The Story as an Essential Part of Human Knowledge Once upon a time, someone asked a question, and someone else answered with a story. Stories hold many functions in civilizations, from telling us how the world was created like Genesis in the Torah, to explaining natural phenomena such as the changing of the seasons like in the story of Dumuzi in Inanna’s myths, to providing guidance and a cultural legacy like Homer’s Iliad. Stories exist as an essential part of human knowledge to answer our questions and pass on information, allowing humans to make sense of the natural world and their cultural legacy. Looking at the stories of past civilizations up through modern ones, there is always one pattern, one story, retold in countless different
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The first and most obvious one is the repetition of the word “day” and the creation of “days”, which is shown in Inanna in the very first line, “In the first days, in the very first days” and in the Genesis by the repetition of the phrase “And there was evening and there was morning, a first day,” which changes later in the text to “a second day,” then “a third day”, all the way to seven days (Genesis, verse 1, pg 1-2) (Wolkstein, pg 4). Imagery related to gardens is also present in both origin stories. In the Torah, God “[plants] a garden in Eden” in which is a tree that holds “the knowledge of good and bad”, and in Inanna, the young goddess Inanna saves a huluppu-tree seedling from the waters of the river Euphrates and “[plants it] in [her] holy garden” (Genesis, verse 1, pg 5) (Wolkstein, pg 5). Even the river Euphrates is a common element, since it also appears in the Torah when God created a river to water the garden of Eden and it split into four rivers, the fourth of which is the Euphrates. The similarities between these stories prove that, even though they seem different on the surface, they hold the same function in their respective civilizations, which is to provide an explanation for the existence of themselves and the world around …show more content…
The society of the Ancient Greeks, for example, became an illiterate society for a significant portion of their existence, and many of the stories of their heroic age were passed down orally before being written down when literacy returned. These stories and legends acted as the only source of information about the period of time before Greek society became illiterate, making them an important source of historical information and the sole legacy of their ancestors.
One such story from the early Ancient Greek civilization is Homer’s Iliad, an epic originally performed orally before it was written down centuries later. The Iliad provides account of the war between the Achaeans and the Trojans, also known as the Trojan War, and the fates of the heroes who fought and died on both sides. Without writing, memorized epics like the Iliad were the only cultural and historical legacy available for many
The first and most obvious one is the repetition of the word “day” and the creation of “days”, which is shown in Inanna in the very first line, “In the first days, in the very first days” and in the Genesis by the repetition of the phrase “And there was evening and there was morning, a first day,” which changes later in the text to “a second day,” then “a third day”, all the way to seven days (Genesis, verse 1, pg 1-2) (Wolkstein, pg 4). Imagery related to gardens is also present in both origin stories. In the Torah, God “[plants] a garden in Eden” in which is a tree that holds “the knowledge of good and bad”, and in Inanna, the young goddess Inanna saves a huluppu-tree seedling from the waters of the river Euphrates and “[plants it] in [her] holy garden” (Genesis, verse 1, pg 5) (Wolkstein, pg 5). Even the river Euphrates is a common element, since it also appears in the Torah when God created a river to water the garden of Eden and it split into four rivers, the fourth of which is the Euphrates. The similarities between these stories prove that, even though they seem different on the surface, they hold the same function in their respective civilizations, which is to provide an explanation for the existence of themselves and the world around …show more content…
The society of the Ancient Greeks, for example, became an illiterate society for a significant portion of their existence, and many of the stories of their heroic age were passed down orally before being written down when literacy returned. These stories and legends acted as the only source of information about the period of time before Greek society became illiterate, making them an important source of historical information and the sole legacy of their ancestors.
One such story from the early Ancient Greek civilization is Homer’s Iliad, an epic originally performed orally before it was written down centuries later. The Iliad provides account of the war between the Achaeans and the Trojans, also known as the Trojan War, and the fates of the heroes who fought and died on both sides. Without writing, memorized epics like the Iliad were the only cultural and historical legacy available for many