-1920; Ferrand 1891-1902, 1910; Reade
1996; Dahl 1991; Beaujard 1983, 1991; Ellis 1838; Deschamps 1960; Bloch
1986; Valette 1965; Birkeli 1936 ; Dick-Read 2005; Kent 1970; however
cf. Raison-Jourde 1994 for a disclaimer reiterating the standard
anti-diffusionist paradigm) have done much to further explore this
dimension. Here the possibility and extent of Indonesian influence not
only on Madagascar and the Comores Isl.
but also on mainland East Africa,
and even South Central and West Africa, remained a moot point – with
Birkeli and Kent as despised pioneers claiming Indonesian settlement
(royal courts, specifically) not just on Madagascar and the Comores but
also on mainland Africa.
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- My own decades of research,
including extensive and repeated fieldwork, among the Nkoya people of
Zambia (Fig. 7, second next slide, 1977), and adoption into one of their
royal family (Fig. 2, 2003), have convinced me – albeit only in the last
few years, now that my research has extended to this kind of long-range
problematic – of the extensive Indonesian traits especially attending
their kingship (van Binsbergen 1992, 1993, and web reports 2006 and 2007).The
following traits suggests Sunda connotations that in each individual
case could be wholly accidental, yet the overall picture is very
suggestive of a positive link.
- with a royal xylophone orchestra as central sign of identity (Fig. 5,
1977)
- royal names like Mangala and Shikanda / Skanda which lack a Bantu
etymology and are effectively South or S E Asian: Mangala = ‘Tuesday’,
and Shikanda / Skanda is the divine protagonist in core texts of
Hinduism: the Skanda Purana and the Mahabharata
- a common and widespread gipsy name like Kale (Smith & Dale 1920; as
a gypsy name this is wisesporead in Eurasia and means ‘black one’) /
Kahale for a major Nkoya dynasty
- which in historical traditions is emphatically associated with
metallurgy
- with an Indo-Aryan etymology (*gabhasti-, ‘forked carriage pole, hand’) for
the name of the mythical king Kapesh who sought to build a tower into
heaven out of forked branches (Fig. 4),
- extensive traditions of a remote though unspecified origin in the east
(‘the land of Kola’),
- many details of ceremonial royal court culture (squatting hunching and
clapping, only the king deserves to sit, Fig. 6, 1995; foundation human
sacrifices (now extinct) for royal drums, fence and palace; human
sacrifice (now extinct) for royal burial – corps rests on skulls, cf.
Marquesas custom -- Ions 1980: 294; pointed poles for royal fence;
annual court festival, etc.
- signs of a royal buffalo cult (Fig. 1, 1973)
- royal monopoly over circumcision (now locally extinct; van Binsbergen 1992,
1993))
- great symbolic emphasis on reed and reed matting (Fig. 2, 8 -- 1977)
- great symbolic emphasis on mead, in parallel with Madagascar (Beaujard
1994), the Celtic peoples, the S Asian mythical theme of Varuni / Mada,
and the Egyptian bee complex –
all of these could be argued to be in the proposed Sunda
trajectory.
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- Also the Nkoya’s eastern
neighbours, the Ila (Smith & Dale 1920), who have many traits
in common with the Nkoya and in many respects are indistinguishable from
the eastern Nkoya or Mashasha, must be regarded as a Sunda-associated
people, with salient traits such as headhunting and large
clay-reinforced coiffures with Melanesian parallels (Blackwood 1935).
Among the neighbouring Gwembe Tonga, still in the postulated Sunda path,
we find (but this is admittedly a very far shot indeed) the puzzling Bene-Kokalia (Colson
1960), without a clear Bantu etymology, but reminiscent of the legendary
Sicilian king Kokalus who according to Ancient Greek myth offered
shelter to Daedalus when the latter fled his master Minos. Kokalus could
be linked to Proto-Austric: *KVk (V = unspecified vowel), e.g.
Proto-Thai: kok, ‘reed’, which does not seem to have Borean, Eurasiatic
or Afroasiatic cognates (Tower of Babel). Both in Ancient Egypt
(earliest temple architecture persisting in later ornamental patterns,
and the royal titulature, nswt-bit, ‘The One of the Reed and the
Bee’, and reed-mat burials) and among the Nkoya (mythical apical
ancestress Katete, ‘Reed person’; reed fence and mat as central
ancestral place; King Kahare posing in style -- second next slide Fig. 9
-- holding a rolled reed mat in reminiscence of how his people left the
Zambezi flood plain carrying reed mats – containing ancestral relics?
etc.) there is a reed complex constitutive of central historical
identity. Als cf. van Binsbergen 1992.
