The World's Oldest Memory - By Faraja Majaliwa

Written By: Faraja Majaliwa

Category: Essay

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In a thought-provoking essay titled "The World's Oldest Memory," Faraja Majaliwa delves into the timeless narratives that have shaped human history. Submitted to the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, this piece explores the universal themes of unity and division that traverse ancient civilizations and resonate with modern audiences. Majaliwa invites readers to reflect on the enduring motifs found within humanity's oldest stories, offering a perspective that transcends cultural and temporal boundaries.

About the Work

"The World's Oldest Memory" by Faraja Majaliwa is an exploration of enduring themes within ancient narratives, such as floods, sacred mountains, and the Tower of Babel. Majaliwa's essay examines how these motifs might reflect shared human experiences and collective memories. The work is rich with historical and theological reflections, encouraging readers to consider how ancient stories continue to influence contemporary understanding of unity and separation.

The World's Oldest Memory

Original Submission by Faraja Majaliwa

The World's Oldest Memory

Faraja Majaliwa

Long before humanity learned to divide itself into races, nations, civilizations, and ideologies, it told stories.

Some were told beside the Nile. Others travelled along the Euphrates. Some survived among the mountains of Asia, while others crossed oceans and took root among peoples far removed from Egypt, Israel, Babylon, or Rome. The stories changed as they travelled. Names changed. Languages changed. Gods appeared and disappeared. Entire civilizations rose, flourished, and vanished.

Yet certain themes refused to die.

A great flood.

A world renewed.

A sacred mountain.

A tower.

A lost unity.

The persistence of these motifs raises an uncomfortable possibility. What if ancient civilizations are not merely telling similar stories? What if some of them are carrying fragments of something older than the civilizations themselves?

I approach that question as a Christian, and therefore with a bias. I do not pretend to stand outside the tradition I am examining. Yet the question belongs to no single faith. It belongs equally to historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and anyone who has ever wondered why humanity's oldest stories can feel strangely familiar.

I use the word memory cautiously. I do not mean that every flood story, sacred mountain, or tower must descend from one historical event. Stories travel. Human beings also arrive independently at similar images because they confront similar realities. A recurring story can be evidence of inheritance, coincidence, shared human psychology, local catastrophe, or some combination of these. Similarity alone proves very little.

But it can still be worth noticing.

Strictly speaking, neither the Flood nor Babel can be called humanity's oldest remembered event.

The theologian will point further back, to Eden. The scientist will point further back still, toward the beginnings of the universe. The anthropologist will search for humanity's earliest ancestors. Each is, in a different sense, searching for a beginning.

Beginnings have a peculiar problem: they lie beyond memory.

The Garden of Eden, if it existed as described, lies beyond history's horizon. The origin of the universe lies beyond human recollection altogether. Neither survives as something humanity could have witnessed and then consciously carried across generations.

Flood traditions are different. Stories of catastrophic flooding have been recorded in many cultures, though their meanings, details, and possible origins vary widely. Some may preserve memories of local disasters. Some may have travelled between peoples. Others may have arisen independently in places where water meant both life and destruction. What interests me is not the claim that every flood story proves one global event, but the persistence of the pattern: destruction, survival, and renewal.

Perhaps this is why the Flood occupies such a central place in Genesis. It is not merely an ending. It is a beginning.

Adam stands at the beginning of humanity in the biblical account; Noah stands at the beginning of humanity renewed. The Flood narrows the human story. The multitude becomes a family. The world begins again.

For a brief moment, at least within the logic of Genesis, humanity is united once more.

The nations have not yet emerged.

The languages have not yet multiplied.

The descendants of Noah still belong to one human family.

Then comes Babel.

The Tower of Babel is often remembered as a story about language. Yet I have increasingly come to suspect that language is only part of what the story is attempting to explain.

The deeper question is division itself.

Why do human beings, who share so much, become separated by so much? Why do people who descend from common ancestors eventually come to regard one another as strangers?

According to Genesis, Babel marks a fracture in humanity's common story. Languages multiply. Peoples scatter. Nations emerge. Whether one interprets the account literally, symbolically, or somewhere between the two, its central movement remains striking: the story begins with unity and moves toward separation. The divisions come later.

That is almost the reverse of how we often imagine the past. We speak as though humanity began as permanently separate peoples who gradually learned to coexist. Yet the deeper we travel into human history, the more our branches begin to converge.

