preliterary

Updated: August 16, 2026

It is, in fact, impossible for us moderns, educated in a long literary tradition, to live our lives as naturally and naively as the unlettered of to-day, or the people of the preliterary geological epoch.

Israel Zangwill - Without Prejudice

The question of their historical development involves great difficulties, partly because the wide diffusion of their cults in Hellas occasioned many local expansions of the original conceptions in the various regions, partly because most of the deities appear fully or almost fully formed in the earliest literary monuments, so that we are dependent on cultic procedures and passing allusions for a knowledge of their preliterary character.

Crawford Howell Toy - Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV