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

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Period · 1450–1650

Print spreads

works
97

Printing does not change literature everywhere at the same time or in the same way. In Europe it takes a book from a few dozen copies to a few thousand, fixes national languages and makes the modern novel possible, which assumes a solitary, silent reader. In the Ottoman and Persian worlds, manuscript copying long remains preferred, for reasons both aesthetic and religious. In China and Korea printing is far older but serves first the examinations and the classics. Ninety-six works, more than half of them European.

Europe 54

Fifty-four works, more than all the other areas together. In one century printing does three things here: it fixes languages that were only spoken or dialectal, it makes the book cheap enough for a merchant to own one, and it creates a market in which one writes for strangers. Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Camões and the chivalric romances they mock all come out of that machinery.

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The Arab, Turkish and Persian worlds 2

Only two works for two centuries, and it is the most telling fact on this page. Printing reaches the Ottoman Empire as early as 1493, but for the Jewish and Christian communities; printing in Arabic characters remains forbidden until 1727, out of respect for calligraphy and fear of errors in the sacred text. Literary production therefore stays in manuscript, abundant, and far less translated.

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Caucasus and Central Asia 9

Eight works, among them the Baburnama, the autobiography of a Timurid prince who became emperor in India, one of the first books of memoirs in the world. The region also produces its Turkic epics, Alpamıs and Köroğlu, still sung by bards; they are dated here from the time of their formation, not from their transcription, which will come three centuries later.

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East Asia 5

Five works, but which ones: Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, two of the four great Chinese novels, and the Jin Ping Mei. The last two appear in the spoken language rather than classical Chinese, under uncertain authors' names, and are sold by booksellers in cities whose literacy rate exceeds Europe's. The novel is born here without having waited for the West.

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South and Southeast Asia 20

Twenty works, the second area of the period, and a production almost entirely in verse: Lao epics, Burmese poems, Malay annals, local versions of the Ramayana. Writing is done on palm leaves incised with a stylus, a support that lasts a century in the tropics, which forces constant recopying and explains why these texts reach us in late versions.

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Sub-Saharan Africa 1

A single work, the Ifa corpus, a body of Yoruba divination verse long handed down by word of mouth. The Swahili coast writes in Arabic at that time, Timbuktu holds whole libraries of manuscripts, but those collections remained outside translation circuits until recently.

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The Americas 6

Six works, and the entry of the Americas into the catalogue. All date from 1550 or later, and almost all are bound to the conquest: the Popol Vuh transcribed into the Latin alphabet by a Maya scholar, Sahagún's enquiry into the Nahuatl world conducted with indigenous informants, the Huarochirí narratives gathered in Quechua in the Andes. These are texts of rescue, written to keep what the conquest was erasing.

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Oceania 0

Nothing yet, and for two more centuries. The first Europeans to touch the Pacific cross it without stopping, and the island societies go on composing and transmitting without writing. The catalogue can therefore date nothing from here before the nineteenth-century missions, which bring the alphabet together with the Bible, and first transcribe what serves evangelisation.