Older Than Feudalism

Ancient Roman Floor mosaic at the Baths of Musiciolus in Ostia, probably early 4th century AD

All of The Oldest Ones in the Book first recorded after the invention of the Greek alphabet (c. 800 BC) and before the fall of Western Roman Empire in the 5th century (c. 476 AD), a period usually called Classical antiquity. Works from this period include:

• All ancient Greek and Roman myths, literature, and theatre.^note  Some of these stories may have originated before the Greeks invented their alphabet, but the only versions we have come from this period.
• The Bible^note  As the work page explains, some parts of the Torah/Pentateuch probably do originate from as early as 1000 BC, but the dating is uncertain, and for simplicity's sake the whole Bible is included on this index. In any event, all of the Old and New Testaments were written before the fall of Rome.
• Most of ancient South Asian literature and Hindu Mythology, including:
  • The Hindu Upanishads, Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Bhagavad Gita (whereas the Sanskrit Vedas are Older Than Dirt).
  • The Panchatantra fables
  • The plays of Kālidāsa
  • The Buddhist epic Buddhacharita
  • The Twenty-Five Tales of the Vetala
• Most surviving^note Thanks Qin Shi Huangdi, for burning practically every copy of every non-technical book in the empire save the one you kept in your personal library! And thanks, Xiang Yu's Army of Chu, for letting the Qin palace in Xianyang—the place where Qin Shihuang's personal library was kept—burn to the ground! examples of ancient Chinese literature, philosophy, and history date to this period:
  • The Analects of Confucius
  • The Daodejing by Laozi and other foundational texts of Taoism.
  • The Art of War, probably by Sūn Zǐ (also spelled Sun Tzu).
  • The Records of the Grand Historian, or Shiji by Sima Qian. This is the classic text on Chinese history up until the reign of Emperor Wu of Han in the 2nd century BCE. It is also (apart from a penchant for exaggeration) surprisingly accurate, all things considered: among other things, its list of Shang emperors and their relationship to each other very nearly matches the one modern archaeologists have reconstructed from the available primary sources (the oracle bones that date from the Shang period), even though Sima lived and wrote nearly a thousand years after the fall of the Shang.
  • The Records of the Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou (which documents the fall of the Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period, written shortly after the unification of China by the Jin Dynasty in 280; it is the historical basis for the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which does not fall into this, being a novel written in the 14th century.)
  • The Thirty-Six Stratagems, usually attributed to Sūn Zǐ or Zhuge Liang, although only firmly recorded in the Book of Qi, written after 502 CE (slightly after the end of this period); that being said, the events used as examples almost universally date from the Warring States period (c. 475 BCE-221 BCE), the Chu-Han Contention (206 BCE-202 BCE) or the Three Kingdoms era (220 CE-280 CE).
  • Though this trope is also problematic if taking China into consideration. Chinese Feudalism actually started between 800 BC to 770 BC, and ended around 221 BC. So could this be a case where Feudalism is a trope Older Than Feudalism?
• The Zoroastrian holy book, Avesta^note The oldest portion of the Avesta, the Gathas (hymns attributed to Zoroaster himself), are probably Older Than Dirt (c. 1200 BCE), but we include the whole thing here for simplicity's sake..
• The Manichean holy book, Shabuhragan.
• The works of the Christian Church Fathers, like St. Augustine's Confessions.

Note: Tropes originating in other mythologies/religions are not indexed here, as we have no idea whether those stories even existed by the 5th century AD, or what forms they took, centuries before they were first written down. Even Norse and Celtic mythology are only Older Than Print; although they're derived at least in part from earlier (unwritten) stories, the details are fundamentally un-dateable. Early folklorists often started with the assumption that folktales and myths never changed; more research has shown that people can and do modify all sorts of tales for many purposes.

Tropes that date back to this time period: