Does anyone know what the first book ever written is? To clarify, I mean a fictional book meant to entertain. (Please don’t give me your opinions on the Bible. That’s not what I meant.) Just curious…
I’m reasonably sure that honour goes to The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, which was written in the eleventh century.
I learned that Beowulf was the earliest recorded work of fiction. I’m too lazy to look up a citation, but I thought it was believed to be written around 1000 AD by an unknown author. Though I confess this might be the oldest English book, though the “Olde English” used at the time would be completely illegible to us now.
Thanks, xcheopis! May I, very humbly, ask where I can reference that information? I’d like to know for sure, with dates, etc. 
You may be right, Omniscient, but when I Googled “Beowulf”, I couldn’t find any mention of it’s chronological place, so to speak. They gave approximate dates, etc, but no specific mention of it being the oldest. Thanks for your help, though!
Well, the only reference I have is what is on the book itself. Every copy I’ve seen, including the one I have, says that it is perhaps the earliest true novel in the history of the world.
There were certainly other fictional writings (Aesop comes to mind) but none of the ones known are regarded as novels.
Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.
Thank you, everybody. I’ll just have to do a bit more research!
I’m sorry but several books have Genji Monogatari beat by a long shot.
First of all, you don’t specify verse or prose, which makes a big difference. In Japan for instance, the ** Manyoshu** , a collection of poems was written in 770 CE. However, if you’re looking for prose, The ** Ise Monogatari** (Tale of Ise) was written somewhere around 980 CE and ** Taketori Monogatari** (Tale of the Bamboo Cutter) is even older.
However, that’s not that old even… Gaius Petronius’ infamous Satyricon was written around 61 CE. However, there were many earlier Roman and Greek novels.
If you accept verse, then of course, there is Homer’s Illiad and ** Odyssey**, probably dating from as far back as the 9th century BCE. If you accept legend, then the oldest known work of fiction is The Epic of Gilgamesh, which goes back to 2000 BCE.
Wow, thank you jovan! You really know your stuff!
Well, IIRC, finding specifics on the history of the story of Beowulf might be tricky. From what I recall from Junior High the book is a complete mystery. A copy was discovered unexpectedly and there was a great deal of effort put into sorting out when, who and where it was written. I beleive there is still to date alot of debate as to which theory behind it’s origins is most likely.
I’m pretty sure it rates as the “oldest” something, I’m just not sure how it fits into a global timeline.
Also I suppose you’re going to have to work on your definitions, where do the ancient Greek and Roman works fall into the description of “books” and “fiction”. What about a legend or folk-tale dating into the BCs that was eventually recorded in paper in the 16th century?
Weren’t the Assyrians the first civilization (i am not sure) on earth. I would check their history out to see if they wrote anything.
The Tale of Gilgamesh is the oldest book I have ever heard of, if we are going to include epic poems written on clay tablets as books.
http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/
Written in Iraq (Ancient Sumeria) some time in the second millenium b.c.e…
I suppose I was thinking specifically of novels, in the traditional “long-ish story read purely for entertainment” sense. Whether it is poetry or prose isn’t important. I wasn’t thinking particularly of Greek or Roman mythology, as I believe those stories were told as “religious teachings” of a sort. Epics count, I guess. It doesn’t matter if they were originally written on paper. What I was looking for, really, is the oldest book (or long story), written with the purpose of entertainment (as opposed to religious or moral teaching), and with a fairly specific date. I suppose this might be rather difficult to pin-point, since no one can be sure exactly why an author wrote a particular work.
You have all given me helpful information. Thanks again.
Earlier this year, my history teacher told our class that the “Epic of Gilgamesh” is the world’s oldest story.
Most of the books mentioned (Beowulf, Iliad, Odyssey) are “epic poems,” not novels. The first novel was The Tale of Genji , and the first western novel was Don Quixote. This, according to * Life : The Millennium: The 100 Most Important Events & People of the Past 1,000 Years
*, LIFE magazine’s big end-of-the-millennium special issue of a couple years back.
Epic poems are books, too, but there’s not really a clear “first.”
I’ve seen many of the Roman works of fiction called “novels”. There’s even a Classics text with that as a title. Certainly works such as the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter seem to fit your definition – they were works of fiction, written for entertainment rather than ceremonial or religious reasons, and published and sold as independent physical books. There are many others – the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (often called The Golden Ass) for example. Undoubtedly a great many others have been lost to us.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find the idea a great deal older than this, going back to Greek times, or even Egyptian or Babylonian, but I don’t think we have examples from that far back. Obviously, you need a large body of literate people with the leisure time to appreciate the work and the money to afford the copying. In Republican and Imperial Rome that was a sizeable bunch, so the odds of such a work surviving to modern times is much greater than works from earlier civilizations.
