[saithound]

> I'm sure fields of literature or politics are older.

As far as anybody can tell, mathematics is way older than literature.

The oldest known proper accounting tokens are from 7000ish BCE, and show proper understanding of addition and multiplication.

The people who made the Ishango bone 25k years ago were probably aware of at least rudimentary addition.

The earliest writings are from the 3000s BCE, and are purely administrative. Literature, by definition, appeared later than writing.

[thaumasiotes]

> As far as anybody can tell, mathematics is way older than literature.

That depends what you mean by "literature". If you want it to be written down, then it's very recent because writing is very recent.

But it would be normal to consider cultural products to be literature regardless of whether they're written down. Writing is a medium of transmission. You wouldn't study the epic of Gilgamesh because it's written down. You study it to see what the Sumerians thought about the topics it covers, or to see which god some iconography that you found represents, or... anything that it might plausibly tell you. But the fact that it was written down is only the reason you can study it, not the reason you want to.

[mkl]

> That depends what you mean by "literature". If you want it to be written down

That is what literature means: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/literature#Noun

[dragonwriter]

> Literature, by definition, appeared later than writing.

Literature, by strict defintion, appeared no earlier than writing, but it is only a tentative conclusion from which surviving writing has been found and understood that it appeared later than writing.