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It sounds like the disagreement here is over the definition of literature. I generally regard wiktionary's fourth entry (high fiction) to be its definition, whe

It sounds like the disagreement here is over the definition of literature. I generally regard wiktionary's fourth entry (high fiction) to be its definition, whereas this seems somewhere between that and the second (collected creative writing of a culture). I was shaking my head at most of the examples given. Now I see we are operating from two different foundations. Maybe this is why so many arguments open with the cliche "Webster defines..."

forbiddenvoid 4y ago
It's hard to separate "I think your definition of literature is wrong" and "I think your application of that definition is wrong."
Maursault 4y ago
> the disagreement here is over the definition of literature 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_ite_domum [2] https://www.openculture.com/2019/03/40000-year-old-symbols-found-in-caves-worldwide-may-represent-the-earliest-written-language.html 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.
- jdmichal 4y ago
  From wiktionary: > 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).
  - not2b 4y ago
    So if 4. is the definition, the Epic of Gilgamesh is first, because it's in a different class than what came before. But if 1. is the definition, the article is clearly right as there are older works.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      > Epic of Gilgamesh is first 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.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - 988747 4y ago
        "still in existence" is kind of implied, no? We can theorize that there were some previous works, but Gilgamesh is the oldest we can actually read.
faeriechangling 4y ago
I don't mind that cliche at all, it's far less painful for people to give a definition of a word than to witness a painful argument where two people define a word in a different way and then criticise the incoherence of the other's argument.
nottorp 4y ago
Yeah, most of that list is life advice and religious texts. Then what comes is ... proto Ghilgamesh. On the other hand, apparently self improvement books are older than the first fiction :)
- dougmwne 4y ago
  In the beginning, there was customer data.
- shireboy 4y ago
  The gods hate this one weird trick!
shireboy 4y ago
If you want to converse with me, first define your terms - Voltaire 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.
gerdesj 4y ago
"Maybe ... Webster defines ..." Not around here it doesn't (says {!US})! 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.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > I've probably really mashed up the singulars and plurals - soz. 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".
- msla 4y ago
  Reasoning from etymology can lead you down some pretty misleading trails, especially since a lot of the most popular etymologies are nonsense and words are not obligated to change with our understanding. For example, "atom" comes from a Greek term meaning something which cannot be cut, as in something indivisible, but we apply the term to physical objects we now know are quite divisible indeed. Computer programmers still use atomic in the old sense, certainly. Also, reasoning from an etymology hardly anyone knows is not going to get you any insight into what others mean.
MattGaiser 4y ago
I like when people start with a definition. Dramatically narrows the scope of the discussion and reduces misinterpretations.
tgv 4y ago
I think the problem is that everyone knows what the current meaning of literature is, but that that doesn't allow for academic reference-baiting, however childish it may be. So now you take another meaning of the word, and find something that exceeds the previous record, et voila, a new article. When people feel cheated after reading, and argue "that isn't literature", you take the relativist position, even though you know it's poppycock. It's intellectual dishonesty.
adrian_b 4y ago
When talking about the age of the Gilgamesh Epic in general, not about the age of one of its many version that have been created during many centuries, it is appropriate to refer to the earliest version, not to the much later version written in the standard Akkadian language. 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.
- Namari 4y ago
  Exactly! People always get confused with the Akkadian version.

forbiddenvoid 4y ago

It's hard to separate "I think your definition of literature is wrong" and "I think your application of that definition is wrong."

Maursault 4y ago

> the disagreement here is over the definition of literature 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_ite_domum [2] https://www.openculture.com/2019/03/40000-year-old-symbols-found-in-caves-worldwide-may-represent-the-earliest-written-language.html 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.

jdmichal 4y ago
From wiktionary: > 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).
- not2b 4y ago
  So if 4. is the definition, the Epic of Gilgamesh is first, because it's in a different class than what came before. But if 1. is the definition, the article is clearly right as there are older works.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > Epic of Gilgamesh is first 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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 988747 4y ago
      "still in existence" is kind of implied, no? We can theorize that there were some previous works, but Gilgamesh is the oldest we can actually read.

faeriechangling 4y ago

I don't mind that cliche at all, it's far less painful for people to give a definition of a word than to witness a painful argument where two people define a word in a different way and then criticise the incoherence of the other's argument.

nottorp 4y ago

Yeah, most of that list is life advice and religious texts. Then what comes is ... proto Ghilgamesh. On the other hand, apparently self improvement books are older than the first fiction :)

dougmwne 4y ago
In the beginning, there was customer data.
shireboy 4y ago
The gods hate this one weird trick!

shireboy 4y ago

If you want to converse with me, first define your terms - Voltaire 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.

gerdesj 4y ago

"Maybe ... Webster defines ..." Not around here it doesn't (says {!US})! 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.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> I've probably really mashed up the singulars and plurals - soz. 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".
msla 4y ago
Reasoning from etymology can lead you down some pretty misleading trails, especially since a lot of the most popular etymologies are nonsense and words are not obligated to change with our understanding. For example, "atom" comes from a Greek term meaning something which cannot be cut, as in something indivisible, but we apply the term to physical objects we now know are quite divisible indeed. Computer programmers still use atomic in the old sense, certainly. Also, reasoning from an etymology hardly anyone knows is not going to get you any insight into what others mean.

MattGaiser 4y ago

I like when people start with a definition. Dramatically narrows the scope of the discussion and reduces misinterpretations.

tgv 4y ago

I think the problem is that everyone knows what the current meaning of literature is, but that that doesn't allow for academic reference-baiting, however childish it may be. So now you take another meaning of the word, and find something that exceeds the previous record, et voila, a new article. When people feel cheated after reading, and argue "that isn't literature", you take the relativist position, even though you know it's poppycock. It's intellectual dishonesty.

adrian_b 4y ago

When talking about the age of the Gilgamesh Epic in general, not about the age of one of its many version that have been created during many centuries, it is appropriate to refer to the earliest version, not to the much later version written in the standard Akkadian language. 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.

Namari 4y ago
Exactly! People always get confused with the Akkadian version.