What Is the World’s Oldest Story?
Whether relayed by way of a novel, poem, movie, or word of mouth, stories have served as a means of connecting people through shared experiences and emotions since we first learned to communicate with one another.
Some of the most famous stories have endured for hundreds or thousands of years. William Shakespeare penned his celebrated plays in the 16th and 17th centuries. Beowulf was written several hundred years before that, while the Iliad and Odyssey epics push back even further into the first millennium BCE.
And yet there are even older and far more obscure examples of storytelling that won’t turn up in a college literature course. Which inspires the question: How far back do we need to travel to find the world’s oldest story?
The “Epic of Gilgamesh” Is the Oldest Surviving Written Tale
The ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh is often cited as the oldest known surviving story. This epic poem tells the tale of King Gilgamesh, the part-divine ruler of the ancient city of Urek, who battles terrible monsters sent forth by spiteful gods and seeks out a plant that brings eternal youth. Derived from sources that date back to approximately 2100 BCE, the first full version of Gilgamesh appeared on cuneiform tablets early the following millennium.
But while this would be an early example of a story that could be held and read, it’s more accurate to refer to Gilgamesh as the oldest known work of narrative literature. If you consider visual art capable of telling a story, then there are plenty of surviving creations that predate the written word.
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Neolithic Carvings Have Been Shown To Portray Narratives
One such creation is the collection of carvings at the ruins of an 11,000-year-old settlement in modern-day Turkey. Found on a limestone bench in a communal building, the carvings show ferocious animals surrounding a male figure who conspicuously holds his genitalia.
According to archaeologists, the carvings represent separate scenes meant to be read together, rendering this display the oldest narrative sequence on record. However, while some believe the carvings are meant to convey a show of masculinity, the exact story being communicated is a mystery.
If a single image can tell a story, then a recently discovered cave painting on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the oldest physical example of a story. Depicting three humanlike figures with sticks alongside what appears to be a giant pig, the painting is believed to be more than 50,000 years old.
This scene may be the abstract representation of a hunt, but again, we can only guess at the narrative being depicted in this ancient painting.
Aboriginal Dreamtime Myths May Be Even Older
Given the absence of a concrete narrative in prehistoric art, better candidates for the world's oldest story are found among the Dreamtime creation myths of the First Nations (Aboriginal) people of Australia. Shared by way of song, dance, and body painting, these stories describe the world's spiritual beginnings in the foundational period of the Dreamtime, also known as the Dreaming, the mythology of the Aboriginal culture.
Because the First Nations people lived on the continent for more than 60,000 years before Europeans arrived in the late 18th century, they were able to pass along their oral stories without outside influence for hundreds of generations. What’s more, the events depicted in creation myths have been shown to coincide with geologic and cosmic events that allow experts to deduce when the stories may have been spawned.
For example, the Palawa of Tasmania have a story about when the strip of land connecting the island to Australia was submerged in a flood. By examining the terrain and deposits around the Bass Strait, which now separates Tasmania from the rest of the continent, a research team found that the land bridge was swallowed by a rising ocean around 12,000 years ago, making that time period the likely origin point of the story.
The Palawa also tell of a "Great South Star" named Moinee, which never budged from its position in the night sky. Determining this to be the star now commonly known as Sirius, the team analyzed astronomical data to find an epoch when the celestial marker seemingly never moved, a period between 12,000 and 14,000 years in the past — likely around the same time the story was first told.
The Budj Bim Creation Story May Be More Than 30,000 Years Old
Which brings us to the creation story of Budj Bim. According to the Gunditjmara people of Southwest Australia, a god named Budj Bim emerged from the earth in the form of a volcano, his head becoming the rocky protuberance, his teeth forming the basalt deposits, and his blood spilling over the land as lava. The volcano still exists, albeit in dormant mode as a feature of the Gunditjmara ancestral lands, now known as the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape.
In the 1940s, an artifact known as the "Bushfield axe" was found beneath a layer of ash from the Tower Hill volcano complex, located about 25 miles from the Budj Bim complex. More recently, thanks to advancements in radiocarbon dating, scientists were able to determine that both Budj Bim and Tower Hill last erupted more than 30,000 years ago.
Since the axe was found beneath the ash, it stands to reason that people inhabited the region at the time the volcano erupted. As such, the local Dreamtime myth about the lava-spewing god that changed the landscape may also be more than 30,000 years old.
Constellations May Have Inspired an Even Older Story
Is there an older story still? According to a pair of astronomers, the answer can be found by again turning to the stars.
The Pleiades are a cluster of stars commonly known as the "seven sisters," although only six are visible to the naked eye since two of them are close enough to appear as one. As described in a 2021 paper by researchers Ray Norris and Barnaby Norris, stories about the missing sister can be found among European, African, Asian, Native American, and South Pacific cultures. Specifically, the Greeks of antiquity and First Nations people of Australia share similar tales about the sisters escaping the lustful yearnings of the nearby constellation Orion, despite there being no contact between the two cultures.
They did have a common ancestor, however, as humans are believed to have begun migrating out of Africa approximately 100,000 years ago. At that time, the seven sisters were more visibly distinct, providing reason to think that the original Pleiades-Orion story crystallized in Africa in this mind-bogglingly distant era.
There are reasons to be skeptical, however. One critic cautions that many cultures ascribe male and female identities to constellations, so this alone is not strong evidence that the stories came from a common source. Also, a period of 100,000 years is far longer than most oral traditions are thought to survive.
Which isn’t to say the Pleiades-Orion story is not the world’s oldest story, only that we don’t know for sure. After all, one can easily envision this tale being dreamed up by stargazers in the plains of Africa, using the same power of imagination that has spurred the creation of the greatest stories known to humanity.
