ancient Sumerian literature Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Nonbinary Characters for Children Are Nothing New

In the past few years, nonbinary fictional characters have become increasingly common in literature, television, and other areas, including in books and programs intended for children. In just the past week, anti-trans activists have made quite a lot of noise complaining about children being exposed to these characters, because apparently the pronoun they is too risqué for innocent little children to hear.

Some readers may be surprised to learn that, while nonbinary characters are starting to appear much more frequently nowadays, characters of this kind—even ones meant for children—are nothing inherently new. Characters who are at least arguably nonbinary appear in some of the oldest surviving works of literature from ancient Mesopotamia and one of the earliest emphatically nonbinary characters in a work of English-language children’s literature appeared over a hundred years ago, in a work by a children’s author who is still quite famous today.

No, the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ Is Not the Oldest Surviving Work of Literature

If you think you know one thing about the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, then, chances are, you probably think that the epic is the oldest surviving work of literature in the whole world. This claim pervades basically all non-academic discussion of the epic. I was taught it in my history and literature classes all throughout my K-12 education, it is endlessly repeated on the internet, and, whenever I happen to talk to someone about the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is usually one of the first claims to come up.

The truth, however, is that the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh (which is what most people mean when they talk about the Epic of Gilgamesh) is not even close to being the oldest surviving work of literature. In fact, it’s not even the oldest surviving poem about Gilgamesh.

Did Ancient Poetry Rhyme in the Original Languages?

A lot of people who have never studied any ancient language have a tendency to assume that works of ancient poetry must rhyme in the original language. It’s fairly easy to see why some people might think this, since many old poems written in English rhyme and it’s easy for people to assume that this is how all poetry—or at least all “traditional” poetry—is just supposed to be. The reality, though, is that rhyming lines of the kind that most twenty-first-century western readers would recognize are virtually absent from ancient poetry altogether.

Poems in ancient languages operate on different rules from traditional modern English poetry. In this post, I will attempt to survey some of these rules for poetry in various ancient languages. Be forewarned that I am not a poetry specialist, of the various ancient languages I will be discussing Ancient Greek and Latin are the only ones I can personally read, and this post is by no means meant to be comprehensive. Nonetheless, I hope it will serve as a rough guide to help interested members of the general public to understand at least some forms of ancient poetry.