Let me tell you a story
It has a Hero, an Adventure, and a surprising amount of Nuclear Waste

From CommentIsFree:

A couple of years ago the US Congress established an expert commission to develop a language or symbolism capable of warning against the threats posed by American nuclear waste dumps 10,000 years from now. The problem to be solved was: how must concepts and symbols be designed in order to convey a message to future generations, millennia from now? The commission included physicists, anthropologists, linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists, molecular biologists, classical scholars, artists, and so on.

The experts looked for models among the oldest symbols of humanity. They studied the construction of Stonehenge and the pyramids and examined the historical reception of Homer and the Bible. But these reached back at most a couple of thousand years, not 10,000. The anthropologists recommended the symbol of the skull and crossbones.

The date normally given for Stonehenge is 3100 BC (5000 years ago), the pyramid of Khufu was finished in 2560BC (over 4500 years ago)[1], and even if we accept the controversial belief that there were "many Homers" Iliad and Odyssey were composed in the 9th century BC [2]. To be fair, the age she gives for surviving written documents of Biblical texts is reasonably accurate (some portions of the Qumran scrolls date to 200BC, although clearly the words, like those of Homer, are much older. I would be surprised if the oldest Homer manuscript isn't AD).

This shouldn't annoy me. But it does.

In any case, here's a picture of some older writing:
This is tablet from 7th century BC. [Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet IX] recording the flood narritive.

Which brings me to my point. There are basically two ways of passing on information over vast streches of time:

(a) Cultivating a tradition in which information is passed on, with strict injunctions that it should remain unchanged. There are plenty of examples of this in religious and secular literature.

(b) Create an oral story, which, although it may receive embelishments, will be passed down in peopular memory. Even though the language itself changes, the story remains the same.

Or, to put it another way, the nuclear industry needs to hire either Talmudic Scholars, or Steven Moffat.



[1] Herodotus discusses his visit to the Giza pyramid complex in his Histories (Book II,124). He was writing in around 440BC - so the construction of Great pyramid was almost as distant from Herodotus as he is from us.

[2] Herodotus' Histories (Book II, 54) places Homer 400 years before Herodotus, although modern scholarship disagrees.