Eurasian mythologies all contain myths about the invention of plough, oxen cart, potter's wheel, weaving loom, metal, writing...
In the myths they were either invented by gods and then given to heroes who gave them to people, invented by gods and then stolen by heroes who gave them to people or invented by heroes who gave them to people...
In reality, based on the archaeological records, these are all things invented during neolithic - chalcolithic - bronze age period...
Why were the inventions of these, from our point of view, "ordinary things", attributed to mythical beings?
Because, from the point of view of the people who made the myths, each one of these things was so mind blowing, so incredibly impossible to be invented by an ordinary human, that it had to have been invented by some superhuman, a hero or a god...
So why is the invention of fire making among these things? Archaeologist believe that making of fire was invented by primitive humans. If so, it had been known for, eeeee, hundreds of thousands of years, and was a common knowledge by the time the Eurasian myths were made...
So why do we have the myth of Prometheus? Prometheus who "stole fire from the thunder god Zeus" and gave it to people. Remember, originally, before the invention of the fire drill, only thunder gods could make fire. Using lightning. People had to "find fire" and "steal it"...
By the way, fire drill was invented by Hermes, "the god of thieves"...Fire drill was considered by Greeks to be such an amazing invention, that only god could have invented it...
This makes no sense...Unless fire making was not invented by primitive humans, and wasn't already known by everyone for hundreds of thousands of years by the time Greeks made their myths...
If the invention of the fire drill happened during Neolithic, then this world changing event was, at the time when Greeks made their myths, still in the ancestral memory as something totally awesome...Hence the mythical origin of fire making...
But what about all the evidence of the human use of fire since, like, forever? Well, using fire is one thing. Every man can pick up a burning branch ignited by a lightning and bring it home (cave, hut...). Once there, he can light his own fire...
And then he can keep this fire burning...You know all the "eternal fire" beliefs across Eurasia, and how "house fire should never die"...Why would these beliefs exist if making fire was "nothing" since Palaeolithic...Fire dies, you light the new one. No biggie...
Yet...To the Greeks it seems, making fire was something completely different...It was like magic. Something only gods could invent and heroes had to steal from them...
I remember reading an interview with a documentary film maker, who visited some remote island tribes somewhere in the 1960's. The crew arrived on the island in a helicopter and they thought that the "primitive natives" would be gobsmacked by the "flying machine"...
It turned out they were most impressed by a lighter...
https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-ethnobiology/volume-37/issue-4/0278-0771-37.4.700/Intentional-Fire-Spreading-by-Firehawk-Raptors-in-Northern-Australia/10.2993/0278-0771-37.4.700.full
ReplyDeleteMaybe they learned from those (gods?) that flew above them?
What excellent and powerful observations. Thinking about all you have presented, it seems the skill of making fire would be neglected in settled areas, for someone would always have a neighbor from whom they could get a live coal or firebrand to start the fire at their home. So once some technique was learned, it could easily be forgotten and lost UNLESS there were rituals that required the skill be taught and remembered.
ReplyDeleteEven with knowledge and tools, fire-making is still a challenge with a significant learning curve. There is an account from the Texas Revolution in which a group of men, fleeing an advancing army, stopped at an abandoned house and spent two days trying to make fire using a grindstone, which will throw sparks when iron or steel is on it. They were unsuccessful, and had to choke down raw meat.
I have some experience in this department and while making a fire from scratch with primitive materials is possible, it is a God awful pain in the butt that frequently takes a sustained uncomfortable exhausting effort for several hours to make it work, and sometimes multiple attempts of that magnitude. There are people who learn to do so more efficiently, but that skill as at least as scarce as the most advanced pottery and iron smithing work and is harder to learn than solving a Rubik's cube (which I've also done).
ReplyDeleteI once spent a month with a tribe in a remote part of Choiseul Island in the Solomon Islands. People there still could and did kindle fire on their own without matches. They used the simple system of pudding/pulling a stick they held in both hands up and down a grooved board. If done with sufficient pressure and rapidity, the wood dust would accumulate in the groove and start to smolder. From there it was transferred to very dry kindling (in a dried coconut shell), and with a little blowing a fire would ignite.
ReplyDeleteI tried several times, but I never managed to get the material to smolder because my forearms would tire. But their forearms were accustomed to this, and they made it all look simple. I was told that a man couldn’t marry until he could kindle fire.