From A Recipe to The Odyssey: Why Documenting Oral Traditions and Storytelling Embodies the Power of Literature

Ancient recipes from cuneiform tablets (Yale Babylonian Collection)

Hungry? Well, let me pull out the recipe book. It’s only 4 millennia old. I’m so glad someone had the chance to etch it down on a rock before we forgot the measurements!

The oldest recipe to exist to this date tells us everything we need to know about literary preservation and its profound impact. Featuring 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian classics like lamb stew, chicken pot pie, and barley cakes, these Babylonian recipes have continuously held up to be culturally relevant, in part due to their documentation. There must be a reason why the Babylonians felt the need to encode these recipes. Documentation has a succinct purpose, which stems from the need to reproduce accurately. There is, of course, a gray area depending on the medium of interpretation, but at its core, replication stems from a desire to share knowledge and culture with others.

A recipe is rather a simple example because of its limit to 1 or 2 pages of text (or stone, in this case). When it comes to storytelling, the rules change despite the consistent pattern of intrinsic motivation. Three Greek icons, Homer, Aristotle, and Socrates, give a great example of how thought preservation through documentation, despite their opposing philosophies on the methodology, has allowed for these ideas to ruminate and educate 2000 years later. While not every idea or story was accounted for, it is generally found that the ones that were transcribed persisted through time. On this note, it’s important to distinguish that the study of past cultures may have been impacted by the level of access to certain materials. While many have found ways to communicate, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sulawesi cave paintings, the most effective and longstanding accounts of tradition and storytelling have stemmed from pen to paper. 

Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey are some of the most famous and influential poetic texts to have ever existed. The stories were originally transcribed in Latin around the first century BCE. Since Latin is no longer widely spoken, translations have taken many creative liberties since the first English translation in 1581. The older and longer a piece of work is, the more liberties that come with preserving it, naturally, as interpretations have room to differ. Effective documentation plays a key role in preserving the nature of these stories, despite the leniencies to differ.  

Book covers of Robert Fagles’ translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey, respectively.

The Poetics of Aristotle is a transcribed collection of ideas Aristotle had for generating effective storytelling, such as plot synchrony and having a beginning, middle, and end to complete a story. His contribution to textual documentation has allowed his ideas to prosper and create media for generations upon generations. This is a concrete example of the power of literary documentation. In the case of Socrates, he was a believer in creating dialogue that probed inquiry rather than being bound to the textbook. His name is alluded to in the Socratic Method or the Socratic Seminar. This, however, did not stop his students, especially Plato, from documenting his work and principles. Thanks to the work of Plato, Socrates continues to live on in as close to a primary source as can be found, if not written by the man himself. The Greeks hold important early records of speech-to-text and the lasting legacies of these philosophers and poets may be credited by the surviving literature that each contributed in one way or another.

To measure the extent of power that literature has from the effect of documentation, the answer simply lies in how old the work is and how much it was used by each generation that received the literary work. Preserving literature allows for a feedback loop to continue for thousands of years because the text is cemented, analyzed, repurposed, and retold, which are some of the most important values in identifying the significance of what a literary text can achieve. The older a work of literature is, the longer it has had the opportunity to make an impact, therefore solidifying the idea that time has an essential role in the value of documenting something that may have only been orally recounted. 

The margin of accuracy that literature provides is another reason why preservation is incredibly important. That recipe from 4,000 years ago will never change because the measurements are eternally recorded. The same can’t be said if the recipe is only verbally passed down. There is a chance that aspects of the recipe will be forgotten and changed, and there’s a chance that the entire recipe will be forgotten. The same goes for oral storytelling and methodology as provided by the Greeks. Without documentation, Homer’s stories would probably spiral in all directions as the meaning and events change if it was never recorded anywhere. A modern example of where we see such exaggeration is in urban legends, such as Bigfoot. These don’t typically have documented origins, therefore becoming manipulated from person to person to express fiction relevant to the individual’s circumstances. Literature provides resolve and order in this sense because society can turn to one place to find the exact retelling they were looking for.

As long as ideas are recorded, time and time again, there is no need to worry about forgetting because the power of literature allows something to live on forever. Sometimes it just takes a gentle reminder of “Write that down” for people to remember what impact they have at the individual level when they transcribe and process their thoughts and use their minds for boundless creativity.