What Was The First Written Book

Welcome back my fellow learners, today we are going to learn about the first ever written book, long before the computer age, people actually learned about things by something called a book, soon to be as extinct as the dinosaur, mores the pity.

Ok let us start at the beginning. The first book ever written was not popular to contrary belief The Book Of Genesis, and it wasn’t written by God, Adam, Moses or any of the disciples.

The invention of writing is the beginning between pre-history and history. The first ever written language known was archaic cuneiform. It is said to have shown up around 3400 BC in the early part of the ancient Sumerian reign somewhere between Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, which is now known as Iraq. It was basically a pictographic language slowly becoming syllabic and comprised of shaped characters. The earliest documented writings were found on clay tablets and some think they could have been administrative lists.

However, the first ever written story is the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is an account of an historical figure known as Gilgamesh, who at the time was a ruler of the Sumerian city Uruk, and is thought to have ruled around 2700 to 2500 BC.

There are several fragmented versions of this story. The oldest are around 2100 BC. However, some scholars think these could be transcriptions of even earlier Sumerian writings. Other versions have been found that have been dated from as early as 2000 to 1700BC. The biggest completed version was found on 12 clay tablets from around 1500 to 1200 BC. These were found in the ruins of King Ashurbanipal’s library located in Nineveh, which is the largest documented library in the pre-Hellenic world.

The definition of a book in the recent years has become more flexible. It used to be a book was basically a collection of printed sheets of paper bound together, and placed between two covers. However, with the birth of the e-book, the definition is changing.