Method. The point of this exercise is to find stories that come to us from the earliest written traditions, so search by where the text comes from, not by whether you like the plot. For each story, note four things before you present it: (i) the civilisation and rough date, (ii) the material it survives on — clay tablet, papyrus, bone, palm leaf, (iii) a one-line summary, and (iv) the human question it turns on. Use your library, your teacher, and the chapter itself, which names several without discussing them.
What a good presentation must contain. Not the plot alone. It must say how we know the story — which is where the chapter's own theme returns. The Epic of Gilgamesh reaches us because it was pressed into clay in cuneiform, clay survives burial, and cuneiform has been deciphered. A story told aloud in a Harappan street is gone forever. Make that point explicitly; it is what connects this box to the rest of the chapter.
Sample answer:
| Story | Where it comes from | What it is about | How it survived |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Epic of Gilgamesh | Mesopotamia; the chapter places creative literature in the Akkadian period, from 2334 BCE onwards | A powerful king who loses his closest friend and goes searching for a way to escape death — and fails | Cuneiform on clay tablets |
| The oldest 'Sindbad the Sailor' | Egypt; the chapter says libraries dating back to 2000 BCE stored papyrus scrolls in labelled jars, and 'one such jar contained the oldest version' | A sailor shipwrecked on a strange island, and how he gets home | Papyrus scroll in a labelled jar on a library shelf |
| Egyptian animal fables | Egypt, same period | Short tales in which animals behave like people and the story ends in a lesson — the chapter notes they suggest 'a link to Aesop's Fables' | Papyrus |
| The oldest 'Cinderella' | Egypt; the chapter lists it among short stories of this period | A poor girl whose fortune turns — the earliest known form of a story now told worldwide | Papyrus |
| Egyptian ghost and miracle tales, and romances | Egypt | The chapter groups these together as the range of Egyptian short fiction | Papyrus |
| Chinese oracle-bone records | China; the earliest source of information about China | Not stories but questions put to the future — which, as the chapter says, 'tell us a lot about the hopes, desires, and fears of the early Chinese' | Symbols carved on animal bones and tortoise shells (Fig. 4.36) |