Ebook: The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets

New York: Alfred Knopf,.2005.—444p.—ISBN-0-375-41120-8Without such papyri, we would have no Greek texts at all. By the middle of the fifth century bc, “all civilised people” wrote on papyrus scrolls.
However, had papyrus not existed, we might have had even more Greek literature to read than we actually do. Some of the earliest whispers of
Greek verse are preserved on pots, for example a cup manufactured in Rhodes but excavated from a grave on Ischia, in the Bay of Naples.8 The
tablets on which the scribes of Sumeria set down their accounts, laws, legends and literature have lasted much longer and rather better than Greek
texts: nine epics (including Gilgamesh) survive in part, the events dating from the fourth and early third millennia bc: myths of origin, not least a Paradise and a Flood story, dating from the eighteenth century bc; hymns, poems of religious and secular praise. The period of Hammurabi (1795–1750 bc), half a millennium before the war at Troy, was a high point for Babylonian culture. Over 500,000 Babylonian and related tablets were recorded as having survived in 1953. Thousands more have been discovered since.