Made an overview on the age of the Biblical Books in the Special Efforts thread. See here.
edited 2nd Nov '11 4:22:19 PM by LordGro
Let's just say and leave it at that.
OK, wick check.
1,711 inbound links: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/inbound_referrals.php?pagename=main.OlderThanDirt
745 wicks (being partway through a cleanup)
Wick check:
correct: 40%
I don't know: 14%
wrong: 46%
Correct: 40%
No Matter How Much I Beg: Legitimate use from the Odyssey.
One True Threesome: Legitimate use from the Epic Of Gilgamesh.
Other: Theatre isn't 3000 years old, but it is Older Than Dirt. Legit.
Parental Abandonment: Mostly correct. Oedipus and Moses are Older Than Dirt; King Arthur in the same paragraph is not.
Please Shoot the Messenger: Correct.
Please Wake Up: Correct use from the Epic Of Gilgamesh.
Poetry: Correct. It even has examples.
Reality Is Unrealistic: Right. The example is Aesop.
Rescue Romance: Correct. Perseus and Andromeda.
Royals Who Actually Do Something: Correct. Mesopotamia.
SaintSeiya: Correct, I think. Wick is a pothole on the name of Athene.
Shapeshifting: Trope is Older Than Dirt, but the wick is in the description and there are no examples with it. It's a supertrope with no examples, so this seems correct.
Shared Universe: Correct, I think.
Slap-Slap-Kiss: Correct. Refers to a Sumerian poem.
Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism: "Beast Fables" probably refers to Aesops Fables, so I think this is correct. Could be worded better in my opinon, though.
So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Correct. Refers to the Trojan War.
Something Only They Would Say: Correct. Refers to specific Old Testament book.
Stairway to Heaven: Correct, refers to Jacob's Ladder. But I think I already had edited this page. I can’t recall whether it was right before (I think it was).
Stranger in a Familiar Land: Legit, it's the Odyssey.
Super-Strength: All three examples are correct as far as I know.
Borderline, or technically true but sloppily applied, might be correct by accident, or by the action of another troper. 14%
PJOFacebookShenanigans: I don't know what's going on here? A trope that appears on a fanfic for a modern novel has, as its example, characters taken from myth. Their names are a pothole to Older Than Dirt. The characters are that old, but not the novels, let alone the fanfic.
Schizo Tech: I don't know if this is right or not. Says stone age tech was obsolete even in King David's time.
Secret Relationship: Refers to The Bible, doesn't specify which book. Might be right, might not.
Seeking Sanctuary: Unclear. Another unspecified biblical reference.
Spontaneous Generation: Just states outright in the description that the trope is that old. Examples further down the page justify it, but the wick is in a poorly chosen place.
Stock Aesops: Not sure. Those from Aesops Fables are Older Than Dirt, but I don’t know what others this refers to. Seems a bit sloppy.
Talking Animal: Correct, I guess? Wicked in the description with no example, but wicked correctly in the examples section.
Wrong: These are Older Than Feudalism, but the tropers who wrote them could be forgiven for thinking they weren’t, or not realizing they needed to check the actual source. This is the assumption that all Classical Mythology and Hindu Mythology is equally old. 10%
Obfuscating Stupidity: Assumes The Bible and Greek Mythology are 100% Older Than Dirt. Though an example from one of those might make this trope Older Than Dirt, this assumption is incorrect.
Secret Test: Refers to The Mahabharata.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: That version of the myth is Older Than Feudalism, but knowing that requires a fair ammount of research.
Separated by the Wall: Refers to a story by Ovid.
Talking the Monster to Death: Only goes back to Ovid.
Wrong: Example clearly from after 500 BCE, or no example anywhere. 30%
No Yay: Refers to Irish myth. Should be Older Than Print.
Once More, with Clarity: Refers to Arabian Nights. That is Older Than Print.
Oracular Head: Baseless and incorrect assumption about human scientific knowledge about the function of the brain and how old that knowledge is.
Other: Refers to Battle of Marathon, dated after 500 BCE. Should be Older Than Feudalism.
Our Ghouls Are Creepier: Random undated folktale with no source.
Our Werewolves Are Different: Assumes werewolves are Older Than Dirt because they’re mythical. The oldest examples on the page are medieval.
Pig in a Poke: Refers to a Latin motto. Clearly is older than 500 BCE.
Rage Quit: Page has no examples anywhere near this old. One example is Older Than Print.
Ravens and Crows: Refers to unspecified “superstitions” with no examples. Myth examples further down the page are this old, but with no wicks.
Red-Headed Hero: Page does have Older Than Dirt examples, but the wick is from Norse myth, which is Older Than Print.
