Oral Tradition. Literacy was not widespread till comparatively recent times. Even in now highly developed countries reading and writing skills were with some notable exceptions generally confined to a class of professional scribes. The fruits of thought and creative imagination were transmitted orally, committed to memory, and passed on from one generation to another. For example, behind the Scriptures of the great religions, including the Bible, lies a body of such oral tradition. This fact is of immense importance for an understanding of the philosophical and religious texts that have come down to us in their present form, for the mind-set of even the learned in a society generally dependent on such oral transmission of scholarship and wisdom is different from that of one in which literacy is sufficiently widespread to be accounted the norm.

Geddes MacGregor, Dictionary of Religion and Philosophy, New York: Paragon House, 1989