The Tao Te Ching (pronounced more like Dow Day Jing) or “Book of the Way” is, simply put, the greatest self-help book of all time. While Lao Tzu’s words of wisdom launched Taoism and influenced Chinese philosophy, Confucianism, and Buddhism, anyone of any religion or belief system could apply its teachings and find themselves living a…
(image: Title page of the I Ching, c. 1100 AD/CE – http://catalog.digitalarchives.tw/item/00/08/73/99.html, Public Domain) As I mentioned previously in my post about the Old Chinese language, the earliest examples of written Chinese come from oracle bones, pieces of ox scapula or turtle shell that were used in divination rituals and began to include written language…
The Upanishads are a collection of sacred Sanskrit texts that were written over the course of a few centuries. Which texts were written in which centuries is a hotly debated question, but according to Valerie J. Roebuck, the translator and editor of the Penguin edition pictured above, the “consensus view” is that “the principal Upanishads were…
The Rig Veda is the oldest surviving text originally written in Vedic Sanskrit, the earliest known version of Sanskrit that was preserved orally until the invention of writing. These hymns probably originated around 1500-1000 BC/BCE, and they have been organized into 10 books, or mandalas, that amount to thousands of pages of hard-to-interpret text. I obviously…
I’ve read The Epic of Gilgamesh several times, and it never fails to amaze me how accessible something so old can be. If you’ve ever read a comic book or watched a superhero movie, you might recognize a lot of elements from Gilgamesh, the legendary tale of a real king of Uruk in the 2nd millennium BC/BCE.…
The Kesh Temple Hymn is the oldest piece of literature ever found, dating back to around 2600 BC/BCE. Stop and think about that for a moment – many people today consider a literary work “old” if it pre-dates themselves, but this poem pre-dates almost everything that has ever been written by human hands. Many of…