The Map of Ancient World Texts

The funerary and temple religion of pharaonic Egypt. Budge’s (dated but public-domain) translations are the free backbone; the oldest layer, the Pyramid & Coffin Texts, has no PD English at all.

The world’s oldest literate religion. The Akkadian/Babylonian classics are public-domain via King and Thompson; the Sumerian layer (Inanna, Enheduanna) survives mainly in modern © or the free-but-not-PD ETCSL.

The western and northern arc of the ancient Near East. The Phoenician and Aramaic layer is public-domain — but the two greatest corpora, Ugaritic Canaanite and Hittite, were deciphered too late for the public domain and remain wholly under copyright.

The theogony, cult, mystery-initiation, and late-antique theology of the Greek gods — almost entirely public-domain through the Loeb-era translators, the Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor, and G.R.S. Mead.

The mythology, civic religion, theology, and mystery cults of Rome — public-domain through Dryden, Yonge, Mead and the Loeb translators, save the Etruscan books (untranslated to this day) and the antiquarian Macrobius.

The mythology of the Norse gods, preserved by Christian Icelanders, with the surviving Germanic pagan charms and the Finnish folk epic — all public-domain (use Anderson 1880 for the Prose Edda; Brodeur 1916 is US-only).

The mythological cycles of Wales and Ireland — public-domain through Lady Guest and Lady Gregory; only the full Book of Invasions has an unclear US status.

The dead pantheons of the pre-Columbian Americas. Aztec and Inca religion has a clean public-domain foothold in the Victorian anthologists (Brinton, Markham) — but the Maya Popol Vuh, the greatest surviving Native American scripture, still has no complete public-domain English.

Texts of this tradition the archive holds that have no chip on this map and no room placement — browsable here honestly; each awaits a reviewed binding or a structure-growth pass (the stays-reception rulings of the placement program, 2026-07).