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The Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Literature: p. 3-21

As our book states, the word “literature” comes from the Latin word for “letters.” So literature is the study of the written word.

The Invention of Writing and the Earliest Literatures:

Oral Tradition: Long before people knew how to write, they still told stories, but they had to simply memorize and often sing (because singing helps you memorize, right?) these stories.

A lot of the first literature that was ever written down came out of these oral traditions. So, really, before the invention of writing, there were no “authors.”

As our book tells us, once some areas did start writing things down, “literacy did not take hold all at once; the transition [from oral tradition to reading] was partial and gradual.”

In fact, in the earliest days of writing and reading, some had a “nostalgia” for the days before literacy, when learning to sing and take part in those oral traditions was important. Old people have always had something to complain about. Nowadays it’s the disappearance of books being replaced by iPads and Kindles; thousands of years ago, it was the disappearance of oral literature being replaced by written words. It’s always something. ☺

Earliest Writing: Writing was mostly invented to document “administrative, political, and legal information,” not to entertain or teach. In Mesopotamia (the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers which is now modern-day Iraq) writing was first developed. The earliest texts we know of date from around 3,300 to 2,990 BCE. That’s over 5,000 years ago!

        Pictographs: These first Mesopotamian (who spoke a language called Sumerian)         writings were made using “pictographic” characters inscribed into wet clay, which         would then be dried, which you can see a picture of on page 4 of your textbook. As         our book says, pictographs were pictures; the sign for an ox looked like an ox head. So         the pictures looked like the actual things they represented.

        Cuneiform: Later, in 2,800 BCE, they began to switch from pictographs to using a         wedge-shaped end of a stick to make marks rather than draw pictures. This script is called         “cuneiform,” from the Latin word “cuneus,” meaning “wedge.” By 2,500 BCE,         cuneiform was all the rage, and was being using not only to keep records but also to tell         stories. In fact, The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down on clay tablets in cuneiform         script. According to our textbook, in cuneiform, “each sign the wedge made denoted a         syllable—a consonant plus a vowel—which meant the reader had to be familiar with a         large number of signs.” This means readers and writers of cuneiform had to be educated,         which meant they had the time and money to be educated. Common people, slaves, and         others who were not lucky enough to have the free time and privilege to be educated were         not writing or reading at all. This means literature was written for the upper classes.