A_4_18 — Confucian Analects: Foundations of East Asian Thought

The Analects (Lúnyǔ 論語, "Collected Sayings") is the foundational text of Confucianism, comprising 20 books of aphorisms, dialogues, and biographical fragments attributed to Confucius (Kǒngzǐ 孔子, 551–479 BCE) and compiled

A_4_22 — Puranas: Hindu Cosmological Encyclopedia

The Puranas (Purāṇa, "ancient, old") are a vast corpus of Hindu sacred literature comprising 18 Mahāpurāṇas ("Great Puranas") and 18 Upapurāṇas ("Secondary Puranas"), totaling hundreds of thousands of verses (the Skanda

A_4_09 — Avestan Texts — Gathas, Vendidad, and Yasna

The Avesta is the primary scripture of Zoroastrianism, the religion founded by the prophet Zarathushtra (Greek: Zoroaster) in ancient Iran. The surviving Avesta — a fraction of a much larger corpus reportedly destroyed d

A_4_16 — Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) and Bon Tradition

The Bardo Thodol (བར་དོ་ཐོས་གྲོལ, "Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State"), popularly known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a collection of funerary texts attributed to the 8th-century Indian master Pa

A_4_14 — Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas)

The Shan Hai Jing (山海經, "Classic of Mountains and Seas") is one of the most extraordinary texts of the ancient Chinese literary corpus — an encyclopedic compendium of mythological geography, zoology, mineralogy, and cosm

A_3_03 — Egyptian Book of the Dead and Funerary Literature

The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Pert em Hru — "Coming Forth by Day") is a collection of ~200 magical spells, hymns, and instructions designed to guide the deceased through the Duat (underworld) and into eternal life in th

A_3_02 — The Egyptian Pyramid Texts: Oldest Religious Literature on Earth

The Pyramid Texts are the oldest substantial body of Egyptian funerary literature ever discovered and among the oldest substantial religious corpora of any civilization — inscribed on the interior walls of Old Kingdom py

A_3_04 — Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days

Hesiod (~700 BCE) is, alongside Homer, one of the two foundational poets of Greek literature. His Theogony ("Birth of the Gods") presents the first systematic Greek cosmogony — from primordial Chaos through the births of

A_3_05 — Ancient Egyptian Medical and Scientific Papyri

Ancient Egyptian medical and scientific papyri constitute the earliest known systematic attempts at empirical investigation of the human body, disease, and the natural world. The Edwin Smith Papyrus (~1600 BCE, copied fr

A_3_01 — Kebra Nagast: The Glory of Kings (Ethiopian)

The Kebra Nagast ("Glory of Kings") is a 14th-century CE Ethiopian text — written in Ge'ez, the classical Ethiopian liturgical language — that serves as the foundation myth of the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia and the sp

A_3_11 — Homeric Hymns: Divine Preludes and the Gods of Olympus

The Homeric Hymns are a collection of 33 hexameter poems addressed to individual Greek deities, composed between approximately 750 and 500 BCE and attributed in antiquity to Homer — though they are the work of multiple a

A_3_00 — Egyptian African Mediterranean: Subfolder Summary

A_3_10 — Egyptian Coffin Texts: Middle Kingdom Afterlife Spells

The Egyptian Coffin Texts are a corpus of approximately 1,185 funerary spells inscribed primarily on the interior surfaces of rectangular wooden coffins during Egypt's Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BCE, Dynasties 11–13).

A_3_13 — Meroitic Texts and Nubian Sacred Literature

Meroitic is the oldest written language of sub-Saharan Africa, used by the Kingdom of Kush (centered at Meroë in modern Sudan) from approximately the 3rd century BCE to the 5th century CE. Francis Llewellyn Griffith achi

A_3_12 — Epic of Sundiata: Mandinka Foundation Myth and West African Oral Epic

The Epic of Sundiata (Sunjata, Soundjata, Son-Jara) is the foundational oral epic of the Mandinka (Manding) peoples of West Africa, narrating the life of Sundiata Keita (c. 1217–1255 CE), the historical founder of the Ma