First Literature?

Question

Does anyone know the name and author of the first Short story, essay, fable, dictionary, myth, fairy tale, diary, memoir, and drama/play ever written?

Answer 1

The origins of many of these genres are in the oral tradition and cannot be truly determined.

In some other instances, naming the first example would depend somewhat on how the genre is defined. The short story as we know it was invented in the nineteenth century, but even there it's hard to say which was the very first without getting into an argument over what constitutes a "short story"--and of course the short story developed from earlier types that were both short and stories. However, Washington Irving, Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekov, and Nikolai Gogol all wrote short stories very early in the existence of the genre.

As for the fable, Herodotus (Greek historian, fifth century B. C.) names Aesop (c600 B. C.) as the inventor. But fables also exist in non-Western languages and may be even older.

Then there's the complication that some of the earliest written works no longer exist. It's generally accepted that, in Western literature, the Greeks invented drama and that the first playwright was Thespis (c500 B. C.)--but none of his writing has survived.

The oldest existing European play is by Aeschylus--probably The Suppliant Maidens (c463 B. C.). Plays were also written centuries ago in India, China, and Japan.

One genre you didn't mention is the novel. Samuel Richardson's Pamela, published in 1740, is generally acknowledged to be the first English novel, but Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and (if RC isn't quite considered a novel) Moll Flanders in 1722.

I suggest that you google each item, with the word "first" in each search.

Answer 2

Those are wildly different genres and forms and there's no clear answer for all of them. As the previous responder said, you can go to the Greeks for some of them -- drama, for example, and they'll never be another culture to outdo them, as far as im concerned. Myths would have been told orally for centuries -- remember for example that Homer never wrote anything, he was a great story teller and reciter. Some had to come along later and write down what we know today as The Iliad and The Odyssey, etc.
Fables and fairy tales would have spread as oral literature as well -- depending much on folklore. The earliest written collection of fables as far as I know is Aesop's Fables, with fairy tales you'd have to go to The Brothers Grimm. Again, that's written. The essay (by the very nature of its form and purpose) of course would have had to come along after the printing press allowed for wider circulation of written material. Montaigne was the first to use the word "essay" to describe his work but there were obviously earlier examples (various treatises on religious matters, literature, etc.) Dictionaries as far as I know are much harder to pin down and early dictionaries (going back a couple centuries I would think) would have been the work of many scholars and scribes, and of course the form would have been different and it wouldn't have been comprehensive the way we think of dictionaries today. That's something you'll have to google. The short story in its modern form is a relatively recent invention -- though you could take it back to Chaucer, for example, and then even earlier, but those aren't short stories really in the way we tend to think of short stories, that's a 19th century invention as far as I know (think Hawthorne, Poe, etc.), and probably came out of (or at least was greatly helped by) literary works printed in magazines and newspapers. Diaries I would assume go back quite a long way too, but would have been things like travelogues describing trips to the Far East, or accounts of Eastern Europe. Memoirs have a shaky history. In it's simplest terms it's just an autobiographical account of one's life, and there generally wasn't widespread literacy in the West (which would promote the reading of memoirs) until fairly recently in our history, the last 100-150 or so years. I know Mark Twain's publishing company published the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which was quite a bestseller. And de Sade's writings are an early (despicable) example of memoir. Im sure there probably are a couple much earlier examples of famous memoirs (of sorts), but again, you'll have to google it.

Answer 3

Go to the Greeks!! Research Sophocles, Aeschylus, and his cohorts...