- There is very close similarity between Nkoya court culture and that of
their western neighbours, the Lozi / Barotse / Luyi; here, a sacred boat
(Nalikwanda; Fig. 3 (1958); source) is the central emblem of kingship –
somehow like in Ancient Egypt, but perhaps because of a shared
background in Sunda connections.
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- The suggestion that the Nkoya, Ila and Lozi, and particularly their
royal courts, may have Sunda connotations, finds circumstantial support
from the fact that several groups in 19th and early 20th
century Zambia and immediate surroundings (Katanga and the Feira
district, Mozambique) are generally recognised to constitute cultural,
ethnic and linguistic enclaves whose population, or at least whose
chiefs, have come from the east, sometimes as far as the Indian Ocean
coast (Brelsford, W.V., 1965, The tribes of Zambia, Lusaka: Government
Printer, 2nd ed.). The percolation, in the interior of South Central
Africa, of Swahili and Umbundu traders from Indian Ocean and Atlantic
Ocean coast respectively was a common feature in the late19th century
(van Binsbergen 1992 and references cited there), and given their
time-honoured technology of locomotion (caravans of pedestrians,
carrying the leaders in ‘sedans’) there is no reason why the same would
not have been the case centuries earlier. In Nkoya oral traditions, much
is made of the arrival of the stranger king whose enchanting musical
band of xylophones – allegedly a total novelty in the area – so
enamoured the local chieftainess that she married him on the spot. A few
hundred kilometres to the southeast, in today’s Zimbabwe, through much
of the second millennium CE, major states with considerable Islamic
influence were the hubs linking intercontinental trade in gold against
textiles and ceramics to regional trade in cattle; there is consensus
that much of the gold available in Indonesia in that period, came from
South Central Africa (Beach 1980 etc.).
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- The Nkoya are conveniently situated in
- the Mozambique/ Angola corridor which I have now come
- to consider as major inroads of Sunda influence in Africa,
- and this corridor region (much of the northern upper part of
- which is taken up by the Lunda empire from the 16th c. CE
- on – the Nkoya kings are peripheral and contested vassals of this
empire, and further exploration of the link Lunda-Sunda (!) seems
worthwile) is, in terms of massive Sunda influence, only comparable with
- the Swahili coast,
- the Cameroonian Grassfields,
- and the Upper Guinea Coast (Bijagos, Felupes, Manjacos etc.).
- These are also the African regions where
- a cult of divine kingship might be
indebted to Sunda influence – although this is probably a much
more widespread and ancient trait of the Back into Africa movement;
- and where – possibly (but see below) also as a Sunda trait – and
(contrary to Frazer’s (1918) widely accepted denial of the occurrence of
flood myths in Africa) flood and tower myths do occur – even though
these are admittedly scarce elsewhere in Africa.
- And one could think of other possibly Sunda-related traits, such as
nautical skills (sail and outrigger); pre-marital sexual freedom of
women especially royals (Frobenius 1931; cf. Herodotus I 199 on sacred
prostitution in the eastern Mediterranean – which is also be an area
given to seafaring and possibly under Sunda influence); throwing-sticks
and boomerangs (however, probably not Sunda-related; see fifth next
slide); hunched statuettes (Lommel; next slide); cults of affliction
(which an extensive literature sees as invading South Central Africa
from the east, and which do have a considerable distribution in the
Indian Ocean region – e.g. van Binsbergen 1981, 2003: ch. 8, Alpers
1984, Giles 1989, Larsen 1998, Kramer 1993 ; male and female genital
mutilation (next 2 slides); headhunting (see fourth next slide), and
megalithic practices (third next slide: partial Sunda interpretation
likely; van Binsbergen in prep.).
- Admittedly, several of these items may not on further scrutiny stand out
as Sunda-related, and all, anyway, conjure up an antiquated, hegemonic
and diffusionist ethnology dangerously close to Elliot Smith and Perry.
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- Recent work by Dick-Read (2005; cf. Ellis 2005), although
impressionistic and somewhat lacking in scholarly rigour, brings
together a host of material establishing Sunda influence on Africa in
the most recent millennia beyond all reasonable doubt.
- What is particularly interesting is that he argues precolonial
continuity of the African trade networks of the Indian and the Atlantic
ocean -- giving the example of cowries (cf. Jackson 1917; Jeffreys
1938), and of a Roman coin from the times of Constantine (300 CE), found
near Buea, Cameroon, but which could only have landed there from the
Indian Ocean, where given the extent of Roman trade (cf. the famous Periplus
navigation manual, early common era) such coins had a wide distribution.