Revive Kills Zombie: Undated folklore assumed to be Older Than Dirt.
Ring of Power: Refers to "ancient Hebrew legend" as opposed to the Bible or some other dated source.
Round Robin: "many the plots involving a group of people sitting down around a fire (or whatever)" is not a work.
Shapeshifters Do It for a Change: Refers to Norse myth, which is only Older Than Print.
Super Mode: Refers to Irish myth, which is Older Than Print.
Totally Wrong: Troper did not know what the index is. Maybe verbal tic territory. 6%
One More Day: Refers to a fictional character who's a senior citizen.
Soap: Tropers who are Older Than Dirt will remember this one actor who is old.
Tales From The Middle Kingdom: A webcomic is called Older Than Dirt, because it’s a fanfic of an Older Than Print book about an Older Than Feudalism war. Wrong on all three counts. Also wrong in wicking/indexing a work instead of a trope.
edited 14th Nov '11 7:29:05 AM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
I think splitting is likely to be problematic. I grabbed all the A entries and tried to specifically date them, and they broke down like this:
- Pre-Homer: 11
- Homer: 11
- Post-Homer: 10
- Couldn't date: 6
If those numbers hold up, that means whichever bucket Homer gets stuck in is going to be by far the larger.
edited 2nd Nov '11 10:22:20 PM by Micah
132 is the rudest number.
I do note that the cutoff between Older Than Dirt and Older Than Feudalism is hard to grasp, since "dirt" doesn't mean anything temporally.
Zzzzzzzzzz
My concern is that you're trying to make it technically correct, at the expense of usability. Splitting Old Testament of the Bible into two different categories, based on which book the example is from? That's hair-splitting that virtually no editor will take into account.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
But the Old Testament was already in two different categories before we began cleaning up these pages.
Yes it's tedious, and I wondered all the time while I made this overview whether it was worth it. But seeing as the development of the Old Testament spans several centuries, it’s hard to justify putting it all in one category.
As long as we have these indices, I don’t think there's a way to avoid these kind of problems. Maybe we could make the cut-offs more 'flexible', or move them to more convenient dates. But I assume in any case, we will likely trade old problems for new ones.
Let's just say and leave it at that.
I have noticed that the same tedium is likely with Greek myths and history. Especially with myths; except with Homer and the theatre, you need specialized sources to find out when a given story was written.
Perhaps the boundary should be moved from 500 BCE to 800 or 900 BCE. That would move all Greek, biblical, and early Hindu examples into Older Than Feudalism. The only drawback is that index would get huge, but not necessarily any huger than Older Than Dirt is now.
Whatever the solution to that issue, I do think that as long as Older Than Dirt exists, it should have a name that clearly indicates its intended use.
Should I do an inbounds check?
The ratio of wicks to inbounds is much higher for the other Older Than X indecies. That means the phrase Older Than Dirt is catchy. But I think its meaning both on and off the wiki does not match its description. Erm, except that the inbounds the wiki pulled up only number 434, not 1715. Huh?
EDIT: Ugh, started an inbounds check but I'm not going to continue. Out of 17 so far, 2 are correct, 1 is wrong, and 14 don't have the link on the page, fell off the net, aren't in English, require a login to view, or are from search engines.
edited 6th Nov '11 9:05:58 AM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
Zzzzzzzzzz
The meaning of "older than dirt" off the wiki is "really, really old". Nothing more.
edited 3rd Nov '11 3:33:08 PM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Not exactly a term that suggests anything specific or historical.
Responding to Micah, here's what I found in a tally of all the tropes on the index:
after 900 BCE: 271
before 900 BCE: 131
no example: 23
So that confirms what you found.
edited 3rd Nov '11 4:23:03 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
My inclination is to put the dividing line somewhere around the Punic Wars. That puts the entire Old Testament in Dirt, but the Apochrypha in Feudalism. Dirt would also include everything Greek and even some Roman stuff. Don't know how it affects Hinduism.
Actually, a great deal of Greek material was first written down after that time, including the first full account of the Argonauts, and everything in Ovid.
What about moving the boundary to 700 BCE? Then the only Greek sources in "Dirt" are Homer, The Trojan Cycle, and Hesiod (not including Shield of Heracles and Catalog of Women, which aren't his). Then we can say "Everything Greek is OT Feudalism, except Iliad, Odyssey, The Trojan Cycle, Theogony, and Works and Days." That's fairly simple.
Dividing Hindu texts is similarly fairly simple (at the early end): the Vedas are Older Than Dirt, everything else is later. As a living religion like Christianity, there is no hard upper end so we'd still have to hope for contributors to check when a story was written...
