solved some problems in orality studies, it also created new problems. Rather
than imagining a storehouse of episodes in the singer’s head, built by diligent
memorizing as an apprentice, we can now think about these scenes as instan-
tiations of scripts that are beingfilled in with details by other cognitive
processes. But could all these scripts stem from the accumulation of everyday
experience? For example, did singers have repeated experiences of sea battles,
duels, murders, epiphanies of gods, and similar kinds of recurring episodes in
Homeric literature, that enabled them to create a set of expectations about
them—just as they created a script of getting dressed?
To solve this problem, I will distinguish different sources of cognitive sche-
mata. First, there are maturationally natural (see section 1.3), cross-culturally
consistent schemata and aspects of schemata. For example, people in all cultures
use the concept of agency automatically and implicitly. From the age offive
months, babies show a good understanding of agents that move purposefully
(Leslie, 1994, 1995). It seems unlikely that very elaborate scripts would be
innate, but it is probable, for example, that some scripts related to social
exchange have strong innate roots. Second, there are cognitive schemata that
we acquire fromfirst-hand experience. According to Schank and Abelson,
scripts are derived from personal experience (that is, they are constructed
based on events of which we are participants or observers). Minchin also used
the notion of script in this sense and identified such scripts in Homeric
literature. The third category of cognitive schemata includes schemata that we
acquire from social learning. For example, we often hear stories about family
life, which are told from particular cultural perspectives. From this information
we distil culture-specific scripts related to getting married, parenting, divorce,
and so on. In the minds of people living in ancient Greek culture, stories of
battlescouldadduptoa“battle script,”even if they had nofirst-hand experi-
ence of a battle. This learning process is very similar to the one described by
Schank and Abelson. Whether we learn them fromfirst-hand experience or
culture, scripts result from generalizations based on a great number of similar
episodes. In the case of cultural learning, however, the respective episodes are
heard from other people, rather than experienced by us. Whereas the Homeric
scripts of dressing up or having a meal could be based onfirst-hand experience,
the scripts of a sea-battle or a divine epiphany could be acquired from listening
to such episodes several times. Given that a meal in an epic poem could be
different from ordinary meals, for example, we also have to take into account the
possibility that scripts used in literary settings were based on inputs from both
personal experience and social learning.
Let us take the well-known story of Paul’s conversion as an example from
the New Testament. This episode is reported by Paul himself in his letter to the
Galatians (1:12–17) and told in three different versions in Acts 9, 22, and 26.
Stories of divine call are known from a variety of ancient cultural settings
(Baltzer, 1975; Czachesz, 2007a, pp. 10–59). For example, an Egyptian inscription
Memory and Transmission 71