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The following is a list of the world's oldest surviving physical documents. Each entry is the most ancient of each language or civilization. For example, the Narmer Palette may be the most ancient from Egypt, but there are many other surviving written documents from Egypt later than the Narmer Palette but still more ancient than the Missal of Silos.
The Code of Ur-Nammu is the oldest known surviving law code. It is from Mesopotamia and is written on tablets, in the Sumerian language c. 2100–2050 BCE. It contains strong statements of royal power like "I eliminated enmity, violence, and cries for justice." [1]
The oldest text of the entire Christian Bible, including the New Testament, is the Codex Sinaiticus dating from the 4th century CE, with its Old Testament a copy of a Greek translation known as the Septuagint. The oldest extant manuscripts of the vocalized Masoretic Text date to the 9th century CE. [1]
Primary sources in classical studies include all the literary, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence from the ancient world.Ancient literary sources such as Livy's History of Rome and Plutarch's Parallel Lives, even though they relied on even older literary sources, are considered primary sources for the purposes of classical studies.
An extreme case is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda: the earliest parts of this text date to c. 1500 BC, [1] while the oldest known manuscripts date to c. 1040 AD. [2] Similarly the oldest Avestan texts, the Gathas, are believed to have been composed before 1000 BC, but the oldest Avestan manuscripts date from the 13th century AD. [3]
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Ancient literature" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( May 2024 ) ( Learn how and when to remove this message )
Islam: A Short History (2002) excerpt and text search; Bowker, John Westerdale, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2007) excerpt and text search 1126pp; Carus, Paul. The history of the devil and the idea of evil: from the earliest times to the present day (1899) full text; Eliade, Mircea, and Joan P. Culianu.
Ancient text corpora are the entire collection of texts from the period of ancient history, defined in this article as the period from the beginning of writing up to 300 AD. These corpora are important for the study of literature , history , linguistics , and other fields, and are a fundamental component of the world's cultural heritage .