So you say, if it's Hindu or Greek, put it in Feudalism, unless you have the actual source and it's from X.
But that again leaves the Bible divided? Lord Gro, how much of the actual texts go beyond 700 BCE? If it's just something simple like "The Pentateuch/Torah" then I think 700 BCE is alright.
Everything Chinese would be Older Than Feudalism. The Avesta would remain complicated, but there are no examples from it anyway.
edited 6th Nov '11 9:07:34 AM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
This page suggests 700 BCE would cut off (bits of) the Torah plus Nahum, Hosea, and Amos. If you draw the line at 800 BCE, it'd just be the Torah and you'd be lumping all the Greek stuff together, but that should probably be accompanied by a later split as well* as it'd make Older Than Feudalism ginormous.
That's a good page, Micah, I didn't see it until now. However, Wikipedia seems somewhat at odds with itself, since I remember seeing different dates for the same biblical books in other articles.
Generally, the dating of the Bible is something of sore spot. As detailed by Wikipedia here, there are several theories on the age of the Torah:
- The traditional view is that the Torah was written essentially by Moses himself, which would put it around the 1400s BC. Conservative Jews and Christians still stick to it.
- The "documentary hypothesis", which has dominated the scientific discourse since the 19th century until recently, assumes that there are four different sources: The Yahwist (950 BC), the Elohist (850 BC), the Deuteronomist (600 BC), and the Priestly source (500 BC). Finally, everything was edited together around 450 BC by the Redactors.
- "Supplementary model": Torah written piecemeal since c. 700 BC, reached its final form around 450 BC.
- "Fragmentary model": Torah was actually a heap of fragments written 850-550 BC, then all glued together around 450 BC.
- Biblical minimalism: Torah composed c. 300-140 BC.
And yes, the Torah/Pentateuch as a whole is in any case not the oldest part of the Bible. The "Deuteronomistic history", a.k.a. the Books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, are older (emerged between 625 and 540 BC). Also many Prophets, Lamentations, and parts of Psalms and Proverbs.
If we would split at 700 BC, then I would suggest putting everything from the Bible in the younger category. There are only a few prophetic books that are possibly older, and some of Psalms and Proverbs.
Otherwise, as an alternative split, the space between 250 and 200 BC (as suggested by Morgan) seems attractive. Roman literature only really begins around 200 BC (of earlier writers nothing survives), and after c. 250 BC (when Argonautika comes out), there is little Greek literature of note. Thus we would neatly split between Greek and Roman antiquity.
I suppose there will be new problems with other literatures, however. I'll look further into it, by and by.
edited 6th Nov '11 3:06:22 PM by LordGro
Let's just say and leave it at that.
200 BCE would separate earlier Greek from Diodorus Siculus and Ovid (both 1st century BCE) and Apollodorus (2nd century CE), who collected and modified many myths that were otherwise lost. Lots of the most famous, best-known myths are known only, or primarily, from those two authors, and many collections of Greek myths will not mention that something came from them.
Between 700 BCE and 200 CE there's really no cut-off point I can think of that wouldn't be a very confusing headache for material that, in modern vernacular languages, is usually published as unattributed "Greek Mythology."
I'm with putting the whole Bible after 700 BCE, for simplicity if nothing else. That the Torah was redacted c. 450 BCE is no different from the Argonautica being redacted in the 3rd century. It was based on something older, but we don't have that something.
UPDATE: I bar-graphed that list of literature and my list of Classical authors. Cutoff points I see with minimum pain are 300 AD, 200 AD, 700 BC, 800 BC, 900 BC, 1000 BC, and 1100 BC. But that's "minimum." Ramayana and Mahabharata were composed slowly over the period from 400 BC to 400 AD. The Vedas fit somewhere between 800 BC and 1100 BC or 1200 BC. I could see sticking the Vedas at 800 or 900, though. With the Mahabharata and Ramayana you could just treat them like the Bible and put them at 400 AD.
Classical antiquity is a troublesome period with lots of texts and few modern sources that divide it up by date and author. I could see cutting all the isolated Ur Examples to trim down Older Than Feudalism and then moving its barrier to 700 BC.
edited 4th Nov '11 8:36:53 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
Byzantine
A relatively easy way to find which book/s a Biblical characters appears in, is to look for profiles in Wikipedia and/or do a google search for the name. For example Abimelech, son of Gideon turns up in the Book of Judges alone. Abimelech the High Priest turns up only in the Book of Chronicles, etc.
