The Hunt for the World's Oldest Story

Summary

The key that Casaubon craved is particularly alluring. He wasn’t just tracing similarities; he was hunting for a primordial mythology, a long-lost ancestor dimly visible in its descendants. He happened to believe this original tradition was Christian truth, but set aside the apologetics and there’s still something intoxicating about the quest for a key: the notion that, by sifting through myth, we might retrieve the imaginative worlds of the earliest storytellers. Nor is the quest just a scholarly game; it’s an attempt to prove, against all odds, that our wild, warring species shares something irreducible at its core.Nowadays, we can unearth bones, extract DNA, even map ancient migrations, but only in myths can we glimpse the inner lives of our forebears—their fears and longings, their sense of wonder and dread. Linguists have reconstructed dead languages. Why not try to do the same for lost stories? And, if we can, how far back can we go? Could we finally recover the legends of our earliest common ancestors—the ur-myths that Casaubon so desperately pursued?If any field lends credibility to the dream of a Casaubonian key, it’s Indo-European studies. Where Frazer’s method was freewheeling, Indo-Europeanists are exacting. The discipline is usually said to have begun in 1786, when Sir William Jones, a colonial judge stationed in Bengal, addressed the Asiatic Society. Years of studying Sanskrit had convinced him that it closely resembled Greek and Latin—“indeed,” Jones said, “no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” He suggested that Germanic and Celtic languages, as well as ancient Persian, might belong to this same lost family. Others had glimpsed such affinities before, but Jones did more than notice; he set off a scholarly chase, and a popular fascination, that has yet to run its course.Today, it’s broadly accepted that languages as different as English, Welsh, Spanis...