The First Humans Couldn’t Speak

TL;DR

• Peoples on every inhabited continent remember the first humans as speechless: mute, murmuring, crying like beasts, or with “few words”.
• The Luiseño of California put thought, consciousness and speech in one sentence: the First People “began to think, to gain consciousness, and could now talk to each other”.
• The Yi, Lisu and Miao of southwest China and the Marind-anim of New Guinea say the first people were mute until bamboo burst in a fire. The Terena of Brazil and the Khmu of Laos say it was laughter.
• Speech comes in stages. The Bambara of Mali say it was voiceless, then unbroken, then cut into words; Cicero and the Veda say the same of Rome’s and India’s first speech.
• The teacher is usually a woman, and the serpent is close by: the Dogon Master of the Word comes as a snake and is eaten.
• These are memories of the time before full recursive language and the self that came with it.

“Then they began to think, to gain consciousness, and could now talk to each other, and discuss what it was best to do.”
— Lucario Cuevish, Luiseño, southern California (DuBois 1908, p. 144)

Which peoples say the first humans could not speak? #

The Luiseño live around Temecula, in the hills of southern California in the United States. In 1908 Constance Goddard DuBois printed their creation account as an old man named Lucario Cuevish dictated it. Sky and Earth bring forth the First People in the dark:

“Everything was all in the dark. The First People could just feel each other but could see nothing.” (p. 143)

They set out on a journey, and at Temecula it happens:

“Then they began to think, to gain consciousness, and could now talk to each other, and discuss what it was best to do.” (p. 144)

Thinking, consciousness and talk arrive together, in that order, in one sentence. Only afterwards is the sun made. When it rises the people scatter, and “they had had only one language, but when they scattered he gave them different languages” (p. 145).

Some nine hundred kilometres east, at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, people of an unrelated language family begin in strikingly close words. Two sisters are born underground: “There was no light and they could only feel each other.” They ask why they live in the dark “without knowing each other by name”, and “as they grew they learned their language from Tsichtinako”, Thought Woman, a female spirit they cannot see (Stirling 1942, p. 1).

The same memory is kept around the world. The first humans are mute (the Yi, Miao and Wa of China, the Terena of Brazil, the Iban of Borneo). They murmur (the Marind-anim of New Guinea), or have “few words” (Pohnpei in Micronesia), or make “an unformed and confused sound” (Cicero’s Rome). Horace calls them mutum et turpe pecus, “a dumb and filthy herd”. Speech comes later, from outside: it is taught by a woman, given by a god, overheard from a god who wanted it kept secret, or shocked out of the first people by fire.

The Eve Theory of Consciousness says why the memory should exist. Full recursive language and the inner “I” that speaks it came late. They were discovered, by women first, and passed on by teaching. A species that went through that would remember ancestors who could not yet talk, a teacher, and a day when thought and speech turned up together. The Ages of Man follows the whole sequence of ages. This essay follows one thread of it, the voice.

Download the data (CSV) · JSON

Why does bursting bamboo make the first people talk? #

The Yi (Nuosu) of the Liangshan mountains in Sichuan, China, descend from a man who married the Sky King’s daughter after the flood. David Crockett Graham took down what happened to their children (Graham 1961, p. 88):

“the three sons of the daughter of the sky could not talk. They could only eat and do mischief, like three dumb people.”

The cure exists, but it is a secret of the sky. A yellow sparrow overhears it in the sky palace and has its tail torn off for the theft. Three joints of bamboo go on the fire:

“The bamboo joints exploded loudly, and the three dumb boys were so surprised that they cried out. The oldest boy said in the Lolo language, ‘This is very hot.’”

The second shouts in Tibetan and the third in Chinese, and they become “the ancestors of the Lolos, the Tibetans, and the Chinese, and so of all human beings”.

Yi texts published in Chinese tell it with more malice. In a version from Chuxiong in Yunnan the sky-god explains himself to his wife while a small bird hides in the chopstick holder: 我要让以后的人都成哑巴, “I will make all later people mutes.” Then he gives the secret away: 只要砍三根竹子放在火塘里烧，竹子一烧炸，孩子就说话, “cut three bamboos and burn them in the hearth; when the bamboo bursts, the children speak” (zqymyth 485). In the version from Mile and Shilin, also in Yunnan, heaven holds “a medicine which, eaten, lets one speak”. The god refuses it and cuts the messenger spider in three. The bird under the eaves hears the secret, laughs out loud and loses its tail (zqymyth 469). Among the Naxi of Lijiang, Yunnan, the spy is a bat on the Sky Father’s roof-beam, burnt bald for laughing. Speech is the gods’ property in these tellings, and humans have it by theft.