I don't particularly get suggestion #4 of your initial list. That is already the format of the list. As for #6, isn't serarating the tropes by alphabetical order more manageable than making new arbitrary chronological separation? For example, tropes A-M go in page 1, tropes N-Z go in page 2.
Number #4 is my request to put an actual note telling people not to misuse the indecies, because until now Older Than Dirt had almost as much misuse on it as correct use, by people who apparently didn't read the description before editing.
I'm now in favor of moving the boundary to 700 BC and not further splitting by time period.
edited 5th Nov '11 11:15:55 AM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
On the cut-off dates: I think the best would be to move the 500 BC boundary to 800 BC or 900 BC. So that Homer and Hesiod are not in the older category. This way, we have the whole of Classical Antiquity, Greek or Roman, in one category.
The only things in the older category would be Mesopotamian literature, Egyptian things, the Vedas, and possibly examples documented by archaeology.
Will make it much easier to handle for users.
It's also in line with the reasonable rule that categories get larger the farther they are back. When Older Than Print covers already 950 years, it's okay to make Older Than Feudalism 1300 or 1400. Another advantage is that it really gives meaning to the oldest category. It's really interesting to see which things can be traced so far back.
The only problem is that it will make the Older Than Feudalism category huge. But as Byzantine said, we could split the index into several pages, or maybe just put the list in some folders.
Let's just say and leave it at that.
This is what it looked like in July:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110718165148/https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OlderThanDirt
Due to the lock and unfamiliarity with the forum, I didn't start this thread until we'd cleaned out a lot of the actual abuse.
800 BCE is probably the cleanest cut we could make. That puts all Greek and biblical texts on one side (assuming the Torah is dated to its current rescension at 450 BCE) and still leaves all the Vedas on the other side.
I think folders by alphabetical order, like A-M and N-Z, would be fine for Older Than Feudalism.
edited 5th Nov '11 12:39:05 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
Making Older Than Feudalism huge is also an improvement over making Older Than Dirt huge, as it can legitimately shrink as people find older examples for the same tropes (while, if Older Than Dirt shrinks, it means someone screwed up somewhere).
132 is the rudest number.
Ovid was Roman. I don't know if there's any Greek mythology stuff that late that isn't actually Roman, other than what Gro says about the Argonauts, and I don't have a problem with splitting the two (it's less obscure knowledge than when different parts of the Bible were written). Alexander the Great had already flamed out by then, which was classical Greece's last supernova before being gobbled up by Rome.
I wouldn't say no to an earlier cutoff in 700-800 BC either. That makes Older Than Dirt a rather miniscule category with no Greek or Biblical examples, but it grabs the truly old stuff, and we could use either of the two exclusions to help with the name.
What I'm saying is that much of what appears in books labeled as "Greek Mythology" does not go back any further than Ovid or Hyginus. Some of what they wrote was clearly based on earlier Greek authors, but Ovid especially changed and reinterpreted them. For example, the Greek flood myth of Deucalion, the Narcissus and Echo myth, the Pygmalion and Galatea myth, the myth that Medusa was turned into a monster by Athene, the Eros and Psyche myth, and the Pyramus and Thisbe myth are first told by Ovid. Those myths were indexed in Older Than Dirt before I moved them.
Romans and late Greeks retold many myths that had existed earlier, and it is usually those later retellings that are the most famous, and the most republished. Many myths are Lost in Imitation, so to speak. And in many cases the earlier versions are just lost.
Apollodorus was a Greek writer after Ovid, and several Greek myths do not appear any earlier than his Bibliotheke. They presumably existed in some form before, but we have little more than tiny fragments to hint what they looked like. Apollodoros and Pausanias were in the 2nd century CE, the last major Greek writers. After that it's mostly just Nonnos, whose stuff isn't popularly retold now.
Most modern Greek Mythology books don't separate the Ovidian and Apollodoran versions and myths from those that were written earlier. Most tropers will have no way of telling them apart without doing some research, and I agree with Madrugada that that's awkward to ask and won't be done often. I think most folks won't expect that any Greek myths are that recent.
edited 9th Nov '11 11:16:04 AM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
Bump?
It seems too early for a crowner.
How important is it for Older Than Feudalism to not be huge, vs. making it easier to use by putting all Greek, Biblical, whatever in one category? And is there anyone who wants to keep the Dirt/Feudalism boundary at 500 BCE?
Right now Older Than Dirt has ~460 tropes, and Older Than Feudalism has 179.
If the cutoff moves to 800 BCE, Dirt will have 192 tropes, and Feudalism will have 447.
Using 900 BCE instead won't change much.