- That navigation around Cape of Good Hope took place in Antiquity has
already been suggested by the Phoenician Hanno’s much-debated report on
(what appears to have been) the circumnavigation of Africa c. 600 BCE.
- Meanwhile Chinese ancient sources have brought to light convincing
evidence that to East Asian mariners after the T’ang dynasty, the shape
of the South African coast had few secrets. And a nearly equally
convincing case can be made for Chinese navigation bowls having been
turned into African divination apparatus, both in South Africa (Venda)
and on the Bight of Benin, at some time in the course of the second
millennium of the common era. (read the external slide indicated, and
the next few slides in the same external location).
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- Tentative distribution map of ancient male genital mutilation and of
hunches statuettes
- Sources: Hastings 1909-1921 s.v. ‘circumcision’; Lommel 1976; and http://www.circumstitions.com/Images/map-mgm66.gif
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- Tentative distribution map of ancient female genital mutilation
- Sources: Hastings 1909-1921 s.v. ‘circumcision’; http://www.circumstitions.com/Images/map-mgm66.gif;
http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/kadi/kadimap.htm; Terre des Femmes /
Genitalverstuemmelung; Hrdy 1987;
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- Death / killing and the human head are both obvious foci of ritual
actions and conceptualisation, so it is not impossible that headhunting
(as the combination of both) has been a parallel invention in various
periods and regions. Yet a look at the global distribution map (van
Binsbergen, in prep., also for sources) suggests, with the exception of
S America, that the distribution is amazingly well interpretable in
terms of the Sunda thesis
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- At first glance, throwing-sticks and boomerangs (assuming they may be
lumped as one type) would appear to provide and excellent Sunda case,
with attestations all along the proposed Sunda trajectory:
- There is the obvious link of the boomerang with Australia
- Gilgamesh loses his throwing stick: it falls into the underworld through
a hole
- Same story among Chewong people,
Malay Peninsula from hunter-gatherers…(Willis 1994: 304): another
sign of the postulated Neolithic/ Bronze Age transcontinental maritime
network; but the indebtedness is not necessarily, not even likely, from
hunter-gathers (Malaysia) to one of the first civilised societies in
world history…(Ancient Mesopotamia), but rather in the reverse
direction. The story is extremely interesting, the Chewong boy descends to the
underworld, learns about night and fire, and brings back the latter in a
reed – exactly like Prometheus, but among Australian Aboriginals elderly
women still have to carry and tend their firesticks from camp to camp in
the 20th c. CE (Tindale c.s. 1978).
- The spinning-woman by the spring, NW Europe (‘Frau Holle’, Grimm,
Aarne-Thompson: AT0480) (the spindle or shuttle is a woman’s implement
par excellence, homologue of the throwing-stick; moreover, the shuttle
is also thrown)
- Thor’s hammer (Ancient NW Europe) is also some kind of throwing stick
- Throwing sticks / boomerangs also in Ancient Libya / Egypt
- An underlying model: The demiurge falls from heaven and, murdered on
earth (often because he is to be eaten as a food crop), falls into the
underworld; this is the model for so many demiurges all over the world
(see van Binsbergen, in prep 2; and 2007c, especially note 27), and is
really another application of the NarCom2: the Re-connection between
heaven and earth
- However (van Binsbergen, in prep., with sources, including Hrdlicka 2004
and Lenoch 1949, cf. Heitmann et al., n.d.) the distribution in space
and time does not support the idea of a Sunda connection
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- With all these cultural items, the emphasis is on non-demic, cultural
diffusion, which does not have a genetic complement but for which
comparative mythology, iconography and ethnography, linguistics and
archaeology may adduce more or less convincing evidence.
- However, the postulated westbound Sunda influence is not exclusively
non-demic, in the sense that sometimes a genetic continuity between
postulated westerly destination areas in Africa and even the
Mediterranean becomes clear even in the genetic material. Here the
evidence is even more extensive than Oppenheimer claimed in 1998:
- in addition to the thalassaemias (hereditary resistance patterns; next
slide) which he does mention,and which do encompass the entire region of
postulated Sunda influence (Indian Ocean, Atlantic Africa, and the
Mediterranean)
- one could cite several other classic genetic markers (see second and
thrid next slides, based on Cavalli-Sforza e.a. 1994),
- as well as the finding (Forster 2004) to the effect that mtDNA type B,
which is the dominant pattern in South East Asia, has also been
demonstrated to have spread all over Oceania and to Madagascar during
the few most recent millennia, as tell-tale signs of Sunda expansion in
all directions
- In all these mutually reinforcing ways the Sunda thesis, whilst having
found it most extensive and passionate formulation with Oppenheimer,
finds a general confirmation. It is high time that we enlist the Sunda
thesis among the few general major processes of the more recent cultural
history of AMHs, as an accepted mechanism to which individual
researchers can take recourse without having to argue it again from
scratch – as has been the case so far.