The neighbours tell the same story:

• Lisu of Dechang, Sichuan: three clever sons cannot speak until 乒乒乓乓三声，毛竹爆炸, “ping-ping-pang, three bursts: the bamboo exploded”, and they scream in three languages (zqymyth 875).
• Miao of Qiandongnan, Guizhou: the people sprung from a hacked-up lump of flesh “were all like mutes”. The flood siblings set a bamboo mountain alight, and the people, “frightened by the bangs, cried out wildly, and so they began to speak” (zqymyth 438).
• Miao of Rongshui, Guangxi: twelve people “had mouths but could not speak, ears but heard nothing”. The remedy is 草烧竹子爆，娃娃就会说会笑了, “when the grass burns and the bamboo bursts, the children will speak and laugh” (zqymyth 416).
• Black Miao of Guizhou, as the missionary Aloys Schotter heard them in 1908: a brother and his sister have sex, and from the “shapeless flesh” she bears come three pairs, «hélas! tous sont muets», “alas, all are mute”. A man strikes the first fire from flint, and their screams of terror are the words for fire in Chinese, Yi and Miao (Anthropos 3, p. 424).
• Miao of Huaning, Yunnan: a god says to heat a flat stone and sit each mute child on it. The eldest’s backside touches and he yells “Aiyo-na!” (zqymyth 292).

Now go 4,500 kilometres southeast, across the sea, to the Marind-anim of the south coast of New Guinea, in Papua, Indonesia. The Dutch missionary Viegen recorded their origin in 1912 and James Frazer put it into English (Frazer 1918, pp. 37–38). The first people are lumps warming at a bamboo fire. Each pop of the bamboo opens an ear, an eye, a mouth, “but as yet they could not speak, they could only utter a murmuring sound”. Then:

“a big bamboo burst with a louder crack than usual, which frightened the people so that they gave a loud shriek, and that was the beginning of human speech.”

In a second Marind telling the first pair are dug out of the ground by a dog and live “like beasts, without experience and without feeling the need of communicating with each other by speech”, until “the loud crackling of the bamboos in the heat … unloosed their tongues”.

Mute ancestors, a fire, exploding bamboo and a first cry that is the first word: the story is too particular to have been invented twice. It travelled between Yunnan and New Guinea, or both got it from an older source. Yuri Berezkin’s world catalogue files it under one motif, “First people are dumb”, with two tellings where the jolt is laughter.¹ Among the Khmu of northern Laos, the peoples who come out of the flood gourd do not speak until a log they are all sitting on snaps, and they fall, laugh and talk. And among the Terena of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, the hero finds people in a hole in the earth: «Viu que eram pessoas, mas não conseguiu se comunicar com elas», “He saw that they were people, but he could not communicate with them.” He calls a little toad. «O sapinho começou a pular e as pessoas começaram a rir e a se comunicar entre si», “The little toad began to hop, and the people began to laugh and to communicate with one another” (Turíne Terenoehiko, 2018, pp. 16, 19).

Did speech come all at once? #

Where the tellers slow down, they say it came in stages, and the last stage is always a cutting.

The Bambara of the middle Niger in Mali teach three creations, as Dominique Zahan set them out (Zahan 1974). The first is “a beginning made in secret, ‘without a voice’ to express itself”. The second belongs to Faro, lord of water, and his Word is “a sort of language in which the words are not separated … a language that cannot be understood”. In the third the heavenly smith makes “the breaks of the speech”, and it becomes “useful discourse”. In that same third period “men assert themselves as individuals”. The Bambara date the individual to the day speech was cut into words.

Cicero, writing in Rome in the late 50s BCE, says the same of the first Italians. Mind found men inconditis vocibus inchoatum quiddam et confusum sonantes, “uttering something unfinished and confused with unformed voices”, and then incidit has et distinxit in partis, “it cut these sounds and divided them into parts” (De re publica 3.3). The smith’s work and the mind’s work are the same act.

Vedic India has it of speech herself. The Taittirīya Saṃhitā, composed in north India around 900 BCE, says vā́g vái párācy ávyākr̥tāvadat: speech at first spoke undivided. The gods asked Indra to divide it, and he stepped into the middle of it and did. “Speech aforetime spoke without discrimination … Indra approaching it in the middle discriminated it; therefore is speech spoken distinctly” (6.4.7.3, Keith 1914, p. 534). The verb, vyākṛ, is the root of the Sanskrit word for grammar.

