Maybe this is why so many arguments open with the cliche "Webster defines..."
I was taught that Gilgamesh wasn’t the first written work of literature, but the first written work of epic story. I don’t know if this is true, but many of the other works cited are biographies, proverbs, etc.
On the other hand, apparently self improvement books are older than the first fiction :)
As mentioned in the article, in the beginning there were 5 separate stories about various adventures of Gilgamesh, written in the Sumerian language, some time around 2200 BC to 2000 BC.
A few hundred years later (around the time of Hammurabi), some Old Babylonian writer has translated the Sumerian stories into Old Babylonian, while making various changes to them in order to make them fit into a single long epic.
The Old Babylonian writer has also written several other stories, which were interleaved between the Sumerian stories and which integrated everything into a coherent epic.
Hundreds of years later, the Old Babylonian version was modified into the standard version that is best known. That version was also modified later into various other versions, some of them being translated into various languages of the neighbors of the Akkadians.
While there are many other earlier writings that can be considered as works of literature, the 5 Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh are one of the earliest examples of writings that are of the epic kind, i.e. which describe the adventures of some fictional character.
Most of the older writings mentioned in the article are not of this kind, but they may be considered as lyric, didactic or historic.
Most stories that might be older than the 5 Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh are other Sumerian stories about their gods, most of them being stories about Inanna, as mentioned in the article.
However, the age of all these Sumerian stories is not known with certainty, just that they have been written some time in the second half of the third millennium BC.
Some of the other Sumerian stories might be even a few centuries older than the 5 Gilgamesh stories, but they might as well be of a similar age.
So when talking about the earliest literature of the epic kind, it is not possible to pinpoint which is the earliest known work, but one must give a list that contains the Sumerian stories of the 3rd millennium BC, including the 5 stories about Gilgamesh.
The Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh might be the earliest where the main hero is identified as a human, not as a god.
Deeply, but though we can make distinction between a modern best seller and Brian's grammatically incorrect graffiti, "Romanes eunt domus,"[1], in essence they are both literature, even if the latter is fictional and framed within the larger contemporary story, because Brian wrote a message representative of some language.
Literature is defined by writing, and writing is defined by symbols representing language. Always given less emphasis than the ancient cave art found in caves all over the world are the abstract symbols that very often accompany the graphic depictions of animals. For all we know some of those symbols may mean, "this tastes good," and regardless of being unable to decipher them, they could still be the oldest extant literature[2] so long as they could represent language and tell a story, no matter how primitive a story.
Before the Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mayan pictographs were deciphered, there was no question that they had specific meaning behind them. Though in the strictest sense, pictography is not an alphabet, it still conveys specific messages in some once spoken language. In my opinion, if there are any abstract symbols that represent even the most primitive message, if it's clear there is even some vague attempt at communication, then it will still broadly fall under the category of literature, regardless of ever being deciphered.
While ultimately I agree that the epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest extant high, advanced, or complex literature, I think whether a written story still exists or not is an arbitrary distinction. The fact that Gilgamesh exists in the literary form that it does necessarily means earlier examples of high literature once existed but are unknown and likely lost. Between Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides there were over 300 plays written of which 33 survive. That the missing plays no longer exist should not diminish the fact that these were, in fact, written and were undoubtedly literature.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_ite_domum
[2] https://www.openculture.com/2019/03/40000-year-old-symbols-f... note: Though von Petzinger herself clarifies in her TED Talk that the common ancient symbols are not writing, I think she's hedging for some reason (probably professional caution) contradicting what her own research shows and statements she makes immediately previously.
> 1. The body of all written works.
> 2. The collected creative writing of a nation, people, group or culture.
> 3. (usually preceded by the) All the papers, treatises etc. published in academic journals on a particular subject.
> 4. Written fiction of a high standard.
So it sounds like you're basically describing definition (1). I make this judgement because "this tastes good" is not creative or fictional writing, which are key points in definitions (2) and (4).
Probably not. If 90% of classical Greek dramatic literature is lost, we can safely assume at the very minimum at least that amount of literature contemporary to Gilgamesh is also lost. There are probably at least 9 other works written around the same time, a little before or after, that would compete with its title as "first." And it is also doubtful something as complex as Gilgamesh arouse out of the blue. There would have been a progression of literature increasing in complexity leading up to it, that is lost.
Thus Gilgamesh is the earliest high literature still in existence. But there definitely had to be earlier high literature, and no judgements can be made on whether that earlier lost contemporary high literature was any better or any worse than Gilgamesh.
Definitely not. Being first does not remotely imply existence. The first gospels have long deteriorated into dust, and the earliest versions are copies of copies of copies. Further, it is astronomically unlikely that the earliest version of Gilgamesh in existence is the original.
> We can theorize that there were some previous works, but Gilgamesh is the oldest we can actually read.
There are quite a large number of works that can be no longer be read.[1] This does not mean they're literature any less than works that can still be read.
That is fine, but my assumption is supported by the history of literature. We don't see anything as complex as Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment or Twain's Huckleberry Finn in 1000BC.
> Complex oral tradition could have led directly to complex story-telling literature. All it would take is someone writing it down.
Are there any examples of "complex" oral tradition that stand in contrast to simpler oral traditions? Could we compare the early Christian oral tradition with, say, Hopi oral tradition to determine which is more or less complex? I don't think this makes a lot of sense, but I would entertain supporting argument.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puranas 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramayana 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata
A takeaway menu for example is not under definition 4 but if accompanied by other texts could be an example of the written works of our species.
You don't need to define "literature", it largely defines itself but not in a formal mathematical way (derived from axioms) but in a linguistic way which is rather closer to legal reasoning and quite open to interpretation.
So, we might have litera tura as an initial path to the to past to explore for literature. Latin for something like learning from letters (characters). I've searched quite a lot and I see litera being turned into a book which I think is wrong - a book is librum in Latin.
Litera are individual letters or characters but many "letters" starts to take on a new meaning. They become words (verbum) initially, and as you deploy more verbum you get paginae and then liberae. I've probably really mashed up the singulars and plurals - soz.
So I think we have literae tura. This gives us some latitude for interpretation. For starters, literature need not be confined to books - that might be liberature and get jolly confused with notions of freedom.
Right, now we have modern language sorted out, let's worry about how old an ancient text is or are or something.
Also, reasoning from an etymology hardly anyone knows is not going to get you any insight into what others mean.
Indeed, and you're also putting a space in the middle of litteratura. It's not multiple words. What effect were you trying to create here?
> a book is librum in Latin
Close, though you'd usually cite the nominative form liber. But as you note, there is no e present in the root - liberae would mean "free women".