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- Thalassaemia is a hereditary blood disorder, notably a form of anaemia
which however has the effect of rendering its carrier less susceptible
to malaria. Stephen Oppenheimer conducted fieldwork on this syndrome in
Papua New Guinea in the earely 1980s, and his discoveries in that
connection formed a major inspiration for his exploration of possible
Sunda expansion in Eden in the East. That book contains an illuminating
discussion of thalassaemias (2001: 212ff), with a distribution map.
Interestingly, in sub-Saharan Africa
- beta thalassaemia only
- appears along the Bigh of
- Benin, as another indication
- of possible Sunda influence
- there.
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- We will now consider a number of single genes as possible indications of
the merits of the Extended Sunda Hypothesis, and of the Karst’s
alternative in terms of eastbound Basque expansion
- 1. GC*IF (Cavalli-Sforza 1994: appendix map 26): promising, but does not
deliver: high values in Indonesia and Taiwan and at significant parts of
the Atlantic and Southern coasts of Africa; moreover attestations along
Indian coast, Iran/Iraq, Bab al-Mendheb and Tunisia, and hardly anywhere
else; but unfortunately no highs for the rest of the Mediterranean, or
Europe – where this gene has no noticeable gradient
- 2. HLAB*12 (Cavalli-Sforza 1994: appendix map 43): Manifestly an indicator
of Basquoid connotations, with an high exclusively in Basque country,
and very low values wherever Sunda influence is to be expected – as if
Sunda and Basque were opposite factors
- 3. IGHG1G3*za;b0b1b3b4b5 (Cavalli-Sforza 1994: appendix map 58): promising
but confusing; this world map shows no data for Indonesia, nor are such
data available in the continental maps for this single gene for Asia and
Oceania. Striking is the very high concentration of this gene in New
Guinea, Madagascar, the SE African coast, Uganda, and the Upper Guinea
coast, with further attestations mainly in Africa (especially in the
equatorial forest and the West African savannah), Iran, Australia – and
practically nowhere else. All this is highly compatible with the
Extended Sunda Hypothesis, but one misses SE Asian, S Asian, and
European attestations, frequency in the Mozambican/ Angolan corridor and
Southern Africa in general is relatively low, and the unavailability of
the key Indonesian data makes it impossible to reach a definite positive
conclusion. The combination of Africa + New Guinea + West Asia makes one
think of a Route-A phenomenon, but the high at Madagascar confirms much
more recent Indonesian connotations: ‘pseudo-Sunda’ or ‘potentially
Sunda’. The red line makes the flimsy conclusion visible.
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- 4. RH*D (Cavalli-Sforza 1994: appendix map 79): highs attained not only
in Indonesia but throughout Se, E and N Asia, throughout Oceania, and
much of the Americas; also very conspicuous along the Ganges and
elsewhere in India; along the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea; and in
Africa especially the Mozambican-Angolan corridor, and the Maghreb;
rather inconspicuous in Europe except for Lapland. Highly compatible
with the Extended Sunda Hypothesis, but certainly not limited to such a
recent and locally specific phenomenon, and in its general distribution
pattern more reminiscent of the distribution of mtDNA type B. The
latter, as we have seen, had an extensive global history before it was
massively and widely spread, once more, under conditions of Sunda
expansion. The moderate attestations for, especially, Central America
and northern South America may largely be attributed to general type B
spread, but I submit that they may also be taken as indications of
African (in line with Afrocentrist claims), or even (specially for the
American west-coast) downright Sunda, influence on these parts of
America. Below we will reconsider
more local, continental maps for this single gene below.
- 5. RH*C (Cavalli-Sforza 1994: appendix map 80): this single gene has,
globally, a distribution that is roughly similar to that of RH*D, but
more locally concentrated in SE Asia, and much less conspicuous in
Africa, where the two concentration areas of RH*D (the Mozambican-Angolan corridor, and
the Maghreb), although noticeable, are rather less in evidence than for
RH*D. Again one has the impression of mtDNA type B expansion over dozens
of ka, more recently somewhat enhanced and redirected due to Sunda
expansion. Again, the moderate attestations for especially Central
America and northern South America may largely be attributed to general
type B spread, but I submit that they may also be taken as indications
of African (in line with Afrocentrist claims), or even (specially for
the American west-coast) downright Sunda, influence on these parts of
America. Below we will reconsider
more local, continental maps for this single gene below.
