| Date | Work |
| 2285 - 2250 BC | Enheduanna (en' heh dwanna) |
| 2100 BC (ca) | Earliest stories of Bilgamesh (Sumerian for "Gilgamesh") |
| 1300 - 1000 BC | Standard Babylonian version of The Epic of Gilgamesh is compiled (Sîn-lēqi-unninni) |
| 800 - 50 BC (ca) | Much of the Old Testament is composed |
| 750 BC (ca) | The Iliad, The Odyssey |
| 700 BC (ca) | Works and Days, Hesiod |
| 630 – 570 BC (ca) | Sappho |
| 458 BC | The Oresteia (Agamemnon), Aeschylus |
| 431 BC | Medea, Euripides |
| 429 BC | Oedipus Rex, Sophocles |
| 430 BC | Histories of the Greco-Persian Wars, Herodotus |
| 460 - 400 BC | Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War |
| 375 BC | The Republic, Plato |
| 58 - 49 BC | Bellum Gallicum, Julius Caesar |
| 43 BC | Metamorphoses, Ovid |
| 29 - 19 BC | Aeneid, Virgil |
| 397 - 400 | Confessions, Augustine |
| 600 | Beowulf |
| 1000 (ca) | The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu |
| 1321 | Divine Comedy |
| 1400 | Canterbury Tales, Chaucer |
| 1455 | Gutenberg Bible |
| 1543 | On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Copernicus |
| 1605 | Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes |
| 1600 | Hamlet |
| 1667 | Paradise Lost, John Milton |
| 1687 | Principia, Isaac Newton |
| 1719 | Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe |
| 1798 | Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge |
| 1808 | Faust, Goethe |
| 1813 | Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen |
| 1859 | On the Origin of Species, Darwin |
| 1879 | A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen |
| 1913 – 1927 | Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust |
| 1922 | Ulysses, Joyce |