Writing began as accounting before it told stories
Literature’s history tracks prose and poetry meant to entertain or teach—and the techniques that carry them. Oral myth in hunter-gatherer bands came first; writing arose independently in Mesopotamia about 3200 BCE, China about 1250 BCE, and Mesoamerica about 650 BCE, first for ledgers more than epics.
Sumerian texts are the oldest known literature, all touched by poetry’s lines, imagery, and metaphor, with gods, humans, and talking animals. Akkadian heirs spread that craft from Babylonia and Assyria into Egypt, Ugarit, and Hattusa.
Egyptian Old Kingdom lists of offerings and officials bloomed into prayers and virtue autobiographies by the Fifth Dynasty—bureaucracy learning to narrate.
Middle Kingdom Egypt made autobiographies more elaborate and gave the king a bigger literary role, with royal testaments addressed from ruler to successor. Early Chinese writing leaned less on myth, since Zhou culture prized community over individual heroes. Anthologising doubled as criticism there: the Classic of Poetry, one of the Six Classics, gathers 305 anonymous poems from the twelfth to seventh centuries BCE and is the oldest surviving Chinese collection. During the Warring States period, records blended with narrative and legend, as seen in two classics, the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Book of Documents.
Qin-dynasty poetry has vanished entirely, but the Han produced several new forms, including rhymed exposition, along with the Nineteen Old Poems and forceful political essays such as Jia Yi's The Faults of Qin. As central power and Confucian dominance waned in the Six Dynasties, Taoist and Buddhist writing flourished and fiction drifted toward supernatural folklore. Jian'an poetry, led by the ruler Cao Cao, prized raw emotion and individual voice, and under the Southern dynasties literature came to be seen as an art in its own right, prompting critical works such as The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons. Farther west, the Levant wrote in Northwest Semitic languages, including Aramaic, Phoenician and Hebrew, whose inscriptions are the main non-Biblical window on the region.
Source: History of literature
