ErostrateDiscovering the world's cultures, one work at a time
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How the works were chosen

By date

Period · -3000–500

What has survived

works
12

Eleven works for three thousand years. That figure does not tell what was composed, it tells what crossed time: a poem cut into clay tablets, a Greek epic and Greek fables written down long after they were recited, a few Sanskrit and Chinese texts copied from one generation to the next. Everything else was lost, or was never written at all because those societies entrusted their stories to memory. Reading this period therefore means reading a selection made by the accidents of preservation, by burned libraries and by languages that became unreadable.

Europe 2

Two works, the Odyssey and Aesop's fables, both from an oral tradition before being written, both recopied for two thousand years because they served to teach reading and public speech. The rest of the Greek and Latin literature in the catalogue begins later, not because it did not exist, but because the pages kept here are those that went on being read without interruption.

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The Arab, Turkish and Persian worlds 7

The densest concentration of the period, and no accident: this is where writing begins, on clay and then on papyrus, and where administrations kept their tablets. Gilgamesh, the Sumerian myth of Enki and Ninhursag, the Baal cycle of Ugarit, the Iranian Avesta: six texts, most of which crossed four thousand years because they were cut into clay, a material that fire hardens instead of destroying.

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Caucasus and Central Asia 0

Nothing in the catalogue before 500. The languages of the region, Armenian, Georgian and the Turkic tongues, begin to be written from the fifth century, when alphabets are created in order to translate Christian texts. Before that, poetry and narrative travelled by voice, and what we know of them was written down much later, often by Persian or Arab scholars.

East Asia 2

Two Chinese texts, the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Analects of Confucius, one a repertory of fabulous creatures and geographies, the other a collection of sayings reported by disciples. Both were copied without interruption for two millennia because they belonged to the imperial examination syllabus: in China the survival of a text long depended on its administrative usefulness.

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South and Southeast Asia 1

A single entry, the Panchatantra, a collection of animal fables composed in Sanskrit to teach the art of governing to young princes. It spread into Persian, into Arabic and then across Europe, to the point that fables believed to come from elsewhere come from it. The great Indian epics already existed but circulated in recitation, and their fixed versions are later.

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Sub-Saharan Africa 0

Nothing in the catalogue, although the Africa of this period both writes and composes: hieroglyphs and demotic in the Nile valley, Ge'ez in Ethiopia, Meroitic in Sudan. The gap has two causes, the attachment of ancient Egypt to the Mediterranean world in our classifications, and the fact that the oral traditions of West and Central Africa were transcribed only in the twentieth century.

The Americas 0

Nothing, and for a precise reason: the Mesoamerican scripts, Maya and Zapotec, did exist, but the books that carried them were destroyed by the hundred in the sixteenth century. Four Maya codices survive out of thousands. The texts the catalogue attaches to that tradition, beginning with the Popol Vuh, are transcriptions made after the conquest, in the alphabet of the victors.

Oceania 0

Nothing, and there could be nothing: the societies of the Pacific did not know writing before the missionaries arrived in the nineteenth century. Their genealogies, navigation narratives and songs of creation were handed on by trained memory, with specialists charged with reciting them without error. The catalogue meets them only from 1800, once transcribed.