The Greeks use the same image: Plato has men “articulate”, literally joint, voice into names (Protagoras 322a).

The Dogon of the Bandiagara cliffs, also in Mali, count three Words. The elder Ogotemmêli told Marcel Griaule that the Earth was first «nue et sans parole», “naked and without speech”. Then came «La première parole, fruste … La seconde parole, plus déliée … Enfin la troisième parole, claire et parfaite», a first Word that was crude, a second more supple, a third “clear and perfect” (Dieu d’eau, pp. 26–27, 70–71).

On Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia, Luelen Bernart measured the ages by vocabulary: “Now in the first period they had few words and their deeds were small. In the second period they had a few more words” (The Book of Luelen, p. 77).

Two Chinese texts give the stages in the body. The Yi of Mile and Shilin in Yunnan say the clay people could move and breathe but 还不会出声，还不会说话, “still could not make a sound, could not speak”. Two gods shout at them until they can cry out, then drill them: 我们说什么,你们就说什么, “what we say, you say”. They learn the cry first, then speech, then song (zqymyth 465). The Hani of Yuanyang, Yunnan, recite a genealogy that begins with a hairy, ghost-headed ancestor: 他不会说话，只会睁大两只眼睛东张西望, “he could not speak, only stared about with wide eyes”. His kind huddle in heaps and cannot tell who their mother is. Generations later comes the woman Ninbeng: “Yoni’e’s ears were deaf; Ninbeng could hear. Yoni’e’s body was blocked; Ninbeng was opened.” Her name, the reciter explains, means “opened”, and so clever (zqymyth 899).

What did the Greeks and Romans say about the first humans? #

They said it more often than anyone, and with the least reverence. Horace, in Rome around 35 BCE (Satires 1.3.99–104):

cum prorepserunt primis animalia terris, / mutum et turpe pecus, glandem atque cubilia propter / unguibus et pugnis, dein fustibus atque ita porro / pugnabant armis … / donec verba, quibus voces sensusque notarent, / nominaque invenere
“When living things crept out of the first earth, a dumb and filthy herd, they fought for acorns and lairs with nails and fists, then with clubs, and so on with weapons … until they found words and names to mark their cries and feelings.”

After that, he says, they began to give up war. Before it they rutted like animals and killed for it: nam fuit ante Helenam cunnus taeterrima belli causa, “for before Helen the cunt was the foulest cause of war.”

Diodorus of Sicily opens his universal history with the first-born humans living ἐν ἀτάκτῳ καὶ θηριώδει βίῳ, “a disordered and beast-like life”. Their voice was ἀσήμου καὶ συγκεχυμένης, “unintelligible and confused”, and they articulated their words “little by little” (1.8.1–3). Vitruvius, the Roman architect, puts the birth of speech at a fire, as the Miao and the Marind do. Men “were born like wild beasts in woods, caves and groves”. A forest fire scares them off, they creep back to the warmth and fetch others, nutu monstrantes, “pointing with nods”. In that gathering around the first hearth, the sounds they pour out with their breath settle into words, and they “begot conversation among themselves” (De architectura 2.1.1).

In Prometheus Bound, staged at Athens in Greece around 450 BCE, the Titan describes mankind before his gift. They were nēpioi, the word for babes too young to talk:

οἳ πρῶτα μὲν βλέποντες ἔβλεπον μάτην, / κλύοντες οὐκ ἤκουον, ἀλλ᾽ ὀνειράτων / ἀλίγκιοι μορφαῖσι
“At first, seeing, they saw in vain; hearing, they did not hear; like the shapes of dreams” (447–449)

He “made them mindful and masters of their wits”. Euripides gives the order of the gifts: a god brought our life out of confusion and beastliness, πρῶτον μὲν ἐνθεὶς σύνεσιν, εἶτα δ᾽ ἄγγελον γλῶσσαν λόγων δούς, “first he put understanding in us, then gave the tongue, messenger of words” (Suppliants 201–204).

Lucretius is the dissenter, and he dissents only about the teacher. Nature drove the first humans to make varios linguae sonitus, “the various sounds of the tongue”, as beasts cry differently in fear and joy; to think that someone handed out names and taught men their first words desiperest, “is folly” (5.1028–1043). He would not have bothered to say so unless people believed it. Even he keeps the speechless ancestors. The philosophers removed the giver from the story, and the peoples who kept the story whole name her.