History multiplies distinctions. Kingdoms become empires. Empires become nations. Nations become ideologies. We sort ourselves by language, colour, geography, religion, class, tribe, and countless other lines of belonging.

But move backward far enough and the names become fewer. The families become larger. The branches converge. The multitude slowly collapses into kinship.

The farther we travel into the past, the fewer strangers we find.

This observation brings me to race.

The modern world has built enormous political, social, and moral systems around racial categories. Yet the racial classifications familiar to us today are relatively recent when compared with the length of human history. Ancient societies certainly noticed human difference, and they were capable of prejudice, exclusion, conquest, and ideas of superiority. But identity was often organized more immediately around kinship, language, city, religion, kingdom, legal status, and culture than around the modern colour-coded racial categories that later hardened into powerful systems.

Race, as the modern world organizes it, is younger than kinship.

The biblical narrative, whatever else one thinks of it, begins from common human ancestry rather than separate human origins. Humanity does not enter the story as unrelated races. It enters as one family and becomes many peoples.

Modern population genetics reaches the question by a completely different road, but it too points toward shared human ancestry and extensive mixing across populations. Historical linguistics traces languages into families and older forms. Anthropology reconstructs migrations, dispersals, encounters, and intermarriage across immense stretches of time.

These disciplines are not saying the same thing as Genesis, and it would be careless to pretend that they are. But they converge on one important point: the human groups we now treat as fixed and ancient are neither sealed from one another nor without common ancestry.

Unity first. Separation later.

Even geology offers a distant metaphor. The continents themselves were not always arranged as they are now. Landmasses joined, fractured, and drifted across immense spans of time. Human history is not geology, of course, but the image is difficult to resist: things separate, diversify, and become distant without distance necessarily being their first condition.

Perhaps this is why certain stories continue to haunt humanity.

Floods.

Sacred mountains.

Golden ages.

Hero-kings.

Towers reaching toward heaven.

The historian in me knows that resemblance does not automatically prove a common source. Floods happen. Mountains inspire awe. Towers embody ambition. Human beings repeatedly turn the same fears and desires into story.

Yet the Christian in me remains reluctant to dismiss the similarities too quickly.

Perhaps some of the world's oldest civilizations are not simply telling different stories. Perhaps, in places, they are remembering the same human questions from different directions.

There is one final irony.

The biblical story begins with humanity united. It records a flood through which humanity begins again. It records a tower from which humanity scatters.

And then, many centuries later, it introduces another hill.

Not a tower reaching upward from earth, but a cross raised upon it.

This essay is not an argument for the claims Christians make about that cross. Yet I cannot help noticing the pattern. The first pages of Scripture describe humanity as one. Its early chapters describe humanity becoming many. Its final pages imagine the nations gathered once more.

Whether one regards this as theology, history, coincidence, or literary genius is a matter for another discussion. For now, it is enough to observe that the biblical story appears strangely unwilling to end where Babel left it.

We live in an age that possesses extraordinary knowledge about human origins. We can map genomes, trace migrations, reconstruct language families, and excavate lost cities. Yet for all our knowledge, we remain remarkably committed to forgetting one of the oldest lessons our stories seem determined to teach.

Perhaps, then, the world's oldest memory is not the memory of a flood, a tower, or even a particular ancient event.

Perhaps it is something older and simpler: the memory that we once belonged to one another.

Before there were nations, there was humanity.

Before there were races, there was kinship.

Before there were strangers, there was family.

The flood stories may preserve fragments of catastrophe. Babel may preserve a memory of dispersal. Ancient genealogies may preserve the conviction of common descent. Different civilizations tell the story differently, but beneath them runs the same unsettling possibility: that separation was not our beginning.

The farther we travel into the past, the fewer strangers we find.

That is the world's oldest memory: that before we became many, we were one.

And perhaps it is the one memory we can least afford to lose.

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, hosted by Hashtag Kalakar, is an esteemed platform celebrating diverse voices in literature. This competition invites participants worldwide to showcase their creativity and insight in poetry, essays, and creative writing. The event facilitates a rich exchange of ideas, fostering a global community of writers and thinkers.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to Faraja Majaliwa for sharing "The World's Oldest Memory" with us. This essay, a part of the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, offers profound insights into the shared narratives of humanity. We appreciate your contribution to this global dialogue and look forward to witnessing the continued impact of your thoughtful writing.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.