Stories and Epics go back much farther, of course, but these weren’t consciously fictional works, published in individual books for a literatate group, so they don’t meet the criteria of the OP.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is by far the oldest book that has ever been found, any earlier books than this have been destroyed.
You’ll find a lot of people claiming that Genji Monogatari was the first novel, but I must again voice my disagreement. As I wrote above, many Greek and Roman works precede Murasaki’s work by several hundred years. Both a translation of Satyricon and Genji Monogatari are online, so if you can read English and classical Japanese, you’re welcome to read both to see which one fits best your notion of “novel”.
Second, Don Quixote was published in 1605, there is absolutely no way it might even remotely be the first western anything. As a matter of fact, it was originally intended as a parody of chivalry novels which were all the rage in Cervantes’ time. Speaking of chivalry, the earliest French novels are the Arthurian tales written down by Chrétien de Troyes between 1170 and 1190. I have read all his work, and though it is partly rhymed, it is definitely entertaining and the narrative line is very novel-like. By the 13th century, according to my sources, prose has replaced verse as the preferred style for storytelling. Hell, Rabelais’s Gargantua was published in 1534, beating Don Quixote by 70 years.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is generally figured to be the oldest book of which a more-or-less complete copy exists. The text as it is now known is actually a compilation of two fragmentary versions which come from successive centuries.
It is possible a small portion of the plot of the epic is still missing. There is a passage in which a monster is referred to and it appears to be a giant scorpion mentioned elsewhere in the story, except that it is called by a different name. Some scholars believe that the reference is actually to yet another monster which the fourth King of Uruk (that is to say, Gilgamesh) was supposed to have killed during the travels described in the book.
It is arguable whether The Epic of Gilgamesh should be classified as fiction. While it seems plain that none of it (or next to none of it) happened, it may be that the ancient Messopotamians regarded it as authentic history, much in the same way that there are still Biblical literalists who accept the stories of Noah’s Ark, The Tower of Babel, etc. at face value.
The Epic, which runs about fifty pages in print, appears to meet Mark Twain’s definition of a classic as being something everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read. In the course of the story Gilgamesh comes to question the purpose of living and goes searching for the world’s oldest man to seek counsel. This man is a survivor of the Deluge, the Babylonian version of Noah.
On account of this the story is often misidentified as being an account of The Deluge, and it is sometimes said that Gilgamesh himself survived the great flood and was the man who never died. The know-it-all narrator says something of the kind at the end of The Demon with the Glass Hand, a classic episode of the original Outer Limits which was written by Harlan Ellison.
The Punic Wars (aka History) by Herodotus is often cited as the oldest complete nonfiction work still extant, aside from religious and philosophical works. While nonfiction, it was probably read largely for pleasure by Herodotus’ contemporaries, as he alternates between commentary on the Greek wars with the Phoenicians and a kind of travelogue narrative in which he includes a good deal of information about the customs and legends of various ancient peoples he visited.
The degree to which ancient people accepted their legends as factual is generally open to question. One might make a case for the Eddas, the Viking accounts of Odin, Thor, etc. as the oldest work read for pleasure.
Then too Hindus have always seemed to take large portions of The Upanishads as being true only in a metaphorical sense. A voluminous account of the struggles between the forces of good and evil over centuries, the section best known to Western readers is the Bhagavad-Gita or Song of God, which Hare Krishnas often pushed at airports.
In it a pure-hearted hero named Arjuna (“shining white”) discusses life with his wise old servant on the night before an historic battle, and questions whether it is really right to fight. In their discussion they review a number of legends about heroes standing up to oppressors, and how Arjuna and the people he has sided with got into the mess they are in now. Unknown to Arjuna, his servant is actually a god in disguise, who has come to guide him to making the right decision.
One finds a lot of sources calling Don Quixote the first “modern” novel, by whatever the critic’s definition of “modern” is. For example, the introduction of Walter Starkie’s English translation calls it “the first modern novel.” I don’t pretend to know enough about 16th century literature to know what distinguishes “modern” novels from “pre-modern” or “olden tymes” in this context.