Who taught the first people to speak? #

Most often a woman did.

At Acoma the teacher is Thought Woman. Among the Hopi of Oraibi, Arizona, two goddesses, the Hard Being Women of the east and the west, make the first woman and man from clay and show them the tablets, which they cannot read. “So the deity of the east rubbed with the palms of her hands, first the palms of the woman and then the palms of the man, by which they were enlightened … Hereupon the deities taught these two a language.” Spider Woman then makes more couples, “giving a different language to each pair” (Voth 1905, pp. 2–3). The woman’s palms are rubbed first.

The Yao of Libo in Guizhou, China, were made by the grandmother Wugao, who shapes them of clay, wakes them by shouting and dancing around them, and then 天天…教它们走路，教它们说话, “every day … taught them to walk, taught them to talk” (zqymyth 748). Among the Yabarana of the Venezuelan Amazon the first people have no lower bodies, no fire and no words. The hero’s mother, who has the shape of a bullfrog, «observó que no podían hablar y que no tenían fuego», “saw that they could not speak and had no fire”, and «les enseñó a entenderse por medio de sonidos articulados con sus bocas», “taught them to understand one another by articulate sounds of their mouths” (Wilbert 1959).

The Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo, say humanity is forged by a female spirit, Salampandai, who still hammers out every child at her anvil. Ordered to make a man, “she made one of stone, but it could not speak and Petara refused to accept it.” One of iron fails the same way. “The third time she made one of clay which had the power of speech”, and that one is our ancestor (Ling Roth 1896, p. 176). For the Iban a human is a made thing that can speak.

Mesopotamia tells it of one man standing for all. Enkidu, in the Epic of Gilgamesh from Iraq, is shaped of clay, grazes with gazelles, and is “a monster (all) savage from out of the depths of the desert”. The prostitute Shamhat has sex with him for six days and seven nights. Afterwards the animals run from him, but he “hath broaden’d (his) wisdom. / Sat he again at the feet of the woman … his ears heard (the words) she was saying” (Thompson 1928, Tablet I).

Where a god gives speech it is counted out as a separate gift. The Norse poem Völuspá, written down in Iceland, finds the first pair, Ask and Embla, as logs on the shore: Önd þau né áttu, óð þau né höfðu, lá né læti, “Breath they had not, mind they had not, nor blood nor voice.” Snorri’s prose names the gifts by giver: the third god gave ásjónu, mál ok heyrn ok sjón, “face, speech and hearing and sight” (Gylfaginning 9). The Dai of Xishuangbanna in Yunnan say their clay couple walked about with “no language”, until the divine pair “gave them language, taught them to speak and to think”, and named them “people” (zqymyth 923). A missionary’s one-line summary of the Miao creator says: “The first men he made were dumb; then he gave them power to speak” (Machle 1911, p. 10). At the far end of the Americas, in Tierra del Fuego, the Selk’nam say only: “Kenos taught our ancestors of old to use speech” (Gusinde, tr. Wilbert 1975).

Where is the serpent? #

The serpent comes where speech becomes complete.

The Dogon say the second Word was held by the seventh ancestor, the Master of the Word. When the order of the ancestors was broken he came down among men “in the form of a great serpent”, and the smith told them to kill the serpent and eat it. Out of that meal came the third Word, the clear one, and after it death (Dieu d’eau, pp. 50–53, 127–128).² Human speech, in the fullest African account of it, is a snake that was eaten.

Genesis has no mute Adam; he names the animals alone (2:19–20). But the first conversation in the Bible, the first time one creature says a thing to another and is answered, is between the serpent and the woman. Dante noticed it around 1304, when he asked who spoke first, and it embarrassed him: mulierem invenitur ante omnes fuisse locutam, scilicet presumptuosissimam Evam, cum dyabolo sciscitanti respondit, “a woman is found to have spoken before all, namely most presumptuous Eve, when she answered the devil’s questioning.” He adds that it is “more reasonable” to believe the man spoke first (De vulgari eloquentia 1.4). The text says otherwise. Speech between persons starts with a snake asking a woman a question, and by the end of the chapter she knows she is naked.

