Excerpt from Masterpieces of the World's Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1: The Great Authors of the World With Their Master Productions From the time when men first created literature, they began, and they have continued ever since, the collection and preservation of its records. Before the days of writing even, and when literature existed only in the most primitive forms of verse and prose, - in ballads and liturgic chants on the one hand, and in apologues, fables, and folk-tales on the other, - each generation transmitted to the next these simple efforts of untaught genius, and they transmitted them through those who memorized them and in turn taught them to their successors. It was in this way that some of the greatest epics of the world have been preserved to us; and it is evidence of the high esteem in which collected literature was held even in the days when civilization was only dawning, that the persons of these reciters and transmitters of verse and prose were almost universally held to be sacred. After writing had been invented, but before printing was known, and in the days when the permanent preservation of literary material was possible only by inscribing it upon stone and brick, extraordinary care was taken to secure its permanency. Modern excavations on the sites of oriental cities in Assyria and Babylonia have brought to light whole libraries of books inscribed and burnt into bricks, or carved upon the imperishable rock. Still later, the same spirit was evinced in the formation of those famous libraries at Alexandria, and Pergamus, and Rome, wherein was stored, and catalogued, and classified, what was memorable in the recorded thought of classical antiquity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.