Maths Meets Myths: Network Investigations of Ancient Narratives

Three years ago, we initiated a programme of research in which ideas and tools from statistical physics and network theory were applied to the field of comparative mythology. The eclecticism of the work, together with the perspectives it delivered, led to widespread media coverage and academic discussion. Here we review some aspects of the project, contextualised with a brief history of the long relationship between science and the humanities. We focus in particular on an Irish epic, summarising some of the outcomes of our quantitative investigation. We also describe the emergence of a new sub-discipline and our hopes for its future

Universal Properties of Mythological Networks

As in statistical physics, the concept of universality plays an important, albeit qualitative, role in the field of comparative mythology. Here we apply statistical mechanical tools to analyse the networks underlying three iconic mythological narratives with a view to identifying common and distinguishing quantitative features. Of the three narratives, an Anglo-Saxon and a Greek text are mostly believed by antiquarians to be partly historically based while the third, an Irish epic, is often considered to be fictional. Here we show that network analysis is able to discriminate real from imaginary social networks and place mythological narratives on the spectrum between them. Moreover, the perceived artificiality of the Irish narrative can be traced back to anomalous features associated with six characters. Considering these as amalgams of several entities or proxies, renders the plausibility of the Irish text comparable to the others from a network-theoretic point of view.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Updated to incorporate corrections from EPL acceptance proces

Sizes of Permanent Campsite Communities Reflect Constraints on Natural Human Communities

Both small-scale human societies and personal social networks have a characteristic hierarchical structure with successively inclusive layers of 15, 50, 150, 500, and 1,500 individuals. It has been suggested that these values represent a set of natural social attractors, or “sweet spots,” in organizational terms. We exploited the new phenomenon of permanent (i.e., residential) campsites to ask whether these values are present in the size distribution of the numbers of residents in these naturally small-scale communities. In two separate data sets of different grain, we find consistent evidence for sites with 50, 150, 500, and maybe 1,500 residents. We infer that these reflect numerical sizes at which communities may in some way be socially optimal. Our data do not allow us to say why this pattern emerges, but the consistency of the results and the fact that the predetermined sizes of permanent campsites adhere to this pattern suggest that it may arise from the limits on the number of relationships that make an effective community