Hymns to the Gods of Egypt and Greece

Carved on a private funerary stela, this is the fullest connected Egyptian account of the Osiris story to survive from Egypt itself, yet the murder and dismemberment are only alluded to. The continuous narrative most readers know comes from Plutarch, some fifteen hundred years later.

The fullest surviving statement of the Amarna religion, addressed to the sun disc as sole creator. Its resemblance to Psalm 104 has been argued since the 1890s, but the direction and mechanism of any influence are unestablished.

Hymns on a Ramesside papyrus praise Amun as the hidden one, and state that Amun, Ra and Ptah are three in names but one in being. Comparison with later trinitarian language is a modern one, and the papyrus is damaged and incomplete.

The hymn tells how Zeus made Aphrodite fall for the mortal Anchises, and it also compliments the Trojan line through their son Aeneas. Its language is the closest of the major hymns to the Iliad and Odyssey, and it is generally treated as the earliest of the long hymns.

The longest of the Homeric Hymns tells the seizure of Persephone and the grief of Demeter. It is the principal literary source for the Eleusinian Mysteries, yet it withholds what was done there, since the rites were under an oath of silence.

A hymn in two parts, on the birth of Apollo at Delos and the founding of his oracle at Delphi, and whether they were ever one poem is unresolved. The poet names himself as a blind man of rocky Chios, and Thucydides quotes the hymn as Homer.

The one substantial surviving piece of early Stoic writing. Its Zeus is the rational principle that orders the cosmos, and it asks not for favours but for the understanding to consent to that order. Thirty-nine lines survive, with a gap.

Two paeans carved on the Athenian Treasury at Delphi are the earliest substantially complete notated music that survives from anywhere in the world. The second is dated by an archonship to 128 BCE, and the stones were found in 1893.

The Orphic hymn to the sun prescribes frankincense and manna and addresses Helios as the eternal eye and as Paian, Zeus and Dionysos at once. That merging of gods is why the collection is read as evidence for late antique syncretism.

The first of eighty-seven short Orphic Hymns, each naming a deity, heaping epithets on it and specifying an incense. Hekate comes first, before Zeus, and the attribution to Orpheus is a convention, since the collection is roughly a thousand years later than the Homeric Hymns.