section_path: History/Prehistory - 1790 ACE
section_name: Prehistory - 1790 ACE
paragraph_text: Prehistory - 1790 ACE
  
  Short stories date back to oral storytelling traditions which originally produced epics such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and Homer 's Iliad and Odyssey. Oral narratives were often told in the form of rhyming or rhythmic verse, often including recurring sections or, in the case of Homer, Homeric epithets. Such stylistic devices often acted as mnemonics for easier recall, rendition, and adaptation of the story. While the overall arc of the tale was told over the course of several performances, short sections of verse could focus on individual narratives that were the duration of a single telling. It may be helpful to classify such sections as oral short stories.
  
  Another ancient form of short story popular during the Roman Empire was the anecdote, a brief realistic narrative that embodies a point. Many surviving Roman anecdotes were collected in the 13th or 14th century as the Gesta Romanorum. Anecdotes remained popular throughout Europe well into the 18th century with the publication of the fictional anecdotal letters of Sir Roger de Coverley.
  
  In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to develop into written form in the early 14th century, most notably with Giovanni Boccaccio 's Decameron and Geoffrey Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales. Both of these books are composed of individual short stories, which range from farce or humorous anecdotes to well-crafted literary fiction, set within a larger narrative story (a frame story), although the frame-tale device was not adopted by all writers. At the end of the 16th century, some of the most popular short stories in Europe were the darkly tragic " novella " of Italian author Matteo Bandello, especially in their French translation.
  
  The mid 17th century in France saw the development of a refined short novel, the "nouvelle", by such authors as Madame de Lafayette. Traditional fairy tales began to be published in the late 17th century; one of the most famous collections was by Charles Perrault. The appearance of Antoine Galland 's first modern translation of the 1001 Arabian Nights, a storehouse of Middle Eastern folk and fairy tales, is the Thousand and One Nights (or Arabian Nights) (from 1704; another translation appeared in 1710–12). His translation would have an enormous influence on the 18th-century European short stories of Voltaire, Diderot and others.
  
  In India, there is a rich heritage of ancient folktales as well as a compiled body of short fiction which shaped the sensibility of modern Indian short story. Some of the famous Sanskrit collections of legends, folktales, fairy tales, and fables are Panchatantra, Hitopadesha and Kathasaritsagara. Jataka tales, originally written in Pali, is a compilation of tales concerning the previous births of Lord Gautama Buddha. The Frame story, also known as the frame narrative or story within a story, is a narrative technique that probably originated in ancient Indian works such as Panchatantra.
  
  The evolution of printing technologies and periodical editions were among the factors contributing to the increasing importance of short story publications. Pioneering the rules of the genre in the Western canon were, among others, Rudyard Kipling (United Kingdom), Anton Chekhov (Russia), Guy de Maupassant (France), Rabindranath Tagore (India and Bangladesh), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (Mexico) and Rubén Darío (Nicaragua).