Forgive me for being a bit tangential, but some of the books I have been looking into recently bring home the idea that the sort of 'history' I was taught as a child sort of missed out so much accomplishment and culture from the whole world, in addition to perceptions generally being that the West (descended from Greeks, Romans, Jesus) was good and advanced and the rest of the world primitive, lacking civilisation etc.

So when last night I encountered info about scholars within Islam undertaking translations from Sanscrit I thought about this thread though the time I was reading about was later that the dates in f,.

We think of India as so far away, but there was trade through to it way, way back. The Indus Valley civilisation is one of the big three.

However, structural similarities and repeated motifs do not necessarily mean lines of descent.

For example, for various reasons I can easily imagine stories about people being thrown off ships on superstitious grounds etc arising simultaneously in a host of different cultures. Human sacrifice in general seems to have been widespread. Does this seem reasonable? So while it might be reasonable to say 'stories like that' have existed for x thousand years, it might be a bigger leap and less considered to assert that a particular story is x years old. Not sure how one would define any abstract lines here, or what sort of evidence one would require to demonstrate or argue for a clear link. Have encountered this sort of problem of argument and evidence quite a lot in musical history one way or another.

I suppose bilingualism, allowing for 'translation' might arise when conditions were stable enough for traders from one group to live and raise children in another place?