<P> In ancient China, early literature was primarily focused on philosophy, historiography, military science, agriculture, and poetry . China, the origin of modern paper making and woodblock printing, produced the world's first print cultures . Much of Chinese literature originates with the Hundred Schools of Thought period that occurred during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (769 ‒ 269 BCE). The most important of these include the Classics of Confucianism, of Daoism, of Mohism, of Legalism, as well as works of military science (e.g. Sun Tzu's The Art of War) and Chinese history (e.g. Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian). Ancient Chinese literature had a heavy emphasis on historiography, with often very detailed court records . An exemplary piece of narrative history of ancient China was the Zuo Zhuan, which was compiled no later than 389 BCE, and attributed to the blind 5th - century BCE historian Zuo Qiuming . </P> <P> In ancient India, literature originated from stories that were originally orally transmitted . Early genres included drama, fables, sutras and epic poetry . Sanskrit literature begins with the Vedas, dating back to 1500--1000 BCE, and continues with the Sanskrit Epics of Iron Age India . The Vedas are among the oldest sacred texts . The Samhitas (vedic collections) date to roughly 1500--1000 BCE, and the "circum - Vedic" texts, as well as the redaction of the Samhitas, date to c. 1000 ‒ 500 BCE, resulting in a Vedic period, spanning the mid-2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE, or the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age . The period between approximately the 6th to 1st centuries BC saw the composition and redaction of the two most influential Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, with subsequent redaction progressing down to the 4th century AD . Other major literary works are Ramcharitmanas & Krishnacharitmanas . </P> <P> In ancient Greece, the epics of Homer, who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Hesiod, who wrote Works and Days and Theogony, are some of the earliest, and most influential, of Ancient Greek literature . Classical Greek genres included philosophy, poetry, historiography, comedies and dramas . Plato and Aristotle authored philosophical texts that are the foundation of Western philosophy, Sappho and Pindar were influential lyric poets, and Herodotus and Thucydides were early Greek historians . Although drama was popular in Ancient Greece, of the hundreds of tragedies written and performed during the classical age, only a limited number of plays by three authors still exist: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides . The plays of Aristophanes provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, the earliest form of Greek Comedy, and are in fact used to define the genre . </P> <P> Roman histories and biographies anticipated the extensive mediaeval literature of lives of saints and miraculous chronicles, but the most characteristic form of the Middle Ages was the romance, an adventurous and sometimes magical narrative with strong popular appeal . Controversial, religious, political and instructional literature proliferated during the Renaissance as a result of the invention of printing, while the mediaeval romance developed into a more character - based and psychological form of narrative, the novel, of which early and important examples are the Chinese Monkey and the German Faust books . </P>

What type of literature from what period of history constitutes our earliest source of greek myths