Humans have been speaking languages for tens of thousands of years. We told stories around fires, passed down myths from parents to children, and memorised important information about survival and history. But for a very long time, nobody could write anything down.
Then, at some point, humans invented writing.
Writing allowed people to record laws, preserve stories, collect knowledge, and communicate across generations. Eventually, writing gave us books.
Today, I want to explore the history of books, from ancient clay tablets in Mesopotamia to modern audiobooks and e-books on smartphones.
Weโll look at the origins of writing, the oldest surviving texts, the first true โbooks,โ ย the worldโs first novels, the printing revolution, the bestselling books in history, and finallyโฆ the future of reading itself.
And we will do all of this while learning some new vocabulary and practicing your English listening comprehension.
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Vocabulary
- Orally (adv): using spoken words rather than writing
- The story was passed down orally for generations.
- Tablet (n): a flat object used for writing in ancient times, often made of clay or stone
- The ancient tablet contained trade records.
- Prose (n): normal written or spoken language that is not poetry
- Most modern novels are written in prose.
- Novel (n): a long fictional book with characters and a developed story
- She is reading a historical novel about ancient Rome.
- Literary (adj): connected to literature, books, or serious writing
- The prize is awarded for literary achievement.
- Literacy (n): the ability to read and write
- Higher literacy rates helped books become more popular.
- Publish (v): to produce and distribute a book, article, or other written work
- The author decided to publish her book online.
Life Before Writing
Before humans invented writing, our knowledge had to be passed down orally. This means using our voices. People communicated about their history or religion, laws and stories by speaking and listening rather than by reading books. This is known as an oral tradition.
There are still some cultures around the world that maintain the oral tradition. It is famously a big part of Australian Aboriginal culture, as well as many other indigenous societies who never developed writing.
Today, though, the vast majority of us rely on writing. Written information like books and websites, notes and [00:04:00] messages.
I think it’s actually difficult to imagine a society without writing. Imagine your life if there was no writing at all in your world.
But for most of human history, writing didn’t exist.
Modern humans have existed for about 300,000 years, I guess, but writing only developed around 5000 or 6000 years ago. That means humans lived without written language for the vast majority of our existence.
Some historians believe that famous works like Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey were actually oral stories before they were eventually written down years after they were first told. Professional storytellers may have remembered enormous amounts of material.
Cuneiform and Clay Tablets
So if humans were already able to communicate and keep their stories using their voices, why did we [00:05:00] develop writing? While I’d love to say the answer to that question was something creative or romantic, like recording our religious stories or some great events or writing amazing novels, the real answer is probably a bit boring.
Writing most likely came from administration and accounting.
Most historians believe the first culture to develop writing was the ancient Mesopotamians. Mesopotamia was a region in the Middle East that includes modern-day Iraq.
Around 3400 to 3200 BCE, the Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia, created one of the earliest known writing systems… cuneiform.
Cuneiform symbols were pressed into soft clay tablets using a stylus, like a stick. The symbols looked wedge-shaped, and because they wrote [00:06:00] in clay, we still have a lot of these records remaining from the past. Clay is quite good at surviving through the years.
The earliest examples of writing were practical records. Ancient people used writing to track things like their taxes, trade, supplies, property.
It is in cuneiform writing from the Sumerians that we also have the earliest known name of a person: Kushim.
According to a tablet from 5000 years ago, we know Kushim was responsible for the production and storage of barley, and he signed his name on his tablet.
Kushim used writing to record shipments into and out of his warehouse. He also is famous for making the first ever accounting mistake, which I find hilarious.
As cities grew larger, remembering everything orally [00:07:00] became really difficult. Written records allow people to store their information more accurately.
People who were trained to read and write were known as scribes, and scribes usually had quite an important position in society because writing was a special skill, and it was quite rare in some of these ancient places.
Writing systems also developed independently in other parts of the world. Ancient Egypt developed hieroglyphics, and other writing systems emerged in China and in Mesoamerica as well.
I think the fact that multiple civilizations invented writing independently is one of the most interesting things about this topic. Very different societies eventually reached the same conclusion: speaking and listening was not enough to organize a complicated society.
And maybe some language learners could also do with this [00:08:00] advice. I know when I’m studying Japanese, I tend to focus on speaking and listening, and I tend to not practice my reading and writing as much as I should. Eventually, speaking and listening are not enough. You also need to learn to read and write.
Oldest Literary Texts
So what are the oldest written books that we have ever discovered?
Well, as I’ve already mentioned, the earliest known examples of writing are those administrative clay tablets from Mesopotamia. These tablets date back more than 5000 years, but they weren’t really books. They were tablets, used to record records and administrative texts.
If we want to think about the earliest literary works, historians usually point to a few different places.
One is the Instructions of Shuruppak, which is an ancient Sumerian text, and it contains advice and moral [00:09:00] guidance. Another suggestion is the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, which are religious writings carved inside of pyramids to help the dead find their way to the afterlife
But the most famous example of an early story is the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is often described as the oldest surviving great work of literature, and it is perhaps the first ever written story.