- 6. RH*CDe (Cavalli-Sforza 1994: appendix map 84): gives virtually the
same distribution pattern as RH*C
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- The diagrams on the preceding slides, although they appear to be
offering major additional genetic confirmations of the Sunda thesis,
must be treated with considerable caution.
- Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994 constitutes a massive and ‘authoritative’
(Oppenheimer 1998) summary of decades of painstaking research by
thousands of geneticists all over the world, working along the then
standard methods of population genetics based on classic genetic
markers. However, since the deciphering of the human genome in the
1980s, such approaches have become obsolete – because now we can trace
ancestral clades with the greatest precision imaginable, i.e. at
molecular level, identifying when and where a particular mutation
occurred, and how it subsequently spread from generation to generation.
As compared to more recent research, the distribution maps that
Cavalli-Sforza et al. present in overwhelming quantities are considered
by present-day geneticists to be ‘palimpsests’ (Oppenheimer, personal
communication 2007; cf. Moore 1995), on which all similar local effects
have been piled one on top of the other, regardless of background,
vectorial direction of each constituent effect, or dating.
- It is my impression that the same reservation also applies to
Oppenheimer’s own map of thalassaemias.
- I am not a geneticist and therefore am in no position to argue the
continued validity of Cavalli-Sforza’s et al.’s, and Oppenheimer’s,
maps.
- Working with relatively small samples, crude assumptions, and massive
error distributions, even state-of-the-art population genetics must be
used with caution when pressed into service by comparative mythology.
- Yet I find it hard to believe that the converging evidence of
Cavalli-Sforza et al.’s five maps as above, and Oppenheimer’s map on
thalassaemias, is now completely obsolete and invalid, less than one and
a half decades after it was published. I propose we admit them as
positive evidence for the Sunda thesis, even whilst realising that all
evidence involves an element of risk.
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- Yet, despite this overall corroboration of the general Sunda thesis,
there is room for some criticism of Eden in the East, even apart from
its Frazerianism.
- Concentrating on what has been reconstructed as the third post-glacial
flood, 7.5 to 5.5 ka BP, gives Oppenheimer a plausible time slot for
Sunda expansion to potentially exert some formative influence on Indus,
Sumerian and Egyptian civilisations. However, what he adduces in the way
of archaeological or traditional evidence is somewhat unimpressive, not
only in fact but also because this is one of the few points where he
shows to lack essential comparative knowledge:
- Niah cave, Sarawak, Borneo, with depictions of ships (Fig. 1 next slide;
© Heather Angel; source) – which (especially in a subcontinent with soul
ships and maritime traditions) are not necessarily evidence of
cataclysmic flooding and escape by boat
- A stone mankala (‘holes-and-markers’) board from Indonesia (Fig. 3, from
Oppenheimer 1998) – whereas the oldest archaeological attestations of
mankala hail from the Neolithic Middle East, and there are indications
that the Indonesian extension of mankala is secondary and recent, so
that we do not need to press the Sunda thesis into service here (van
Binsbergen 1995, 1997, in press2 and in prep.; see second next slide).
- Feline-faced Al Ubaid – Southern Mesopotamian -- figurines adorned with pellets of clay
(Fig. 4; source) – admittedly reminiscent of Indus figurines (Fig. 5, source;
Fig. 6, source), but unfortunately also of Central American ones! (Fig.
2, Anthropomorphic clay figurines of "H-4" type. Chupicuaro,
Guanajuato. (Private collection. Photo © Eduardo Williams; source). But
as the many fakes on the antiquities market already indicate, such
figurines and adornments are too unspecific to base such far-reaching
conclusions upon. (However, scepticism on this point does not mean that
one had to concure with Strasser 1996, who interprets the Ubaid boat
models – significant from a Sunda point of view – as mere spinning bowl.
- Oppenheimer sees the use of red haematite (ochre) as a Sunda-related
trait, but fails to appreciate that throughout Old World prehistory this
mineral has had such a wide attestation in space and time that Sunda as
epicentre of diffusion is excluded (not only Borneo, Sumer, Çatal Huyuk,
Mapungubwe (S Africa), and prehistoric China – which might all be argued
to have Sunda connotations, but even
the Blombos Cave block, South Africa, 70 ka BP, as well as many
prehistoric burial sites all over the Old World, in between!)
- Berossus’ Oannes myth (Fig. 7, after: Cory 1832), purportedly dealing
with proto-Sumerian times yet committed to writing nearly 3 ka later
(this is a good example of one of the critical points in Farmer 2007:
what looks like an old text often is not! And compare the preposterous
extraterrestrial use to which Temple 1977 has put the same myth.
