Would people be interested in a reading list of classic ancient world literature for beginners I'm kinda in the mood to infodump
I'm gonna do it anyways give me a bit to find links to where you can read online. Also fair warning this list is probably gonna be heavily skewed towards the Mediterranean, India, and China because those are the ones I know the most about.
I have linked to a free version of each of these texts if I could find them. Keep in mind though that if a translation is free it's usually old enough to have lost its copyright and is therefore pretty out of date and harder to read. If you want a smoother reading experience of any of these texts I'd suggest googling the most recent English translation and buying a copy of that.
This is not a comprehensive list by any means. To me it's just stuff that's good to be familiar with because it's still having a large impact on culture today. If you have any other recommendations please add them.
Ancient Mesopotamia:
The poetry of Enheduanna, the earliest credited author we have records of. She was a priestess of the goddess Inanna and her poetry is hymns to the goddess in question as well as functionally political propaganda for her father who was king of the region at the time.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest written epic poem we have on record. It tells the story of a demigod king losing his best friend and going on a quest to try and achieve immortality to avoid the same fate.
Ancient Greece:
The Iliad by Homer tells the story of how the hero Achilles led to the end of the Trojan war. It notoriously has entire chapters composed entirely of lists but other than that it's good I promise.
The Odyssey by Homer tells the story of the ten year journey home of the hero Odysseus after the Trojan war. This is a text claimed by many to be just as important as the bible in terms of its impact on western literature.
The poetry of Sappho of Lesbos, called by many to be "the tenth muse". Her poetry is unusual for the time because she speaks about herself as the subject of her poetry. She's often considered to be important today because of her poetry about openly lusting for other women. Although she was very popular in her time, very few of her poems survive because the dialect she wrote in fell out of fashion.
Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, also known as the three Theben Plays. Together, these plays tell the tragedy of the Greek hero Oedipus and the aftermath of his death on his children.
Ancient Rome:
The Aeneid by Virgil continues the story of Troy from where the Greek epics carry off from the Trojan perspective, following Rome's founding hero hero Aeneas and his journey to Italy.
Metamorphosis by Ovid is a poetic collection of short stories from Roman mythology with an anti-authoritarian bend. Ovid retells Greek myths from a Roman perspective, and from the perspective of a man who hates authority living in a time where a republic is being replaced by a monarchy.
Ancient China:
The Poetry of Li Bai. A controversial man in his own time in the Tang dynasty who was kicked out of many courts and was married four times. His poetry has a lot of beautiful imagery in it that modern poets from all over the world still take inspiration from.
The poetry of Du Fu, also known as Tu Fu, is another great poet of the Tang dynasty. His poetry is more personal than that of Li Bai, who was his contemporary, and he is sometimes also considered an early historian.
The Analects of Confucius is a series of sayings and lecture notes gathered by the students of the philosopher Confucius. The philosophy in these works still has an impact on cultural values in many Asian countries to this day.
Ancient India:
The Vedas are a series of texts sacred to Hinduism. Although important, they are so long that I can't in good conscience tell you to read the whole thing. So here is a small selection of quotes from the university of Hawaii's intro to Asian philosophy course and I invite you to do your own research after that.
Shakuntala by Kalidasa is a play that tells the story of a woman who is cursed to be forgotten by her husband for a small slight she committed. Kalidasa is extremely pro-monarchy but he wants monarchs to be good, so this play serves as a moral example for the upper classes.
Hala's Sattasai is an ancient Indian collection of various love poems. Only recently translated into English. And I am personally very glad for that because they are lovely.
I think that these are a good place to get you started if you want to actually read this stuff instead of just reading summaries. There's an endless well of fragments and other texts you can jump into if you like, but these are, in my opinion, the basics. I hope you find something here that you like.
