Epic Poetry: Did you mean...?

Persian literature derives from a long oral tradition of poetic storytelling. The first recorded example of this tradition is the Behistun Inscription of Darius I (the Great, r. 522-486 BCE), carved on a cliff-face c. 522...

Homer's Iliad describes the final year of the Trojan War, a legendary conflict between an alliance of Greek cities and the city of Troy in Anatolia. It was probably written in the 8th century BCE after a long oral tradition. The Greeks...

Literature (from the Latin Littera meaning "letters" and referring to an acquaintance with the written word) is the written work of a specific culture, sub-culture, religion, philosophy, or the...

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (also given as Jalal ad-did Muhammad Balkhi, best known as Rumi, l. 1207-1273 CE) was a Persian Islamic theologian and scholar but became famous as a mystical poet whose work focuses on the opportunity for a...

Phillis Wheatley (l. c. 1753-1784) was the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry and become recognized as a poet, overcoming the prevailing understanding of the time that a Black person was incapable of writing...

The First World War (1914-18) stimulated a great wave of literary output, not least in the field of poetry. In an era when photography and film were still in their infancy, poems, especially those written by direct participants...

The Aeneid was written by the Roman poet Virgil who lived between 70 and 19 BCE during the Augustan Period (named for Augustus, the first emperor of Rome). The twelve-book long epic poem tells the...

Rarely does a name survive as many millennia as Gilgamesh has. World-renowned men of letters such as Carl Gustav Jung and Rainer Maria Rilke spoke nothing but the highest praise for the ancient Babylonian...

The newly discovered, partially broken, tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh: "the episode of the journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu." The tablet dates back to the old Babylonian period, 2003-1595 BCE. From Mesopotamia...

Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London The Epic of Gilgamesh is a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian poem about a hero who embarks on an...