However, cf. the S. Asian Matsya, saving the flood hero Manu – again in
the proposed Sunda trajectory.
- Superficial similarities between armlets and between ceremonial axes
from the Indo-Pacific world and from Ancient Atlantic Europe (second
next slide); however, cf. the Nkoya example, which yet suggests the
possibility of a genuine Sunda link.
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- Should all this mean that scarcely any convincing archaeological
evidence has so far been unearthed for the postulated high development
of pre-flooding Sunda culture and of its postulated subsequent westbound
expansion?
- Not really, if we take further evidence into account, such as
- The great similarities between shell money from the Indo-Pacific region
(e.g. Solomon’s Islands, picture left; source), and excavated shell
money from Ur, Southern Mesopotamia, from the 3rd millennium BCE
(picture centre; source)
- The pre- and protohistory of the diffusion of food crops, such as taro
(next slide, partly based on Lee 1999), banana, plantain, mango and
perhaps rice.
- Bronze Age evidence of cloves in West Asia (e.g. Wright 1982; Chavalas
1996) is usually taken as evidence of Indonesian trade contacts; so is
the presence of bananas in West Africa, 1000 BCE: while cloves have a
unique origin in the eastern Indonesian archipelago, bananas have a
unique origin in New Guinea, and since bananas only propagate from
saplings they must have been deliberately brought to West Africa with
great care.
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- Meanwhile, on the point of the relative dearth of concrete traces of the
postulated Sunda process, we are reminded of the apt title of
Dick-Read’s book, The phantom voyagers (2005): admittedly, the westbound
Indonesian expansion clearly has a tendency to leave remarkably few
tangible traces in history.
- In this respect there is a parallel with those other furtive ancient
mariners: the Phoenicians (e.g. Muhly 1970). The latter may not be
totally unrelated to Sunda: in Antiquity their cradle was claimed to be
in the Persian Gulf, smack in the proposed Sunda trajectory!
- ‘Is this a Black thing?’ (Eddie Murphy, in the motion picture Beverly
Hills Cop II) – in other words, could social exclusion (even genocide)
on the basis of perceived collective somatic difference be an
explanation for the invisibility of Sunda elements, and of the stranger
mariners bringing those elements? Often these mariners would have stood
out as more pigmented and otherwise somatically different, – even if, in West Asia, the Mediterranean
and perhaps Atlantic Europe (under the assumption of a multicentred
intercontinental network) they do not need to have come all the way from
Sundaland itself. Often when we probe deeply in European and West Asian
traditions, we hit on people emphatically identified as dangerous
‘others’, and standing out by pigmentation, ethnic names, Cushitic or
Bantu connotations of their ethnonymns and of the toponyms they left
behind (Karst 1931; van Sertima 1985; the dark people of Abkhazia,
Colchis (with male genital mutilation) and surroundings featuring in the
Black Athena debate, e.g. Snowdon 1989; some the legendary earliest
inhabitants of Ireland: the demonised Formorians with only one side to
their body; biblical toponyms such as Jabbok and Canaan, possibly also
Jordan, without an acceptable etymology except in Bantu, etc.; the
surprising trajectory (cf. Bernal 1997) of the word nikar / ‘nigger’,
originally a water spirit, not unlike Oannes and Matsya…). The mortal
fear of the somatic other is one of the most deplorable constants of
western Eurasian culture and society throughout recorded history
(although scholars like Bernal and Snowdon prefer to see a Graeco-Roman
Antiquity without such blemishes). I would advance as a hypothesis that
this abhorrence from the somatic other is the main reason why traces of
Sunda expansion in western Eurasia have not simply been lost, but
positively eradicated in ancient times.
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- Or, if we do not wish to go to the extremes of such a genocidal
hypothesis in order to explain the absence of archaeological
attestations of a culturally advanced ‘Eden in the East’, may we simply
assume that, since flooding is supposedly the trigger to Sunda
expansion, here is a massive invitation to marine archaeology – all
evidence lying hidden under the shallow seas of now insular South East
Asia?
- However, as a cultural historian I dislike this recourse to
- the argument of silence,
- and (cf. Bernal) to natural disasters in order to explain crucial
transitions in cultural history – as if we had no theories to explain
such transitions by reference to the inner dynamics of societies, such
as overpopulation as a result of successful modes of production, the
involution of state systems, etc.
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- Even in the face of the paucity of concrete archaeological evidence,
there is much attractiveness in the idea of some hypothetical Sunda
influence upon the Indus civilisation, the Sumerian civilisation, even
the Ancient Egyptian early dynastic civilisation. The latter has
unmistakable Sumerian initial influence (Rice 1990), and an obsession with sacred boats (cf. Kadry
1986; O’Connor 1995), and flooding from earliest times on – and its
legendary first king was named as Men (Greek Menes) (his usual
identification with cAha is contested; Kinnaer 2003), cf.
