Before we started writing things down, we remembered. We sang, we recited and performed stories, around fires, market squares, battle camps and sacred places. This was knowledge that lived in bodies. Memories were not found in scrolls, or stone tablets or pages, but in the heads of people.

Some of those early stories survived, sometimes in a messy, miraculous and uneven way. They crossed a chasm from sound to symbol, from breath – the moment of utterance – to a symbol that gave form and permanence to the otherwise ephemeral.

This article discusses how those stories were preserved, what was lost and what it means to receive them today.

The Oral World

Orality is not just the “before writing” stage in human history. It is a system that involves rhythm, repetition, structure and convention. This system adapts and remembers. Oral cultures can preserve complex laws, genealogies, rituals and storytelling over centuries.

However, the voice is flawed in the sense that it is vulnerable. The entire oral catalogue of one people can vanish in a war, an epidemic, extreme weather events. Displacement can cause entire generations to become dislocated from their stories. Colonisation can have the same effect. Millennia-old stories become stunted, altered, twisted, disfigured and disappeared. So, when writing emerges, it does not just preserve words, it tries to preserve presence. But in the transition from oral to written, something may change in the process. The story is somehow altered.

Carved Memory

I wrote in a recent article that one of the most iconic moments of orality becoming text is Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. Before that, divine revelation came through voice: God speaking to Moses, Moses speaking to the people. Now, revelation becomes text; text becomes a code, a law. It is not just spoken of, but physically inscribed. A covenant made visible, as opposed to those prior to that, such as with Adam, Noah and Abraham.

Sundiata: From Voice to Page

In West Africa, griots were custodians of memory. They contrast with seers: peering into the future, while griots preserve the past. Both seers and griots carry entire histories: empires, lineages, wisdom, all without writing a word.

The story of Sundiata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire, lived in the mouths of griots for 800 years. Then, in the 1960s, a griot’s oral recitation was transcribed and published. This is the first time a written version existed. A story built to be heard was now read, and it travelled outside of Mali, to libraries, classrooms and other continents. Then to me, in the 2000s, on a Boston to Reykjavik plane in the form of a ragged paperback.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: Lost, Then Found

Some stories were lost. The Epic of Gilgamesh was one of the world’s earliest literary masterpieces, told in Mesopotamia and carved into cuneiform tablets. But for over two millennia, it was completely lost.

In the 19th century, archaeologists unearthed the tablets in modern-day Iraq. They were cracked and fragmented, but they still spoke. A forgotten voice echoed from the tablets: the epic adventure of a king, a friendship, a quest for immortality. A human voice from 4000 years ago, revived by scholarship and translation. I am grateful for that too, not just that it was found, but that I could understand and that it reached down through time and space, spoke to me through the pages and resonated.

The Bards and the Written Song

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey come from oral tradition too. Their poetry, formula and rhythm, built for memory, not for page. Greek bards would sing them in parts. The stories evolved with the telling. Eventually, around 8th century BCE, they were written down.

Today they are read silently in libraries, analysed in universities, adapted into Hollywood movies. They exist in a vastly different form from when they were once alive, sung beside hearths and changing according to the telling. Writing them fixed them into position. Writing preserved them. But it also stopped their evolution.

Similarly, India’s epic Mahabharata and Ramayana evolved as sacred oral recitations. The Mahabharata itself has 1.8 million words and is one of the longest poems in history. Yet it was sung, chanted and remembered, as was the Ramayana. Then they were written down. But, in these cases, orality and writing coexisted. They are still recited orally even now. The text did not freeze the oral tradition, whereas the orality of Homer’s epics was replaced by the written versions.

The Qur’an: Oral at its Core

Revealed orally, memorised and recited, the Qur’an lives in both text and voice.

Though written down soon after the Prophet Mohammed’s death, its primary function remains recitation. Its rhythms, cadences and sonic patterns are preserved and revered. A hafiz is a person who memorises the Qur’an. He becomes a walking archive of divine speech. Even with widespread printing, the oral tradition defines how it is experienced and lived.

When Oral Becomes Text

When oral stories become text, it could be said that something is saved and something is lost. When written, the oral story gains permanence but loses flexibility. It reaches new audiences but loses the intimacy of performance. It ceases to evolve, but, especially with translation, becomes a traveller through time and space.

Writing preserves the oral, but it also flattens it. It turns the performance into a product. It can be mass produced. It becomes accessed by readers asynchronously, instead of watched by witnesses in real time.

But it lets a griot’s voice land in a stranger’s hand. It lets the lamentations of Job or Gilgamesh reach the 21st century. It allows phrases of Homer, like ‘aurora, rosy-fingered dawn’ to be pondered and admired today. And the Qur’an, turned from oral to text to oral again, in an audiobook, in our smartphones, in our pockets. Maybe this reach through time and the flexibility of access afforded to us now: text or voice, are the miracles.

But many stories did not make it.

Some were never written down, some were but the key to reading the scripts has been lost, or where their memory-bearers, the griots of their contexts, are long gone.

But the ones that did survive, through translation, transcription, accident and effort are now entrusted to us. So, at the same time we are given multiple roles to fulfil: becoming the new audience, being their stories’ custodians and the new transmitters – in a sense, the new griots. When an oral story becomes text, it gains weight. It becomes referenceable and teachable. And all of us, inheritors of these wisdoms. At any time. When I read Sundiata or Gilgamesh, or stories from ancient Egypt or the Popol Vuh, we are hearing people long gone, now dust, whispering, through the words, across the ages:

“Do not let this be lost.”

I feel grateful for being able to access them. Grateful for the break in tradition that let them come into my life. Grateful that something oral and sacred had crossed into my textual world, into my line of sight and spoke to me, personally. I emerge richer for it.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, April 2025