Excavations in modern-day Iraq by Ernest de Sarzec in 1877 found evidence of the earliest known code of justice, issued by the Sumerian king Urukagina of Lagash ca 2300 BC.

Parallels to the earliest Babylonian ( Sumerian ) star catalogues suggest that the ancient Chinese system did not arise independently from that of the Ancient Near East.

The earliest language written in Mesopotamia was Sumerian, an agglutinative language isolate.

For example, during the earliest Sumerian period, the " en ", or high priest of male gods was originally a woman, that of female goddesses, a man.

Sumerian temples functioned as banks and developed the first large-scale system of loans and credit, but the Babylonians developed the earliest system of commercial banking.

The Vinča culture may have created the earliest system of writing, the Vinča signs, though it is almost universally accepted amongst archeologists that the Sumerian cuneiform script was the earliest true form of writing and the Vinča signs most likely represented pictograms and ideograms rather than a truly developed form of writing.

So far evidence for the earliest periods of the Early Bronze Age in Mesopotamia is very limited. Mesh-Ane-pada is the first king mentioned in the Sumerian King List, and appears to have lived in the 26th century BC.

The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur.

The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system, which was originally used to write ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate.

In historic literature, Susa appears in the very earliest Sumerian records, e. g. in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta it is described as one of the places obedient to Inanna, patron deity of Uruk.

The earliest example of writing is the Sumerian pictographic system found on clay tablets, which eventually developed around 3200 BC into a modified version called cuneiform.

Archaic Sumerian is the earliest stage of inscriptions with linguistic content, beginning with the Jemdet Nasr ( Uruk III ) period from about the 31st to 30th centuries BC.

First, the amount of time between the earliest known form of Sumerian and the oldest reconstructable form of the proposed related language is too great to make reliable comparisons.

The Sumerian language is the earliest known written language.

The earliest records for intentional castration to produce eunuchs are from the Sumerian city of Lagash in the 21st century BC.

The earliest Sumerian poems are now generally considered to be distinct stories rather than parts of a single epic.

Although very long spears had been used since the dawn of organized warfare ( notably illustrated in art showing Sumerian and Minoan warriors and hunters ), the earliest recorded use of a pike-like weapon in the tactical method described above involved the Macedonian sarissa, used by the troops of Alexander the Great's father, Philip II of Macedon, and successive dynasties, which dominated warfare for several centuries in many countries.

The earliest version of the flood myth is preserved fragmentarily in the Eridu Genesis, written in Sumerian cuneiform and dating to the 17th century BC, during the 1st Dynasty of Babylon when the language of writing and administration was still Sumerian.

The earliest recorded mention of prostitution as an occupation, appears in Sumerian records from before 4000 BC, and describes a temple-bordello operated by Sumerian priests in the city of Uruk.

Some of the earliest towers were ziggurats, which existed in Sumerian architecture since the 4th millennium BC.

The earliest recorded thoughts towards acculturation can be found in Sumerian inscriptions from 2370 B. C.

The earliest written flood myth is found in the Mesopotamian Epic of Atrahasis and Epic of Gilgamesh texts.

Gilgamesh ’ s historical reign is believed to have been approximately 2700 BCE, shortly before the earliest known written stories.

Some of the earliest references include the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bible ( Ezekiel 47: 5, Acts 27: 42, Isaiah 25: 11 ), Beowulf, and other sagas.

* c. 640s BC: Assyrian king Ashurbanipal founds library, which included our earliest complete copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

One of the earliest written examples of dream interpretation comes from the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.

* Assyrian king Ashurbanipal founds library, which includes our earliest complete copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from Mesopotamia, is amongst the earliest surviving works of literature.

