Epic, Myth & the Ancient Literatures: The First Great Stories

Around 1853, workers digging in the ruins of Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq, turned up thousands of baked clay tablets from the library of an Assyrian king. Nearly two decades later, in 1872, a museum assistant in London named George Smith read one of them and is said to have been so excited that he started undressing in the reading room. The tablet told of a man warned by a god to build a boat before a great flood, and of the birds he sent out to find dry land. It was older than the Bible by centuries, and the flood story was strikingly familiar.

The tablet belongs to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest long story we can read. This piece is a tour of that world: the poems of Mesopotamia, Greece, India, Rome, West Africa, the Maya highlands and Iran that came before the novel, and the surprising discovery of how most of them were made.

Poems made out loud: oral composition and the Parry–Lord discovery

Why does Homer keep saying "swift-footed Achilles," even when Achilles is sitting down sulking in his tent? A young American scholar named Milman Parry, in his doctoral work at the Sorbonne in 1928, noticed that the epithets seemed to be chosen not for meaning but for sound. Each hero has several ready-made phrases of different lengths, and the poet picks whichever one fills the part of the line that is left. The stock phrases are formulae: Parry defined a formula as an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express a given idea.

Parry realised this was not a literary style but a tool for composing at speed, in public, in rhythm. To test the idea he travelled to Yugoslavia in 1933 and 1935 and recorded living singers of oral epic. His assistant Albert Lord carried on after Parry's death in 1935 (an accidental gunshot in Los Angeles) and published The Singer of Tales in 1960. The finding: these singers did not memorise a fixed text. They re-composed the song each time from formulas and story patterns, and each one swore he sang the same song he had always sung.

You can feel the system with a toy. Choose a hero and the room left in the line. The page gives the real Greek phrase that fits.

That is the heart of the Parry–Lord idea. A heroic phrase is a unit of rhythm as well as meaning. The poems were passed on by composition-in-performance, which is why there is no "original" in the way we imagine one. Scholars still argue how far this describes Homer: how much of the Iliad was oral, when it was written down (the standard date for its composition is the late 8th to mid 7th century BCE), and whether a single genius shaped it. And the claim that formulaic verse is a mark of oral composition is itself debated, as in the long argument over Old English poetry. What is not in doubt is that oral traditions made these works, and that to read them well you should think of a voice and a room.

Gilgamesh: the oldest story, and its fear of death

Gilgamesh is the king of Uruk, two-thirds god and one-third man, who oppresses his city until the gods make him an equal: Enkidu, a wild man made from clay. They become friends, kill the monster Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, and the gods decree that one of them must die. Enkidu sickens and dies. Gilgamesh will not accept it until, as the poem says, a maggot falls from his friend's nose. Terrified, he journeys to the end of the world to find Utnapishtim, the only human given eternal life.

The text has layers. Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, some perhaps from around 2100 BCE, came first. The oldest tablets of a single connected epic are Old Babylonian, around 1800 BCE. The version we read most is the Standard Babylonian one, twelve tablets compiled by the scholar Sîn-lēqi-unninni some time between about 1300 and 1000 BCE and titled "He who saw the deep," found in the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Utnapishtim's flood story in Tablet XI is the part Smith read in 1872. And Gilgamesh's answer to death is not immortality but a city wall: he goes home and shows the ferryman the walls of Uruk, and they are what survives.

The flood story also appears, in different form, in the Mesopotamian Atra-Hasis and in Genesis. Scholars such as Andrew George argue that Genesis follows the Gilgamesh account closely and that a Mesopotamian origin is widely accepted. Compare them.

Homer: the wrath and the homecoming

The Iliad (15,693 lines in the standard edition) is not the story of the Trojan War. It is the story of a few weeks near its end, set in motion by a quarrel and a sulk: Achilles withdraws from battle, his friend Patroclus dies in his place, and Achilles' rage turns on Hector. The poem ends not with Troy's fall but with Achilles, in his tent, handing Hector's body back to Hector's father Priam. The most devastating scene in Western literature is two old enemies weeping together over their dead.

The Odyssey (about 12,100 lines) is its mirror: a man trying to get home, and a household hoping he will. It is full of the narrative tools from the last piece: it opens in the middle (in medias res), and Odysseus tells his own wandering from a banquet seat, so that the hero is also the narrator, and the reader may wonder how much of it to trust.

A short note on a famous reading: in Mimesis (1946), the German critic Erich Auerbach contrasted the Homeric style, which brings everything into the light, with the Hebrew Bible's story of Abraham and Isaac, which gives hardly any inner life and leaves the reader to fill the silence. Many scholars have taken the contrast further, and many have disputed it. It is a good lesson in how a close reader makes a case.

The Mahabharata and the Ramayana: the largest stories ever told

India's two great Sanskrit epics are enormous. The Mahabharata, traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa, has more than 100,000 shlokas (verses of two lines each) and, with its long prose passages, some 1.8 million words, about ten times the Iliad and Odyssey put together. It tells of two sets of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, and the eighteen-day war that destroys a generation. Inside it sits the Bhagavad Gita, the conversation on a battlefield between the warrior Arjuna and Krishna about duty and action. Scholars see it as a composite work that grew over centuries: its oldest parts are not much older than about 400 BCE, and it reached roughly its present form by the early Gupta period, around the 4th century CE.

The Ramayana, traditionally by the poet Valmiki, is shorter: about 24,000 shlokas in seven books. Its subject is Rama, prince of Ayodhya, exiled for fourteen years with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana; Sita is abducted by the demon king Ravana; Rama, aided by the monkey-god Hanuman, wins her back. Scholars date its original oral composition to somewhere in the mid-first millennium BCE. It has been retold all over Asia, from Kamban's Tamil version in the 12th century and Tulsidas's Hindi Ramcharitmanas in 1576 to Cambodia's Reamker and Thailand's Ramakien. For many people the question is not "what happens in the Ramayana" but "which Ramayana".

How long are these things? Slide to your reading speed and see.

The Hebrew Bible as literature

The Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) is, among other things, one of the great literary works, and since the 1980s critics such as Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative, 1981) have taught readers to see its craft: sparse description, quick dialogue, repeated key words, and a way of telling a story by leaving things out. A believer reads it as scripture; a literature student can read the same page for how it works, and the two readings are not rivals. It was composed and edited over many centuries (dates are debated; much of it is placed roughly between the 8th and 2nd centuries BCE).

Its poetry rests on parallelism: a line says something, and the next line says it again in other words, but pushed one step further. The King James Bible (1611) renders Psalm 19:1 as "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." The second half does not simply repeat the first. "Heavens" becomes "firmament," "declare" becomes "sheweth," and "glory" becomes "handywork": the declaration is moved from words to things made. Hebrew poetry thinks in pairs, as Chinese regulated verse does (see Close Reading & Poetry, 35/28), and the English reader can feel it even in translation.

Virgil: an epic to make an empire

The Aeneid was written in Latin between 29 and 19 BCE by Virgil, who died in 19 BCE at Brundisium, asking that the unfinished manuscript be burned. The emperor Augustus overruled him and ordered his literary executors to publish. The poem (9,896 lines) takes Homer on purpose: the first six books, Aeneas's wandering from burning Troy to Italy, are commonly compared to the Odyssey; the last six, the war against the Latins, to the Iliad. It opens "Arma virumque cano": "I sing of arms and the man."

Where Homer has no nation, Virgil has one: Aeneas is a founder, obedient to fate, who gives up a lover (the Carthaginian queen Dido) to do his duty to the Rome that will come. Readers have argued for two thousand years over whether the poem celebrates Augustus's empire or mourns what it costs, and its closing scene, in which the hero kills a begging enemy in anger, is the strongest piece of evidence for either side.

Three living traditions: Sundiata, the Popol Vuh and the Shahnameh

Sundiata. The epic of Sundiata Keita, who founded the Mali Empire in the 13th century (his reign is dated to about 1235 to 1255), is still performed in West Africa by jeliw (singular jeli, often called griots), hereditary keepers of history and praise. It tells of a prince born lame who could not walk until he was seven, then stood, bent an iron rod, and grew into the king who defeated the sorcerer-king Sumanguru. There is no single text: the best-known written form is Djibril Tamsir Niane's French Soundjata ou l'épopée mandingue (1960), based on the telling of the jeli Mamadou Kouyaté, and translated into English by G. D. Pickett in 1965. Every performance differs, which is exactly what Parry and Lord described.

The Popol Vuh. The sacred book of the K'iche' Maya of the Guatemalan highlands, probably written down in Latin letters around the 1550s (the oldest surviving manuscript is the copy made about 1701 by the Dominican priest Francisco Ximénez). It begins with the gods' failed attempts to make people: first of mud, who crumbled, then of wood, who were washed away, and finally of maize, who succeeded. Its heart is the story of the Hero Twins, Hunahpú and Xbalanqué, who go down to Xibalba, the underworld, defeat its lords at their own games and become the sun and moon.

The Shahnameh. The "Book of Kings" by Ferdowsi, completed in 1010 CE in Persian, runs to about 50,000 couplets from the first mythical kings to the Arab conquest of Iran. It is often credited with helping to keep the Persian language alive. Its most-loved tragedy is Rostam and Sohrab, a father who kills his own son in battle without knowing who he is.

Put them in time. Drag the year and see which of these works exist in writing by then.

What a graduate just sees

• The oldest literature was made out loud, which is why it repeats, uses stock phrases, and has no single original.
• A formula is a tool for rhythm as much as meaning. "Swift-footed" Achilles is swift-footed because the line needed seven syllables.
• Epics are about the cost of heroism: Achilles' grief, Gilgamesh's terror of death, Arjuna's doubt on the battlefield.
• Stories migrate and change. The flood in Genesis has Mesopotamian cousins; the Ramayana has a thousand versions.
• "The same story" is never quite the same: ask which version, which performance, which translation.
• Epic can serve a nation (the Aeneid, the Shahnameh, Sundiata) and also question it.
• Sacred texts can be read for craft without being read against belief.
• Writing is a late arrival in the history of storytelling.

Where it shows up next

• Drama & Tragedy (35/31): Greek tragedy drew its plots from Homeric and other myths, and Aristotle's Poetics built its theory on them.
• The Novel (35/32): Don Quixote parodies chivalric epics; Joyce's Ulysses (1922) rebuilds the Odyssey in one Dublin day.
• Translation & World Literature (35/35): each epic reaches us in translations that differ, and the choice of one is an interpretation.
• In the world: film and games still use the hero's journey, the quest, the descent to the underworld, and the long war. Every fantasy epic is in debt to these.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. The Norton Anthology of World Literature (W. W. Norton), Volume A, assigned in many survey courses: Gilgamesh, Homer, Valmiki, Virgil in translation, with introductions.
• 📘 Textbook. Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Harvard University Press, 1960; later editions 2000 and 2019). The book of the oral-formulaic discovery.
• 📘 Gentler. Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization (2017), a readable tour of the first books, with chapters on Gilgamesh, Homer and the Hebrew Bible.
• 🌐 Free course. Harvard Online: The Ancient Greek Hero (Gregory Nagy; the page says the course has been archived), covering the Iliad and Odyssey and the tragedians; check there for what remains available.