When I was last at the museum there was an exhibit on about ancient Sumerian and Assyrian civilizations. What stunned me was how much writing there was. There was no standardized ten-commandment-like tablet on which stuff was written (although there was that too), there were tonnes of palm-sized pieces of clay packed with script, and lots of interesting pottery also stamped with script containing information ranging from simple orders for commodity shipments all the way to complex mythological tales wrapped around a big-ass obelisk (eg.
Epic of Gilgamesh). Another interesting thing was the realization that all this ancient Bronze Age cuneiform text was a hell of a lot more advanced than the pictographic shit of the late Neolithic period just a few thousand years prior. In such a short (relatively speaking) amount of time, they refined writing from incredibly cumbersome crap into small strokes that could be written quickly and formed into more complex thoughts and used to explain more complicated concepts. Think back to that order for commodities; these motherfuckers were exchanging written dialogues arguing about advanced economic concepts (
AKA the earliest known evidence of futures contracts). So by 2000 B.C., the fertile crescent area was already a hotbed of some pretty advanced literature. Around that same time, we have evidence that East Asian cultures had similarly well-refined writing developed as well, and then during the Iron Age European civilizations also hopped on the bandwagon as all of Asia went through a literary explosion.
So in conclusion, assuming you had an infinite knowledge of all languages and dialects to have ever existed, there's a chance that you could spend your whole life reading just from the stuff that survived into the modern era and not even make it as far as the birth of Christ on the timeline.