The K’iche’ Maya of Guatemala name Gucumatz, the Plumed Serpent, among the Makers whom the finished people thank: «nos disteis boca, cara, y que habláramos y oyésemos», “you gave us mouth, face, and that we should speak and hear” (Ximénez, ed. Scherzer 1857, p. 81). And the oldest text here, the Sumerian spell in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta from Iraq, sets the time of one speech “when there is no snake, when there is no scorpion”, before Enki shall “change the speech in their mouths” (ETCSL 1.8.2.3). The snake and the divided tongue come into the world together.

What is a human without speech? #

It is a beast, and the tellers say so. The Naxi mother in Lijiang looks at her three sons, “taller than calves”, and asks: 他们与牲畜有什么不同呢?你说怎样才能把智慧灵魂喊回来?, “how are they different from livestock? How can the soul of wisdom be called back?” (zqymyth 542). She speaks of speech as a soul, one that has been lost and can be called back.

The Wa of Cangyuan, Yunnan, say of the first people out of the earth-hole: 那时，人出来得很少，而且不会说话, “At that time few people had come out, and moreover they could not speak.” Those who laboured “grew daily more unlike the beasts”, and 人会说话, “people could speak” (zqymyth 525). On Pohnpei they say the same: the first people “had few words, for words come from work” (The Book of Luelen, Annotations, n. 20.1).

The Yi of Mile and Shilin count three generations of humanity by their eyes, and the first, the one-eyed people, are the speechless ones: 这一代独眼人，不会说话，更不会种田, “This one-eyed generation could not speak, still less farm.” They lived like wild animals, 有时还会人吃人, “and sometimes people ate people”. “In the one-eyed age, monkeys and people could not be told apart” (zqymyth 459). The Nuosu epic Hnewo Teyy opens the making of mankind with “a pair of mute things, short and ugly, unable to speak”, who “could not become ancestors” (zqymyth 477). In Sumer, Enki’s creature Umul is questioned by the goddess Ninmah, “but he could not speak”; he cannot take bread or sit or lie down (ETCSL 1.1.2).

Mesoamerica adds the case that proves what the others mean by speech. In the Popol Vuh of the K’iche’ Maya, the Makers want beings who will speak to them. The animals fail: «no pudieron hablar como los hombres, sino que chillaron, cacarearon y gritaron», “they could not speak like men, but only squawked, cackled and cried out”. The verdict: «seréis trocados porque no pudisteis hablar», “you will be changed, because you could not speak” (Ximénez, p. 9). Then comes a man of mud:

«era ciego, y no miraba para atrás, aunque hablaba, no tenia entendimiento»
“he was blind and could not look behind him; though he spoke, he had no understanding.” (p. 10)

The wooden people after him also “spoke like a man”, «empero, salieron tontos, sin corazón, sin entendimiento», “but they came out stupid, without heart, without understanding” (p. 12). Words come out of both, with nobody inside to mean them. The Makers destroy them. The Tlaxcalteca of central Mexico tell where such people go: the survivors of the wind-age «olvidaron el uso de la razón, perdieron la habla», “forgot the use of reason, lost speech”, and became the monkeys, who lack “nothing but speech” to be men (Muñoz Camargo, pp. 153–154).

So the Maya separate two things the mute-ancestor stories hold together. There is sound that passes for talk, and there is speech with understanding behind it. The second is what the first humans lacked, and it is the one that needs a self.

What do these stories remember? #

They remember that language, in the sense that matters, has a beginning inside the human story, and that somebody was there for it.

The first people have bodies, appetites and company. They eat, do mischief and huddle in heaps. They make noise: a murmur among the Marind, cries in Horace, unbroken sound among the Bambara. What they lack is the cut. Speech “undivided” is a call, complete in itself, with no parts to move around. Divided speech has joints, and jointed speech can be put inside itself: a sentence about a sentence, a thought about a thought, a speaker who can say “I” and mean the one who is speaking. That fold is recursion, and The Snake and the Syntax Tree argues it is the same fold that makes a self. The Bambara say it outright: when the smith cut the Word, men became individuals. The Luiseño say it in one sentence. The Naxi call it the soul of wisdom, and Euripides lists understanding first and the tongue second.

The tellings also agree on how it arrived. It came suddenly, to a group, at a fire: one bang, one shared fright, one laugh, and the voice is there. It came from a teacher, and the teacher is a woman more often than chance allows: Thought Woman, the Hard Being Women, grandmother Wugao, the bullfrog mother, Salampandai at her anvil, Shamhat, Ninbeng who was “opened”, Eve. It was guarded: the Yi sky-god wants mankind mute forever, and speech reaches us by an eavesdropping bird. And it had a serpent near it, eaten in Mali and answered in Eden.