One of the earliest recorded sidekicks may be Enkidu, who adopted a sidekick role to Gilgamesh after they became allies in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

He argues that literature about land ( and, subsequently, about going back to the land ) is largely sentimental ; " little ," he writes, " is known about farmer's attitudes towards nature ..." Tuan finds historical instances of the desire of the civilized to escape civilization in the Hellenistic, Roman, Augustan, and Romantic eras, and, from one of the earliest recorded myths, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

While the Iliad is the earliest source for descriptions of theophanies in the Classical tradition ( and they occur throughout Greek mythology ), probably the earliest description of a theophany is in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The biblical creation myths and " the flood " are two examples, as they are repeated in other civilizations ' earliest texts ( see Epic of Gilgamesh or Deluge ( mythology )) and are seen again and again in historical texts and references.

The earliest recorded example of the type is the character Enkidu in the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.

This ancient motif of a legendary figure traveling to the end of Earth is also found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which can be dated to c. 2000 BC, making it one of the earliest known works of literary writing.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from Ancient Mesopotamia is among the earliest known works of literary fiction.

His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889 and those slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelite poets.

While traveling to Luoyang, Zhang passed by a hot spring near Mount Li and dedicated one of his earliest fu poems to it, the Wenquan ( 溫泉 ).

Probably the earliest reference to coca in English literature is Abraham Cowley's poem " The Legend of Coca " in his 1662 collection of poems " Six Books of Plants ".

The Old English poems Widsith and Beowulf, as well as works by later Scandinavian writers — notably by Saxo Grammaticus ( c. 1200 ) — provide some of the earliest references to Danes.

The earliest preserved examples of Old Norse literature are the Eddic poems, the oldest of which may have been composed in early 9th century Norway drawing on the common Germanic tradition of alliterative verse.

Many of his poems are still read by British schoolchildren, the best-known being The Inchcape Rock, God's Judgement on a Wicked Bishop, After Blenheim ( possibly one of the earliest anti-war poems ) and Cataract of Lodore.

The earliest example of the name occurs in several of the mythological poems attributed to Taliesin in the Book of Taliesin.

Droste's earliest poems are derivative and conventional but in 1820 her work began to show marked originality when she embarked on a cycle of religious poems, Das geistliche Jahr (" The Spiritual Year ").

His success as a writer was coeval with his earliest publication ; his Comical Tales in verse, poems that recall the Broad Grins that Colman the younger brought out a decade later, took the town by storm, and the struggling young poet found himself a popular favourite at twenty-one.

In addition to the well-known greenhouse poems, the Poetry Foundation notes that Roethke also won praise " for his love poems which first appeared in The Waking and earned their own section in the new book ' were a distinct departure from the painful excavations of the monologues and in some respects a return to the strict stanzaic forms of the earliest work ,' to the poet Stanley Kunitz.

Oread, one of her earliest and best-known poems, which was first published in the 1915 anthology, illustrates this early style:

The body of his works is considerable, the earliest known being a group of five anonymous poems included in the " Songs of Divers Noblemen and Gentlemen ", appended to Newman's edition of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, which appeared in 1591.

Chamisso's earliest writings, which include a verse translation of the tragedy Le Compte de Comminge in which " heilsam " is used in place of " heilig ", show a 20 year old still struggling to master his new language, and a number of his early poems are in French.

The poems of In Hospital are also noteworthy as some of the earliest free verse written in England.

The first, composed in the 14th century, is from Chaucer and if, as some scholars believe, it is one of his earliest poems, then it is possibly the first manifestation of the form in English.

Lowell's earliest poems were published without pay in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1840.

The earliest collection of these poems is known as the.

The main source sources for the earliest preserved poems are the Classic of Poetry, or Shijing and the Songs of the South ( or, Chuci ), although some individual pieces or fragments survive in other forms, for example embedded in classical histories or other literature.

" Formally, the earliest poems show the influence of conventional poetic practice, yet by The Tennis Court Oath a much more revolutionary engagement with form appears.

The Dream of the Rood is one of the earliest Christian poems in the corpus of Old English literature and an example of the genre of dream poetry.