There are limits to this, unless it is transformed by the ever-repeated memory into epic and myth, by which time it will have lost its historical anchorage. 1.8.3 But imagine the quantum leap in a community’s capacity to ‘remember’ through narrative when it can commit the tradition to writing. Suddenly the remote past, far beyond narrative memory, can be brought up in the mind: stories of battles long ago, of the rise and fall of empires, of how we came to live here and own this territory, or why