It was almost certainly written within three or four years of Columba's death and is the earliest vernacular poem in European history.

* 700 BC: Epic poem Iliad by Homer, earliest account on the continent.

This poem is one of the earliest known musings on economic thought.

One of the earliest coinage of jianghu was by a dejected poet Fan Zhongyan ( 989 — 1052 ) in the Song Dynasty in his poem Yueyang Lou Ji ( 岳阳楼记 ), in which the context of jianghu was set out as distant to the courts and temples, meaning a world in its own right.

One of the earliest direct reference to Mabon can be found in the tenth century poem Pa Gur, in which Arthur recounts the feats and achievements of his knights so as to gain entrance to a fortress guarded by Glewlwyd Gafaelfawr, the eponymous porter.

The first clear reference to " rhymes of Robin Hood " is from the late-14th-century poem Piers Plowman, but the earliest surviving copies of the narrative ballads that tell his story date to the 15th century, or the first decade of the 16th century.

His earliest poem " The Thought Fox ", and earliest story " The Rain Horse " were recollections of the area.

The earliest attestation mentioned by the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is in fact T. S. Eliot, who between 1910 and 1916 wrote an early poem to which he gave the title " The Triumph of Bullshit ", written in the form of a ballade.

In Japan, the earliest unambiguous reference to a paper model is in a short poem by Ihara Saikaku in 1680 which describes paper butterflies in a dream.

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

Though the Metamorphoses did not suffer the ignominious fate of the Medea, no ancient scholia on the poem survive ( although they did exist in antiquity ), and the earliest manuscript is very late, dating from the 11th century.

The poem retained its popularity throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and is represented by an extremely high number of surviving manuscripts ( more than 400 ); the earliest of these are three fragmentary copies containing portions of Books 1-3, dating to the ninth century.

The Völsung Cycle is a series of legends about the clan, the earliest extant versions of which were recorded in medieval Iceland, and is also the subject matter of the Middle High German epic poem Nibelungenlied.

The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English and is, with the runic Ruthwell Cross and Franks Casket inscriptions, one of three candidates for the earliest attested example of Old English poetry.

The earliest reference to Arthur is in Aneirin's poem Y Gododdin ( c. 594 ).

Hall's earliest published verse appeared in a collection of elegies on the death of Dr. William Whitaker, to which he contributed the only English poem ( 1596 ).

The earliest known English poem is a hymn on the creation ; Bede attributes this to Cædmon ( fl.

The earliest version appeared in 1516, although the poem was not published in its complete form until 1532.

Although the earliest recorded evidence comes from a Welsh poem written by Gryffydd ap Adda ap Dafydd in the mid-14th century, in which he described how people used a tall birch pole at Llanidloes, central Wales.

Sextus is the earliest known source for the proverb " Slowly grinds the mill of the gods, but it grinds fine ", alluded to in Longfellow's poem " Retribution ".

The earliest references to pickled vegetables in East Asia is found in the Xin Nan Shan 信南山 poem of the Shi Jing ( 詩經 ), which uses the character 菹 ( Korean " jeo ", Mandarin Chinese " zu ").

The earliest known extant literary work in Malayalam is Ramacharitam, an epic poem written in the late 12th or early 13th century.

The earliest records of the study of this phenomenon are attributed to the philosopher Pythagoras in the 6th century BC.

The earliest known representation of angels with wings is on what is called the Prince's Sarcophagus, discovered at Sarigüzel, near Istanbul, in the 1930s, and attributed to the time of Theodosius I ( 379-395 ).

The combined book Ezra-Nehemiah of the earliest Christian and Jewish period was known as Ezra and was probably attributed to him ; according to a rabbinic tradition, however, Nehemiah was the real author but was forbidden to claim authorship because of his bad habit of disparaging others.

The earliest recorded use of the terms Christianity ( Greek ) and Catholic ( Greek ), dates to this period, the 2nd century, attributed to Ignatius of Antioch c. 107.

