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The following is a list of the world's oldest surviving physical documents. Each entry is the most ancient of each language or civilization. For example, the Narmer Palette may be the most ancient from Egypt, but there are many other surviving written documents from Egypt later than the Narmer Palette but still more ancient than the Missal of ...
The civilizations in and around Mesopotamia are credited with inventing the first true writing systems in the world. Several clay tablets from this time period have survived and this list contains the oldest confirmed writings.
Jul 26, 2023 · The earliest confirmed form of writing is recorded on a limestone tablet, known as the Kish tablet, which dates to around 3,500 BCE. The tablet was found on the site of an ancient Sumerian city...
Dec 18, 2015 · While Shuruppak’s fatherly wisdom is one of the most ancient examples of written literature, history’s oldest known fictional story is probably the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” a mythic poem that...
Nov 28, 2022 · These pieces of literature—from 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' to what is widely considered the first novel ever written—are some of the oldest in history.
Cuneiform as a robust writing tradition endured 3,000 years. The script—not itself a language—was used by scribes of multiple cultures over that time to write a number of languages other than...
May 9, 2019 · One well-known text recorded on Sumerian clay tablets is the Epic of Gilgamesh, considered to be the oldest work of literature in the world.
May 11, 2016 · The text was originally discovered in 1900 by a monk in Dunhuang, China, an old outpost of the Silk Road on the edge of the Gobi Desert.
Jan 18, 2023 · Though anthropologists and archaeologists tend to accept that the oldest written word appeared around 5,000 years ago, a new paper published in the Cambridge Archaeology Journal pushes this date back by about 15,000 years.
Sep 21, 2023 · The Teaching of Ptahhatp was published as ‘the oldest book in the world’ as long ago as 1858, about a decade after the most important papyrus scroll containing the text was acquired by an antiquarian in Egypt.