It originated in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and follows King Gilgamesh on a journey searching for immortality after the death of his friend.
Even though it was written over 4,000 years ago, quite a few of the themes in the story are still recognizable today. People in the ancient world obviously worried about many of the same things that we worry about now.
What Counts as a Book
But was Gilgamesh the first book ever [00:10:00] written? Well, the problem is that ancient people did not use books in the modern sense. When we think of a book today, we usually imagine pages bound together with a cover.
But humans used many different formats for storing written information before books were invented. Sumerians used clay tablets. Ancient Egyptians used scrolls made from papyrus. The oldest Chinese writing examples were carved into animal bones and turtle shells. Are these books?
I guess the predecessor to the modern book is the codex. A codex is a series of handwritten pages of text which are then stacked on top of each other and bound along one side.
The codex became popular during the Roman period in Europe. The oldest surviving codices (which is the plural of codex) [00:11:00] tend to be religious texts. Of course, there would’ve probably been some more written in the past, but the ones that we have today, the ones that have been best preserved, are typically religious.
Some of the most interesting codices were found in the Nag Hammadi Library. The Nag Hammadi Library was discovered in Egypt in 1945 and contains Christian texts from around 1,600 years ago.
But interestingly, they contained early Christian texts known as Gnostic texts, which are very different from modern Christianity. They were written in a period before Christians had decided exactly what to believe, exactly what their religion was going to focus on.
Are these books? Well, they were written texts bound together. But I don’t think we would consider them to be a book in the way that we understand books. Same as the early scrolls and [00:12:00] tablets we have from the Middle East and parts of Asia, they’re definitely writing. They’re definitely examples of writing, but are they books? It’s more debatable.
First Novels and Prose
So far, I’ve talked about the origins of writing and some of the oldest texts in history. But when I think of a book, to tell you the truth, I’m imagining a novel. That’s just my perspective. So I thought it would be interesting to think about the first ever novel.
A novel is a long fictional prose narrative with developed characters and a complex story. Prose is normal everyday language that follows normal grammar rules. A lot of early writing was not in prose, but it was written as poetry. Epics like Homer’s Odyssey or Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh were technically poems. They weren’t prose. They weren’t what we’d consider a normal story.
One of the strongest candidates for the world’s [00:13:00] first true novel is The Tale of Genji, written in 11th century Japan by Murasaki Shikibu.
She was a lady-in-waiting, so a servant, for the Empress of Japan at the time. The novel was written during Japan’s Heian period, which was a time when aristocratic courts and that kind of culture flourished in Japan.
The Tale of Genji follows the life and relationships of Hikaru Genji, a nobleman living in the Imperial court. This novel spends a lot of time talking about emotions and relationships, jealousy, romance, the inner lives of characters. And this focus on characters is why it’s often considered the earliest thing to resemble a modern novel, because it’s more psychological. It’s not just a basic story. It talks about [00:14:00] people.
I’ve read The Tale of Genji. There are lots of translations out there if you’re interested in checking it out. I would recommend it.
Of course, not everyone agrees. Some people argue that later European works fit the definition of a novel more clearly.
Don Quixote, for example, was written by Miguel de Cervantes in the early 17th century. Don Quixote tells the story of a man who becomes obsessed with medieval knight stories and begins confusing fiction with reality.
Other people point further back. They talk about ancient Greek and Roman prose fiction, which we do have lots of examples of, but were they really novels?
Printing Revolution
We can’t talk about the history of books without talking about printing.
The earliest large-scale printing technology developed in China centuries before Europe. One common method was woodblock [00:15:00] printing, where entire pages of text were carved into wooden blocks, covered with ink, and pressed onto paper. This allowed text to be copied much faster than writing everything by hand.
One very famous example is the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text printed in 868 CE. It is considered the oldest known printed book in the world.
Around the 1450s, Johannes Gutenberg developed the movable type printing press. Instead of carving entire pages into wood, printers could arrange individual metal letters and then reuse them repeatedly for different pages. This made printing dramatically faster and so much more efficient. The Gutenberg Bible became one of the earliest major books printed in Europe using this type of printing [00:16:00] press.
Before printing, books had to be copied by hand. Making a single book could take months, which made books really expensive and quite rare.
Printing changed everything. Books became cheaper. They were much faster to make and more accessible. Literacy rates gradually increased as well. More people had access to written materials, which meant more people were able to read.
Because more people were able to read, scientific ideas could spread across countries. Newspapers emerged. The education systems of countries grew and expanded.
Some historians argue that the printing press helped make things like the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution possible. When I was a history student many years ago, my university considered the invention of the printing press the start of a new period of history, the early [00:17:00] modern period.
From Religion to Mass Reading
For a long time, the world’s most widely distributed books were religious texts like the Bible, the Quran, or Buddhist texts. These were copied and then spread across the world.
But over time, books also became forms of entertainment, especially during the 18th and 19th centuries. The fact that more people could read and printing technology was getting better meant there were just more people willing to buy books and read stories.
Novels became particularly popular in a form called serialized novels. Instead of publishing the entire book at once, writers would release their story chapter by chapter in newspapers or magazines. Readers would then wait for the next installment.
Cheap stories known as “penny dreadfuls“ became really popular in Britain, and characters from these stories, like Sherlock Holmes, have now become [00:18:00] internationally famous. Sherlock Holmes’s original stories were published weekly or monthly, I think, in newspapers and magazines.
Best Selling Books Ever
While researching this episode, I became quite interested to find out what is the best-selling or the most distributed book in history. For older books, especially, exact sale numbers are almost impossible to calculate. Some books were copied and distributed for years before any records exist. And other books are spread religiously, maybe through churches or mosques, and maybe were not sold.
The Christian Bible is often considered the most distributed or the best-selling book in history. It has been translated into hundreds of languages and sent around the world for centuries. Estimates vary, but billions of copies are believed to exist.
The Quran, similarly, has been spread around the world and is considered the [00:19:00] second-most distributed book in history, with also over a billion published.
The third best-selling book in history, might surprise you. It is probably Quotations from Chairman Mao or The Little Red Book. During the Cultural Revolution in China, enormous numbers of copies of this book were sent across the country for political and ideological reasons.
However, the Bible, the Quran, and Quotations from Chairman Mao are not really commercial bestsellers. People read those books because of their importance, because of their religious or political significance.
The best-selling or most widely read novels of all time include Don Quixote, which we mentioned earlier as maybe the first possible modern novel. Also, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Little Prince by [00:20:00] Antoine de Saint-Exupรฉry, and also Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter series, all seven novels, are the best-selling book series in history.
One reason these books became so successful is translation. A book written in only one language has limited reach. But once books are translated into dozens or hundreds of languages, they can spread globally.
English language books also tend to dominate publishing. This is partly because of the historical influence of the United Kingdom and the United States. English is the international language of business, science, entertainment, and education.
Also, successful English language books are often turned into Hollywood movies or TV series, which then again increases their international popularity. How many people out there [00:21:00] read the Harry Potter books after the success of the first Harry Potter movie? And how many read the books before the first Harry Potter movie?
Many incredibly important books were written in languages like Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and they will never achieve the same visibility as English language works, which is a big shame.
Digital Reading and Self Publishing
Let’s end this episode by thinking about the future of books.
Books have already changed a lot throughout history. We have moved from clay tablets and scrolls to manuscripts, handwritten manuscripts, and now printed books. But actually, we are moving towards digital reading and e-books.
Things like the Amazon Kindle have changed how we read. Instead of carrying a physical book, you can store your entire library on a small electronic device.
Also, in the past, you usually needed publishing [00:22:00] companies to print and distribute your book if you wanted to write a book. But now self-publishing is a massive industry. You can publish books online, onto Kindle for example, without needing a publisher. You do it yourself, and you can become successful doing this.
Some famous examples of self-published books include The Martian by Andy Weir and Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. Both of these became massive bestsellers, were turned into successful Hollywood movies, and were first published digitally without major support.
Audiobooks have also grown in popularity. Recorded books have existed for decades, of course. But smartphones and streaming apps make audiobooks much more convenient. You can now listen to them anywhere without needing to carry around a CD player or a cassette player. I used to listen to the Harry Potter books on cassette when I [00:23:00] was seven or eight years old.
The future may bring even bigger changes to writing and to books.
I think we might see new ways of telling stories. Maybe interactive fiction that changes based on decisions in the book. So you might be reading on your Kindle, and it gets to a point where the character can either agree to go swimming with a character or reject that character. And depending on that decision, which way you choose, you get a different story.
These already exist in some form, but it might be more convenient digitally. We might also see virtual reality storytelling.
Some people worry about the future of reading. Some people worry that our attention spans are becoming shorter and reading is less common.
But this has been a similar fear for a long time. Television was supposed to destroy reading. The internet was supposed to destroy books. But [00:24:00] books have survived every shift so far.
Final Thought
What was the first book ever written? I don’t think there’s a perfect answer.
If we mean the first written text, then the answer is probably some clay tablet created by the Sumerians 5,000 years ago. But they were just records and accounting documents.
If we mean the first great literary work, then maybe the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s the oldest surviving story that feels like a story.
If we we mean something closer to a modern novel, then The Tale of Genji may deserve the title. Or the first mass-produced printed book, I guess that could be the Gutenberg Bible.
Books have changed a lot throughout history, but I think we, we humans, have always had this love of storytelling. So [00:25:00] hopefully the future of books is positive.
But what do you think? In your opinion, what would you say is the oldest book in history? Actually, what counts as a book in your opinion? Does an ancient poem count as a book? Does it need to be printed in a modern way, or can a book be handwritten? Is reading an e-book just as good as reading a real book? And in 1,000 years, will people still read books at all?
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