reading a book from every century

>>8638368
What a retarded 'challenge'

Cool challenge. I'm not well versed in ancient literature, so I'll just overtly shitpost. Good luck though, and I hope someone can be more helpful than me.

My great great great great grandfather's diary desu

what text are you using for Gilgamesh? I'd like to give it a read as well?

>>8638376
>challenge
>retard

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94KB, 1791x827px

>>8638383

i'm reading The Epic of Gilgamesh by N.K. Sandars.

>>8638368
How are you qualifying "book" exactly?

Not to be autistic but narratives like Gilgamesh long predate literary traditions, as is the case for most surviving narrative works from the period you describe. Are you interested at all in oral traditions, or are you just interested in what happened to be written down and what texts happened to survive?

Any serious project in ancient literature needs a good material grounding of "texts" imho

>>8638397
>Any serious project in ancient literature needs a good material grounding of "texts" imho

I'm open to anything. What would you recommend I do? I went with surviving texts.

>>8638402
Well, how much literary history have you studied? I mean the history of literature, not historical works of literature.

If you have access to scholarly resources (i.e. if you go to university) ask your literature subject librarian about finding existing scholarship about materiality. That'd be a lot easier than me pointing to texts.

it will not be easy to date very old literature

from wikipedia:

>Distinct sources exist from over a 2000-year timeframe. The earliest Sumerian poems are now generally considered to be distinct stories, rather than parts of a single epic.[3]:45 They date from as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur (circa 2100 BC).[3]:41–42 The Old Babylonian tablets (circa 1800 BC),[3]:45 are the earliest surviving tablets for a single Epic of Gilgamesh narrative.[4] The older Old Babylonian tablets and later Akkadian version are important sources for modern translations, with the earlier texts mainly used to fill in gaps (lacunae) in the later texts. Although several revised versions based on new discoveries have been published, the epic remains incomplete.[5] Analysis of the Old Babylonian text has been used to reconstruct possible earlier forms of the Epic of Gilgamesh.[6] The most recent Akkadian version (circa 1200 BC), also referred to as the "standard" version, consisting of twelve tablets, was edited by Sin-liqe-unninni and was found in the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh.

so, basically the version which you read is likely the standard babylonian version which was compiled in the 12th century bc, if you read andrew george's translation (penguin classics, you can pirate it on the internet) it also has the old tablets from the 18th century bc where giglamesh is called bilgames. they are pretty good, i like the story of the bull of heaven there more than in the standard version (a crying inanna is cuter than a threatening one and then, i like that passage that the bull grazes at the horizon... i wonder what he grazes there) and it has some of my favorite gilgamesh epic passages like "At that time there was a solitary tree, a solitary willow, a solitary tree..."

anyway you can check the wiki page for the anncient literature and find there what you want to read till the times of homer and later when it gets somehow more accurately dated

>>8638386
oh fuck off you twat. I lifted his vocabulary from his post without thinking. *Endeavor. Are you satisfied, you pretentious fuck? Now I'm not implying that text and formats from 3000 years ago translate into contemporary language so unreadily as to pose a modicum of challenge to endure reading. That's best kept as an elephant in the room - that way we can all avoid mentioning it so as to maintain our intellectual facade, despite our pseud single word adhom refutations and undoubted DFW shitposts.

>>8638368
theres probably going to be some centuries in there that don't have anything surviving, if you're starting that far back

>>8638374
what a retarded 'post'