The earliest Chinese document mentioning a crossbow is in scripts from the 4th – 3rd century BC attributed to the followers of Mozi.

The Zuo Zhuan, attributed to Zuo Qiuming in the 5th century BC, is the earliest Chinese work of narrative history and covers the period from 722 BCE to 468 BCE.

Perhaps the earliest extant primary source referencing Easter is a mid-2nd century Paschal homily attributed to Melito of Sardis, which characterizes the celebration as a well-established one.

Possibly the earliest and nearest approach to the discovery of the identity of lightning, and electricity from any other source, is to be attributed to the Arabs, who before the 15th century had the Arabic word for lightning ( raad ) applied to the electric ray.

Fossils at 20 million years ago include fragments attributed to Victoriapithecus, the earliest Old World Monkey.

The writings attributed to the apostles circulated amongst the earliest Christian communities.

The composition of his chamber opera Dido and Aeneas, which forms a very important landmark in the history of English dramatic music, has been attributed to this period, and its earliest production may well have predated the documented one of 1689.

Cryptography historian David Kahn titles him the " Father of Western Cryptography ", pointing to three significant advances in the field which can be attributed to Alberti: " the earliest Western exposition of cryptanalysis, the invention of polyalphabetic substitution, and the invention of enciphered code " ().

Writings attributed to the apostles circulated among the earliest Christian communities and the Pauline epistles were circulating, perhaps in collected forms, by the end of the 1st century AD.

The Muratorian fragment, dated at between 170 and as late as the end of the 4th century ( according to the Anchor Bible Dictionary ), may be the earliest known New Testament canon attributed to mainstream Christianity.

The earliest fossils attributed to the Polaes dates to the late Cretaceous period about 65. 5 million years ago, though some studies ( e. g., Bremer, 2002 ) suggest the origin of the of the group may extend to nearly 115 million years ago, likely in South America.

Some of the earliest manifestations of Pan-Slavic thought within the Habsburg Monarchy have been attributed to Adam Franz Kollár and Pavel Jozef Šafárik.

The earliest known citation on the Internet is from 1986 on Usenet in the signature of a poster from Convex Computer Corporation as "' I think there is a world market for about five computers ' — Remark attributed to Thomas J. Watson ( Chairman of the Board of International Business Machines ), 1943 ".

The cultivation of common millet as the earliest dry crop in East Asia has been attributed to its resistance to drought, and this has been suggested to have aided its spread.

Males were almost as likely to have positions of authority over both males and females, and the tradition of Matriarchy, where the highest ranking member was always a female, was not a special directive of the Demon Queen Lolth but rather had been a reality in Drow society since the earliest times attributed naturally to a few ability scores by the male gender being on average inferior, and particularly due to the ' wisdom ' ability rating being on average quite inferior to the females.

The first literary connection of Joseph of Arimathea with Britain had to wait for the ninth-century Life of Mary Magdalene attributed to Rabanus Maurus ( AD 766 – 856 ), Archbishop of Mainz ; however, the earliest authentic copy of the Maurus text is one housed in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University.

Clement is the earliest pope to whom a text is attributed.

Perhaps the earliest recorded example is the prohibition of the use of alcohol under Islamic law ( Sharia ), which is usually attributed to passages in the Qur ' an dating from the 7th century.

Three brief ancient lives, the earliest attributed to Suetonius, another to an otherwise unknown Vacca, and the third anonymous and undated, along with references in Martial, Cassius Dio, Tacitus's Annals, and one of Statius's Silvae, allow for the reconstruction of a modest biography.

The earliest work directed toward standardizing an approach toward provision of mandatory and discretionary access controls ( MAC and DAC ) within a UNIX ( more precisely, POSIX ) computing environment can be attributed to the National Security Agency's Trusted UNIX ( TRUSIX ) Working Group, which met from 1987 to 1991 and published one Rainbow Book (# 020A ) and produced a formal model and associated evaluation evidence prototype (# 020B ) that was ultimately unpublished.

It featured in the earliest known history of Rome, which was attributed to Diocles of Peparethus.