Minos – the equation of these two names has a considerable history:
Baumgartel 1947, Waddell (cf. Casillo 1985), Bernal 1991, Trigger 1992
and remains contested; a plausible Austric etymology could be found for these names:
proto-Austric *mVn, tooth – claimed to go back to Borean but only
attested in Austric, and apparently without semantic resonances in
Crete, although for Egypt cf. Mnw, the god Min, whose emblem is two
tooth-like belemnites; and proto-Austric *mVʔn (V = unspecified
vowel), ‘settlement, stay’ – not inappropriate for a first king – cf.
the king’s privilege on sitting in SE Asia and among the Nkoya, and
Egyptian Isis, 3st/3śt, ‘she who is seated’; but like in many such
cases (e.g. Egyptian t3, proto-Austric *tVʔ, ‘earth, recognised
cognates, only other cognate in Sino-Tibetan, and going back to *Borean)
the specificity of the Austric attribution is spoiled by the fact that
the same root has also been reconstructed for the hypothetical parent
language Borean, and thus has a very wide distribution e.g. Eurasiatic: *menV
and Afroasiatic : *man- / *min- (Tower of Babel). However, in my
conclusion, I will adduce reasons why this can never be the total
explanation of the rise of the Ancient Near East including Egypt.
- Recent linguistic work by Pedersen (n.d.) argues the continuity between
Austric (the most likely language macrofamily associated with Sunda),
Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. Manansala (2007) specifically argues the
Austric element in Sumerian. The latter author also points out
continuity in physical anthropology between Sumerians and Indonesians. A
link between Sunda and Bantu is suggested by the fact that the lexical
root that was eponymic for the latter language group (Bleek 1851), -ntu
(‘human’), is closely cognate to –taw in Austronesian (and incidentally
is also found in India).
- Impressive though this linguistic argument may be, the counter argument
would be that, given some degree of continuity between most language
families within the Eurasiatic realm (cf.Tower of Babel, extensive
etymological database), it is very difficult to tell apart parental
relationships from borrowing relationships between languages, on the
basis of mere mass comparison i.e. the analysis of actual forms as
attested in historical times.
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- Challenged by the preposterous, but apparently successful work by
Joseph Greenberg on African languages and, more recently Greenberg, and
Ruhlen, on native American languages and on languages worldwide, all
based on mass comparison, specialist historical linguists have argued
that the only form of comparison agreed to yield valid and authoritative
results is that comparing, not actual forms, but reconstructed
proto-forms. This ongoing debate has very important implications for
long-range comparative mythology, for there we tend to remain on the
side of mass comparison, without even making that position explicit.
Whether we adopt a time-honoured and prestigious (but Eurocentric and
theoretically barren) classification like that of Aarne and Thompson (recently
renewed by Hans-Jorg Uther), or a finely-meshed classification of our
own making (like Berezhin does, distinguishing c. 1,500 carefully
defined micro-mythemes), or a broad classification into just a few dozen
Narrative Complexes each encompassing up to twenty or thirty
constitutent mythemes (like in my own Ággregative (!) Diachronic
approach) – we are always relying on the equivalent of actual forms, on
recently attested mythemes, and have not developed a method yet to
validly and reliably reconstruct
the protoforms that may be presumed to underlie these actual forms. In
other words, we are projecting back into the remotest past actual
mythemes as if these were self-evidently equivalent to ancient mythological
forms. Of course, proposals are made for the, more or less intuitive and
certainly qualitative and unmethodological, reconstruction of very broad
general ancient forms, such as Witzel’s distinction between Laurasian
and Gondwana mythologies, and my plea (see below) for the distinction
between two broad types of cosmogonies, one based on the separation of
Water and Land, the other on the separation of Heaven and Earth – but
this is more like reconstructing entire lexicons than individual lexical
proto-forms. Ultimately we will have to face the problem, either by
putting up an explicit argument as to why we believe our actual
mythological forms are fair approximations of mythological proto-forms;
or by devising a method to specially reconstruct the latter.
- Back to linguistics. It is easy enough to propose an etymology, but very
few etymologies do live up to the stringent requirements professional
historical linguists would impose (a. phonological correspondence; b.
semantic correspondence; c. explicit transformation rules, specific to
the language family/ies involved, that dictate the phonological and
morphological link between the word in question, and the proposed etymon
(Blažek, personal communication, 2005).
