20th century BC

A scribe trained in Isin or Larsa this century inherits a library already old. The Sumerian King List, which took shape under Ur's last dynasty a century earlier and continued to be reworked afterward, still frames kingship as something the gods lower from heaven city by city, and the Curse of Agade still explains imperial collapse as divine punishment for royal impiety, a moral he has just watched play out again in Ur's own fall. He can recite Ur-Nammu's law code and the hymns Shulgi commissioned to have himself worshipped as a living god, even though the dynasty that produced them no longer exists. His own king, Ishme-Dagan of Isin, has had new hymns written claiming that vanished prestige for himself, an act of political theater the scribe copies without necessarily believing.

He knows almost nothing of Egypt beyond trade goods and travelers' report, and an Egyptian scribe would know just as little of him. That scribe, serving the new Twelfth Dynasty, has his own recent political literature to master: the Prophecy of Neferti, staged as an ancient sage's vision but written to retroactively bless Amenemhat I's seizure of the throne, and the Instruction of Amenemhat, a posthumous voice-piece in which the murdered king warns his son to trust no one, family included. He also copies the Instruction of Merikare, generations old by now, and drills the formulaic Kemyt as a child learning to write. Egyptian literature at this date is instructional and dynastic rather than narrative; the great story-cycles, Sinuhe among them, belong to the coming decades.

A merchant traveling the roads between Ashur and Kanesh in central Anatolia knows a different world again, one measured in donkey caravans, tin, and textiles rather than royal hymns. The archive he will leave behind, thousands of private letters and contracts, has barely begun to accumulate; the system that generates it, an Assyrian trading colony embedded in a foreign city under local rulers' protection, is itself a recent and fragile arrangement. He would find nothing to read from Crete, where builders have just begun raising the first palace at Knossos, a structure whose purpose, part storehouse, part shrine, part seat of authority, is legible archaeologically but left no contemporary text to explain it in its own words.

None of these figures could read the others' scripts even where correspondence existed, and no one this century has produced anything resembling epic narrative as later ages will define it. What passes for extended literary composition is hymnic, legal, or admonitory: praise of kings and gods, codes claiming to fix just prices and punishments, advice literature staged as a father's or predecessor's voice. The great flood story that will become Atrahasis and, later, part of Gilgamesh, likely already circulates in some oral or fragmentary form, but no text of it from this century survives to prove it. Rigveda's hymns are five centuries from being composed even orally; Hammurabi's stele, the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh, and the Mari archive are all a lifetime and more away. What exists instead is a set of regional literatures, Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, each serving its own scribal bureaucracy, unaware how thoroughly later centuries will braid Mesopotamian and Levantine material together into shared story-cycles. For now, the furthest any single mind's reading plausibly reaches is a few hundred miles and, at best, a few centuries back.