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Episode details

Radio 4,05 Jan 2012,30 mins

SeriesThe Written World

Literature

In Our Time

Available for over a year

Melvyn Bragg investigates how the written word, a technology originally used for accountancy, gave rise to all of human literature. He charts the emergence of poetry and history writing in the ancient world, inspects an ancient Egyptian precursor to Hamlet, and discovers how Greek literary traditions reached this country in the Middle Ages.Producer: Thomas Morris.

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