Oral tradition and knowledge without text

The vast majority of human knowledge across the full span of human existence has been transmitted orally — without writing, without text, through the living medium of voice, song, story, and ceremony. Oral traditions are not primitive preludes to literacy but sophisticated technologies for encoding, preserving, and transmitting complex knowledge through forms — rhythm, melody, narrative pattern — that the human memory is specifically adapted to hold. The Vedas themselves were oral long before they were written, and the oral transmission is held by the tradition to be more accurate, not less, than the textual.