Most of us love a good story, told with just the right amount of emphasis or embellishment or suspense, always leaving you wanting more, but ever wonder how it all began? Where do some of those old time stories come from and how did they get handed down to us?Stories have been told to each other, since the beginning of time really, handed down from generation to generation until someone got the brilliant idea of writing it down on clay tablets, cloth, sheepskin, cave walls or whatever worked. This was a way of telling stories, recording history and preserving it.The first recorded story was a mythical poem called, The Story of Gilgamesh, recorded in 2100 BC. The 128-page epic tale is about a proud and arrogant king in Mesopotamia. The story pre-dates Homer’s writing by 1500 years and therefore stands as the oldest piece of epic literature.Some other stories that are older than dirt are some of the classic fairy tales such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin which can be traced way back to the 16th and 17th centuries.Today though, storytelling has become so much more than spoken word and books on the shelf. There are multiple ways we tell stories nowadays. Whether it’s through magazines, newspapers, audio books, animation, journalists, photographers, screen writers, musicians, artists, the world has a ginormous amount of ways of telling stories. Heck we can even ask our Google Home to play a book on tape for us!!!Suffice it to say, we all like stories, told in different ways and while some of us prefer our audio books while driving in the car, there’s really nothing like snuggling under the covers and cracking open a brand new book, which transcends us to a new, unexpected and exciting place where we can escape for a little awhile.https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35358487https://www.booktrust.org.uk/news-and-features/features/2019/december/a-little-history-of-reading-how-the-first-books-came-to-be/ |
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