1. The Pentateuch
2. Hammurabi's Code
3. The Epic of Gilgamesh
4. The Enuma Elish
5 Hesiod's Theogony
6. Egyptian Book of the Dead
7. The Rig Veda
8. The Assyrian King List
9. The Brahma Sutras
10. The Art of War
Note: The Iliad and The Odyssey don't make the list because they were hymns that were sung and part of Greek oral tradition later transcribed into text.
Honorable mentions: The Pillar Edicts of Asoka, The Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Aeneid by Virgil. Feel free to add to your picks to the list or make another one entirely.
Even if Trump were to be revealed as the Dark Lord of the Sith, he's still better than the last four presidents we've had.
I have no idea about the parameters of this exercise, so I will push back as is my right. 😆
So you did not include Homer's works, but it is clear that there would have been written copies of them existing in the ancient world, right? If so, how is this any different from some or all of the other works in your list that likely came about in oral form before they were written down?
Now that I have that out of the way, I'll point out some notable absences that could be candidates for the list:
- Josephus, The Jewish War
- The Septuagint
- The Rosetta Stone
- Aeschylus' Oresteia
- Vitruvius' De Architectura
- Herodotus' History of the Greco-Persian Wars
- Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War
- Plato's Republic
- Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
I was trying to stay out of the Classical Period as much as possible. As for Homer, I excluded him because it was always thrown out he never wrote anything because he was allegedly blind and because of that, there are even some doubts to his historicity. The Iliad and Odyssey are billed as songs so I will treat them as such and disqualify them from this list.😁
Even if Trump were to be revealed as the Dark Lord of the Sith, he's still better than the last four presidents we've had.
The identity of Homer has been in question since the ancient world, and claims have been made that he was actually a "she", or that he was actually a "they". But whatever the truth is regarding the Homeric Question, I still think that the works themselves are considered to be literary works because they are epic poems. Also, no one would ever put the Iliad or Odyssey on lists of "Top Ten Greatest Songs", even if they were originally sung.
I think the long tradition of epic poetry is decisively considered within the framework of the literary arts rather than the musical arts.
Oh, and I would probably add the Psalms on the list you made as well.
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