F I C T I O N ?

Nobody knows when fiction began.
Maybe the first story-teller was a prehistoric mother
trying to explain the world to her children.
Or perhaps it was a hunter telling about his adventures
around the camp fire.
WHO CAN TELL ?
What we do know, though, is that story-telling
was a purely oral activity until around 800 BC.
Myths and tales were passed down by word of mouth
and had to be memorized by each new generation of
story-tellers. This oral tradition only changed when ancient
people started to keep written records of certain stories.
The earliest surviving examples of these are the epics
of Homer, a blind professional story-teller, who lived
in the eighth century BC.