Humans have also used drums, often wooden slit gongs, for long-distance communication, relaying the message every few kilometers. Although talking drums are no longer a leading communications technology (telephone lines, radio, and fiber optics carry farther and have higher bandwidth) they are still in traditional and ritual use, much like handwriting, candles, IRC servers, and <table> layout. The West African versions of this form of communication are the best known, but it has been used in many parts of the world.
Transposed into the world of radio, this approach is known as "ultrawideband" or "time domain radio".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_drum
https://time.com/archive/6771186/science-drum-telegraphy/ 01942: "Any pulp writer worth his salt knows that when his locale is darkest Africa he can’t use too many drums. In a good standard plot, talking drums warn fierce natives of the unsuspecting white man’s approach while the reader shudders. Last week in Natural History Dr. Albert Irwin Good, who understands Bulu and related African dialects, published the first popular article on the linguistics of drums, the complicated telegraphy whereby African drummers talk across the jungle."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1945.11... 01945: Drum-signaling in a West African Tribe, by George Herzog. "The use of musical instruments for purposes of signaling is very widespread, and definite systems of communication are or were based on it in native Africa, Middle and South America, and the Pacific. The African systems are the most elaborate and often serve for free conversation; their existence is well known to the anthropologist and the traveler, hut they have been little investigated from the linguistic point of view, and still less in their social setting."
https://pen.org/drums-that-talk/ (Gleick?) "For a long time Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa had no idea. In fact they had no idea that the drums conveyed information at all. In their own cultures, in special cases a drum could be an instrument of signaling, along with the bugle and the bell, used to transmit a small set of messages: attack; retreat; come to church. But they could not conceive of talking drums. (...) That result was a technology much sought in Europe: long-distance communication faster than any traveler on foot or horseback. Through the still night air over a river, the thump of the drum could carry six or seven miles. Relayed from village to village, messages could rumble a hundred miles or more in a matter of an hour."
https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/50p1b7/til_t... "I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Nigeria and as a result of learning to play the drums I happened to pick up the talking drums as well and even though my spoken Yoruba is absolutely horrendous now (I can still understand), I can still speak Yoruba with the talking drums."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT3tIJzAkcc a short message with a transcription
They also encoded messages, so they had a high-speed communications network that used cryptography. In essence, it was an early version of the internet.
I've noticed a bit of resistance in Western cultures when I bring this up. People tend to think of Africa as "primitive", and there's some cognitive dissonance when you realize Africa had the world's most sophisticated communications system.
I'm not making this claim lightly either. They had a start/end signals, a "header" with an address, and a message payload, repeated for error-correction. There was also a whole routing and QoS system, albeit done manually.
Yes, the talking drums are attested in Africa from the 18th century, before electrical communication of any kind. Also, though, remember that the second writing system in the world originated in Africa 5000 years ago—older than the Olmec, older than oracle bones, probably older than the khipu. What were Western cultures doing at the time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnelbeaker_culture:
> The TRB introduced farming and husbandry as major food sources to the pottery-using hunter-gatherers north of this line. (...) Although they were largely of Early European Farmer (EEF) descent, people of the Funnelbeaker culture had a relatively high amount of hunter-gatherer admixture, particularly in Scandinavia, suggesting that hunter-gatherer populations were partially incorporated into it during its expansion into this region.[7] People of the Funnelbeaker culture often had between 30% and 50% hunter-gatherer ancestry depending on the region. (...) In the early 3rd millennium BCE, the Corded Ware culture appeared in Northern Europe. Its peoples were of marked steppe-related ancestry and traced their origins in cultures further east. This period is distinguished by the construction of numerous defensive palisades in Funnelbeaker territory, which may be a sign of violent conflict between the Funnelbeakers, Corded Ware, and Pitted Ware.[13] By 2650 BCE, the Funnelbeaker culture had been replaced by the Corded Ware culture. (...)
> In Frydenlund, Funen, Denmark, the grinding stones were used to grind wild plants only. In Oldenburg, Germany, grain was processed. In Frydenlund, the absence of cereal grinding combined and an abundance of carbonised cereals from soil samples indicates that probably grain was processed to a porridge-like meal.[18] In Oldenburg, in contrast, bread (possible flat bread) was produced in addition to porridge.[20][16] (...)
> The Funnel Beaker Culture is associated with skilfully crafted objects such as flint axes or battle axes.
> At Flintbek in northern Germany cart tracks dating from c. 3400 BCE were discovered underneath a megalithic long barrow. This is the earliest known direct evidence for wheeled vehicles in the world (i.e. not models or images).[25][26][27][28]
Meanwhile, in Africa:
> In a 2013 study based on radiocarbon dates, the accession of Hor-Aha, the second king of the First Dynasty, was placed between 3111 and 3045 BC with 68% confidence, and between 3218 and 3035 with 95% confidence.[3] The same study placed the accession of Den, the sixth king of the dynasty, between 2928 and 2911 BC with 68% confidence,[3] although a 2023 radiocarbon analysis placed Den's accession potentially earlier, between 3011 and 2921, within a broader window of 3104 to 2913.[4] (...)
> Information about this dynasty is derived from a few monuments and other objects bearing royal names, the most important being the Narmer Palette and Narmer Macehead, as well as Den and Qa'a king lists.[5][6][7] No detailed records of the first two dynasties have survived, except for the terse lists on the Palermo Stone. (...) Egyptian hieroglyphs were fully developed by then, and their shapes would be used with little change for more than three thousand years.
No wheels, though; those were probably an Indo-European invention.
I think it's probably a mistake to try to make general statements about all of Africa. The majority of human cultural and genetic diversity is found in Africa, so generalizations about Africans are somewhat similar to generalizations about non-elephant mammals.
> Yes, the talking drums are attested in Africa from the 18th century
This highlights another important bias when viewing African history through the lens of Western culture. Talking drums are likely much much older, but oral history gets ignored, and the "official" history is really just the first time a European wrote it down.
This has the added complication that oral historians were/are a political institution in many parts of the continent (unlike, say, reproducers of folklore). So "official" history very clearly predates written history we have today—and certainly in European languages—but it's still the product of conscious maintenance of image. That said, written records (say, inscriptions on a victory stele) have this issue too.
It's also worth noting that there is strong indication that pre-colonial states in subsaharan africa well outside the horn of africa did keep written language for the purposes of managing bureaucracies. Hell, arabic was adopted in east africa many centuries before europeans ever set foot there. The technology was certainly not unknown. However, if indeed this was the case, it clearly did not spread far beyond the needs of centralized bureaucracy, nor was it likely used for what we would now call private commerce, and we have no surviving records showing the scripts.
The nice thing about written records is that the victory stela necessarily tells you the same story that it told the literate subset of Ramesses's subjects 3200 years ago. Oral history can be extremely well preserved, but it can also be tailored to the listener. And it can be hard to date reliably, though there are exceptions. For example, people in many places in the world have oral traditions of having lived there since the world began or for specific numbers of years that are much greater than the archaeological evidence supports.
> It's also worth noting that there is strong indication that pre-colonial states in subsaharan africa well outside the horn of africa did keep written language for the purposes of managing bureaucracies. (...) The technology was certainly not unknown. However, if indeed this was the case, it clearly did not spread far beyond the needs of centralized bureaucracy. However, if indeed this was the case, it clearly did not spread far beyond the needs of centralized bureaucracy, nor was it likely used for what we would now call private commerce, and we have no surviving records showing the scripts.
This is not correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts explains:
> Timbuktu Manuscripts, or Tombouctou Manuscripts, is a blanket term for the large number of historically significant manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in private households in Timbuktu, a city in northern Mali. The collections include manuscripts about art, medicine, philosophy, and science, as well as copies of the Quran.[6] Timbuktu manuscripts are the most well known set of West African manuscripts. (...) Some 350,000 manuscripts were transported to safety, and 300,000 of them were still in Bamako in 2022.
> The dates of the manuscripts range between the late 13th and the early 20th centuries (i.e., from the Islamisation of the Mali Empire until the decline of traditional education in French Sudan).[11] Their subject matter ranges from scholarly works to short letters. (...)
> Scribes in Timbuktu translated imported works of numerous well-known individuals (such as Plato, Hippocrates, and Avicenna) as well as reproducing a "twenty-eight volume Arabic language dictionary called The Mukham, written by an Andalusian scholar in the mid-eleventh century."[15]: 25 Original books were also written by local authors, covering subjects such as history, religion, law, philosophy and poetry. (...)
> Some manuscripts contain instructions on nutrition and therapeutic properties of desert plants, whilst others debate matters such as "polygamy, moneylending, and slavery."[15]: 27 The manuscripts include "catalogues of spells and incantations; astrology; fortune-telling; black magic; necromancy, or communication with the dead by summoning their spirits to discover hidden knowledge; geomancy, or divining markings on the ground made from tossed rocks, dirt, or sand; hydromancy, reading the future from the ripples made from a stone cast into a pool of water; and other occult subjects..."[15]: 27 A volume titled Advising Men on Sexual Engagement with Their Women acted as a guide on aphrodasiacs and infertility remedies, as well as offering advice on "winning back" their wives.
This is far beyond the needs of centralized bureaucracy, and substantial numbers of records do survive despite the best efforts of Boko Haram.
Ah yea, sorry, I mean in addition to what we already know for sure—Timbuktu is emphatically not what I was referring to (although—I had forgotten about Timbuktu libraries, and it makes my point better than I did, so I appreciate your bringing it up!). I'm referring to oral evidence of writing in Great Zimbabwe (among other places I'm sure). If they had developed script, we unfortunately lack evidence of it.
My point more broadly is that prevalence of an oral tradition doesn't imply the lack of capacity to develop a written one. As Timbuktu is perfect evidence of—their libraries coexisted (and still do today) with griots, and the two repositories of knowledge seem to serve distinct functions in society.
Yea, behold! Thou knowest many things; surely thou wilt not do wickedly, nor will thy scholarship lead thee astray.
I have many history books. There's no such thing as an official history. Historians write about what interests them, through the lens of their own opinions and experiences.
I interpret calibas to mean that oral history is not generally considered to really be history ("official" history), while written books sometimes are. I believe that this is correct, and that there are excellent reasons for it, related to verifiability of provenance and mutability. I do not think that calibas was referring to some kind of official imprimatur.
> oral history is not generally considered to really be history
Probably because it is not considered to be reliable. For example, "hearsay" is inadmissible as evidence in court.
I believe that hearsay is inadmissible as evidence in court even when it's written.
Yeah. Hearsay is an out of court statement provided to show the proof a matter. It has little to do with oral vs non oral. There are also exceptions, exceptions to the exceptions and so on.
Contemporaneous notes are used in courts a lot though, aren't they?
Yes, so is oral testimony. That doesn’t make them hearsay.
Not sure why this was downvoted. Written notes can be hearsay. Contrary to the GPs opinion, the medium of transmission is not what distinguishes a statement as hearsay.
Google: "As early as 1653, the British Navy utilized flags to send messages between ships by varying their placement and arrangement."
Google: "The practice of using church bell signals to call people to worship and mark time is widely attributed to Paulinus of Nola, a Bishop of Nola in Campania, Italy, around AD 400. He is credited with introducing the first church bells into the Christian Church."
Church bells can be heard for miles.
Yes, but the British Navy didn't have a system of relaying messages from one station to another over long distances, and church bells (mentioned in the text I quoted from Gleick (?) in my comment upthread) normally don't carry messages at all; everyone knows the sequence they will be rung in before they ring, so the information content is zero. You could hypothetically use them to relay coded messages over long distances, but to the best of our knowledge, nobody did.
Similarly, Archimedes had mirrors, even if he may not have burned ships with them, so he could have invented the heliotrope or heliograph, but in fact that had to wait for Gauss.
The first telegraph relay system in Europe used a semaphore system similar to the British Navy's, but it wasn't deployed until 01792: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph At that point the relaying of drum messages over long distances through many stations was already practiced in parts of Africa.
Church bells were used to mark time, and announce major events like the death of the king and probably a few others. Those are information content - but of course very limited. The bells weren't for entertainment (although I enjoy hearing those massive gongs, and church bells often appear in recorded music).
It's a bit hard for me to imagine drums working in medieval Europe. I don't think they would propagate as well as the sound of church bells. Heck, I could identify church bells from miles away, nothing else carries like that. Outdoor concerts don't seem to carry far at all, for example.
>I don't think they would propagate as well as the sound of church bells. Heck, I could identify church bells from miles away, nothing else carries like that.
As with most discussions, the nuance matters. Anecdotal evidence is trumped by science.
Drums tend to have lower frequencies than church bells. All else equal, lower frequencies generally travel farther because they have longer wavelengths (less diffraction means they can go around objects better), less attenuation, and less absorption.
As an example of the application of low frequency long distance communication in nature, elephants use sub-sonic (to humans) frequencies to communicate many kilometers away.
That's true! The king's death is a message!
Generally lower frequency sounds are less attenuated by air, and they diffract better around obstacles, and drums are better at producing low-frequency sounds. So I'd think that drums would carry better than bells over many kilometers.
Wow, those are very interesting references. Also the 5 digit years are a little ahead of its time and interesting too. Could you be a time traveler?
It's a year-numbering style promoted by the Long Now foundation. Always seemed a bit silly and distracting to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKOc6hXMDhc&t=86s