I'm not sure where to put the Vedas, since according to Wikipedia scholars believe they were composed 1500-1000 BCE, but apparently weren't actually written down for several centuries afterwards. I guess that's comparable to the (outdated) documentary hypothesis for the Pentateuch/Torah.
edited 22nd Nov '11 6:21:37 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
So, I was absent for some time. I would have hoped for more opinions on the matter, but this particular problem seems not to draw a whole lot of attention ...
I read a little on the Vedas on Wikipedia. The 800 BC cut-off doesn’t sit particularly well with them, as the youngest Vedas are dated only to 600 BC.— On the other hand, I doubt we will get many entries from the Vedas, so it might be not all that much of a problem. Classical Mythology and The Bible are the two big Trope Makers in that era. The 500 BC cut-off would actually be quite good, if it weren't for these two.
From your count, Arcades Sabboth, it seems that the new Older Than Feudalism would be about as big as Older Than Dirt is now. So it wouldn't make these pages more even in length, but no worse than it is now. The advantage is that it would be (I assume) much easier for users to decide where entries go.
Let's just say and leave it at that.
Crown Description:
The 500 BC cutoff date between Older Than Dirt and Older Than Feudalism causes confusion and misuse in wicks and examples. Classical Mythology is split between the two indexes, and so is The Bible. It takes careful research to figure out what date any story was written to know which index it belongs in. This is a huge pain, and people aren't doing it. Renaming or not will be a separate crowner.
EDIT: Updates at bottom of post. There is a new crowner: single proposition: rename Older Than Dirt?
I have been cleaning up Older Than Dirt and its sister indecies for 1-2 weeks now. I initially started a Special Efforts thread, which has had a little discussion: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13196857330A99188400&page=1#9
I apologize for the long first post, I don't know how to shorten this. There are a several problems.
There was a ton of misuse: tropes indexed with no example justifying the claim of their historical date, or with an example from the wrong period. There were many assumptions that all myths are automatically Older Than Dirt, despite the warning on Older Than Dirt not to do this. I and others have done some clean-up.
But there's a lot left to do:
1. I propose renaming Older Than Dirt. I've already cleaned up a lot of misuse. The name is vague and doesn't refer to the index's historical cutoff date. Many tropers use it for "this trope is old!" or "all myths are this old!" or even "this fictional character is old within his fictional universe!" I have found it used for works that contain tropes which are old (just because they contain that trope) and for Warhammer 40k because 2nd edition was a while ago. From the initial >980 wicks it's down to 745 right now (with ptitles, A-No Doubt, The-Z done).
Why not move the content to a new index with an explicitly historical name, like the other indecies in this series (Older Than Democracy ?). Since Older Than Dirt is used as a synonym for The Oldest Ones in the Book, I say make the original name redirect to that.
2. The Bible examples in Older Than Dirt and Older Than Feudalism need clean up. Older Than Dirt and The Bible explain how the different parts of the Bible are dated, and which are older than 500 BCE. But the examples from the Bible are indexed randomly. I myself know little about this subject.
3. EDIT: Nevermind, I'll bring this up later.
4. I propose adding a note to each index that says "Before adding a trope to this index, please be certain that it is in a specific work dated to before [_YEAR_]. After adding it, please cite the work and date, and make sure the trope's page references the correct index." This could discourage new misuse.
5. Some tropes, especially in Older Than Dirt, have no actual example. I think every trope should have a dated example from a specific work, to justify dating it to a particular time period. I think examples should come from works of writing or visual art, or other historical or archaeological evidence, not "It's oral history/folklore/myth so it must be old," which was the norm before I started this clean-up. I removed many tropes from these index pages because I could find no such examples on their page.
6. Older Than Dirt is getting long, and many more tropes could be added. Should it be split into two indexes? EDIT: I'm now against splitting any of the indexes.
______________________________________________________________
UPDATE:
Wick check (50 wicks):
44% correct (sometimes sloppy, but correct)
10% borderline or I don't know
8% misuse where the troper got Greek Mythology or The Bible mixed around
38% misuse that was just wrong: totally wrong time period, treating it as a trope instead of an index, etc.
All Examples (as archived in July by Way Back Machine)
46% correct
3% borderline, owing to Classical Mythology or biblical mixup
6% borderline for other reasons
11% misuse from Classical Mythology or biblical mixup
34% just plain wrong: totally wrong time period, no example whatsoever, or treating "folklore and myth the world over" as an example.
Previous crowner found consensus support for changing the defintion to: Tropes from before 800 BCE. Definition was changed and younger examples moved to Older Than Feudalism.
New crowner: single proposition to rename Older Than Dirt?
Pros
Cons
edited 9th Dec '11 12:37:47 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.