What is the oldest continuously circulating story that survived until 1890’s?
Upvote:2
Menes - c.3000 BCE
Although much garbled by a millennia-long game of "telephone" from unreliable and biased historians, many of the kings of ancient Egypt have been recorded continously up to the present.Further, the Egyptians (said they) first used the appellations of twelve gods (which the Greeks afterwards borrowed from them); and it was they who first assigned to the several gods their altars and images and temples, and first carved figures on stone. They showed me most of this by plain proof. The first human king of Egypt, he said, was Min.
-Herodotus, Histories
In succession to the Spirits of the Dead and the Demigods, the Egyptians reckon the First Dynasty to consist of eight kings. Among these was Mênês, whose rule in Egypt was illustrious...
-Syncellus, in a fragment of Eusebius's Chronicon which excerpted Manetho's Aegyptiaca. (LacusCurtius), Bill Thayer 's website at the University of Chicago
The Hellenistic Egyptian priest Manetho compiled a list of kings outlining the dynasty structure still used today, but with gaps filled in by modern discoveries.
Manetho's Aegyptiaca only survives in epitomes and excerpts in other works, but of particular note is the Chronicon by Eusebius, which itself only exists in fragments. Syncellus's excerpt of Eusebius was later excerpted in Latin translation by Anastasius the Librarian.
Even with all of this slicing and dicing, however, we do know that Manetho called the first king of the First Dynasty "Menes" (called "Min" by Herodotus), Most Egyptologists identify Menes with the historicaly-attested king Narmer, as both names appear to be associated with a king who united Upper and Lower Egypt in the late 4th (or early 3rd) millennium BCE. The runner-up is Narmer's successor Hor-Aha.
Menes's death is briefly described as "carried away by a hippopotamus" although there's no knowing how old that detail really is.
Sumerian works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Sumerian King List were lost and only rediscovered in the 19th Century, so Menes is likely the oldest.
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