The Eve Theory holds that there were once people who were not yet persons, that the inner voice was found by women and taught, and that our species has told the story ever since without knowing it was history. The Ages of Man are that story told by its stations. Here it is told by its sound: first a herd that could “just feel each other” in the dark, and then, at Temecula, people who “began to think, to gain consciousness, and could now talk to each other”.

Sources #

Primary texts

• DuBois, Constance Goddard. The Religion of the Luiseño Indians of Southern California. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 8(3). Berkeley, 1908, pp. 143–145.
• Stirling, Matthew W. Origin Myth of Acoma and Other Records. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 135. Washington, 1942, p. 1.
• Voth, H. R. The Traditions of the Hopi. Field Columbian Museum Anthropological Series 8. Chicago, 1905, pp. 2–3.
• Ximénez, Francisco. Las historias del origen de los indios de esta provincia de Guatemala. Ed. Carl Scherzer. Vienna, 1857, pp. 9–12, 81.
• Muñoz Camargo, Diego. Historia de Tlaxcala. Ed. Alfredo Chavero. México, 1892, pp. 153–154.
• Valério, Guilherme Felipe, and the Terena teachers of Aldeia Jaguapiru. Turíne Terenoehiko. Dourados: EdUFGD, 2018, pp. 16–22.
• Wilbert, Johannes. “Mitos de los indios yabarana” (1959), in Cesáreo de Armellada and C. Bentivenga de Napolitano, Literaturas indígenas venezolanas. Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1975, pp. 211–217.
• Gusinde, Martin. Folk Literature of the Selknam Indians. Ed. Johannes Wilbert. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1975, narrative 1.
• Graham, David Crockett. Folk Religion in Southwest China. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 142(2). Washington, 1961, p. 88.
• 藏羌彝走廊多民族创世神话数据库 (Creation-myth database of the Tibetan–Qiang–Yi Corridor). Entries 416, 438 and 292 (Miao), 459, 465, 469, 477 and 485 (Yi), 525 (Wa, Cangyuan), 542 (Naxi), 748 (Yao), 875 (Lisu), 899 (Hani), 923 (Dai), each reprinting a published collection of the 1980s–90s. Translations the author’s.
• Schotter, Aloys. “Notes ethnographiques sur les tribus du Kouy-tcheou.” Anthropos 3 (1908): 397–425, at p. 424.
• Machle, E. C. The Aboriginal Tribes of China. Canton, 1911, p. 10.
• Frazer, James George. Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1918, pp. 37–38, after Viegen (1912).
• Ling Roth, Henry. The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo, vol. 1. London, 1896, p. 176.
• Bernart, Luelen. The Book of Luelen. Trans. and ed. John L. Fischer, Saul H. Riesenberg and Marjorie G. Whiting. Canberra: ANU Press, 1977, pp. 25–26, 77.
• Keith, Arthur Berriedale, trans. The Veda of the Black Yajus School Entitled Taittiriya Sanhita, part 2. Harvard Oriental Series 19. Cambridge, Mass., 1914, p. 534.
• Griaule, Marcel. Dieu d’eau. Entretiens avec Ogotemmêli. Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1948; Fayard reprint, 1966.
• Zahan, Dominique. The Bambara. Iconography of Religions VII.2. Leiden: Brill, 1974.
• Thompson, R. Campbell. The Epic of Gilgamish. Oxford, 1928, Tablet I, pp. 16–18.
• Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. Enki and Ninmah (t.1.1.2); Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (t.1.8.2.3), lines 134–155.
• Horace. Satires 1.3.99–110. Cicero. De re publica 3.3. Lucretius. De rerum natura 5.1028–1090. Vitruvius. De architectura 2.1.1. Latin texts; translations the author’s.
• Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound 442–461. Euripides. Suppliants 201–204. Diodorus Siculus. Library 1.8. Plato. Protagoras 322a. Greek texts from the Perseus Digital Library; translations the author’s.
• Völuspá 17–18 and Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning 9. Old Norse texts; translations the author’s.
• Dante Alighieri. De vulgari eloquentia 1.4.

Studies

• Berezkin, Yuri E., and Evgeny N. Duvakin. Thematic Classification and Distribution of Folklore-Mythological Motifs by Areas: Analytical Catalogue. Motif E38C, “First people are dumb”.