- Yet, still in the linguistic field, it is possible to propose quite
convincing Austric (i.e. Sunda) etymologies for, for instance, the key
divine names in Ancient Egyptian mythology: Osiris and Rec (see van Binsbergen, in prep.).
And also for Nuaḥ (see below; the standard Old Testament Studies
etymology in terms of ‘rest’ has little to recommend it) – although the
statistical and etymological findings which I shall present below are
not encouraging for the implication of Oppenheimer’s theory to the
effect that Nuaḥite flood myths have a Sunda connection; and even
for the South East Chinese flood heroes Nű Wa 女娲 (cf. Nuaḥ?) and Fu Xi 伏羲 (cf.
Po-sei[-dōn]?) (van Binsbergen, in preparation).
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- And there is enough to continue further research along the lines
suggested by the Sunda thesis. Whence the thalassaemias in South Asia,
Africa and the Mediterranean? Whence the sudden rise of these early
civilisations in the Indus, the Persian Gulf and the Northern Red Sea?
Whence the rise of nautical societies: Minoans, Mycenaeans, Carians,
Leleges, Corinth, Athens, the Black Sea region and Colchis – with the
same Argonaut connotations that Malinowski (1922) so aptly applied to
the Melanesians ! – and finally Phoenicians. Come to think of it, could
there be Sunda reminiscences behind the ancient tales of (usually sea)
voyages to distant lands: Gilgamesh, Osiris (to foreign lands as a
culture hero), Odyssea, Dionysus (to India), Argonauts, Aeneid, St Brendan?
Whence the dramatic increase of
nautical skills in the eastern Mediterranean? In this connection
Daedalus, like his mythical Oceanian counterpart Maui or Rongo, is credited (Pausanias 9.11.4ff) with the
invention of the sail (also the culture hero Pakaá on Hawaii (Cotterell
1989: 230)! Others (Willis 1994: 81) give this credit to Daedalus’
adversary Minos (legendary founder of the first maritime empire in the
West) with that invention – Willis 1994: 81; whilst there is also a
tradition of attributing that invention to the Nile valley – Barnett
1958). Whence the apparently sudden increase in nautical skills (and
boat depictions) in the NW Europe Bronze Age, the boat-centred
Scandinavian rock art, the Nordic Bronze Age trumpet (lyre) which seems
to have a counterpart, not only in Linus’ invention of the trumpet in
Ancient Greek myth but also (in
the form of a sea shell) in Indo-Pacific mythology, whence it seems to have found its way into the
South Asian and Tibetan cult of Tara and in Mongolian and Tibetan
religion. Could a remote awareness of Sunda background be the ultimate
source of the ethnicity that bound the Sea Peoples and allowed them to
inflict decisive blows to the two major empires of the Eastern
Mediterranean at tyhe end of the Bronze Age(Hittites and Egypt)? Could
major sea gods, like Poseidon and Achilleus, and the conch shells their
lesser counterparts (like Nereus, Triton, Proteus and their folk) are
sounding, fit into a Sunda pattern of mythological and religious
continuity? Could the Ancient Mediterranean population? (cf. van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen,
in press). Are the various protector divinities of seamen, from Tara in
N India/ Tibet to Isis, the
Kabeiroi, the Dioscuri/ Asvins and St Mary / Stella Maris, mere parallel
local inventions or cognate transformations of Sunda divinities?
(Cotterell 1989: 165, 140).
- Many more isolated indications could be suggested: e.g. Elymian, Ligurian, Irish, and further Celtic
headhunting, on the Mediterranean and Atlantic extreme of the postulated
Sunda path; and, on the Mozambican/Angolan corridor, headhunting by the
Zambian Ila, and further up the proposed Atlantic Sunda on the Bight of
Benin (cf. Hutton 1947, who perceived the Indonesian influence in the
latter region very clearly) – see next slide).
- But since we have already agreed that the Sunda thesis as such deserves
to be enlisted in mainstream cultural history, these are merely
questions for further research.
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- Meanwhile there is one very important lesson we have to learn from our
argument on the overall Sunda thesis, affirmative as it has been.
- Similarity, even argued and demonstrated identity, does not in itself
mean borrowing, let alone that it automatically reveals the direction of
possible borrowing.
- In other words, the fact that
- We have, in Africa and elsewhere among the postulated westbound Sunda
trajectory, traits that could be argued to derive from Sundaland
(although we do not have any direct evidence on the nature of the
original Sunda society before its supposed disruption by dramatic
flooding – we are in the dark concerning its culture, mythology, or even
language!), should not prevent us from investigating the other four (!)
possibilities inherent in such a situation:
- The
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Notes