hendiadys is often characterized by its elevation above the ordinary tone of conventional English and by a kind of syntactical complexity that seems fathomable only by an intuitional understanding of the way the words interweave their meanings, rather than by painstaking lexical analysis.
The oldest documented use of poetry discovered so far is a large body of texts called Vedas, which originate from Ancient India around 1700BC.
The earliest Sumerian poems are now generally considered to be distinct stories, rather than parts of a single epic. They date from as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur (circa 2100 BC). The Old Babylonian tablets (circa 1800 BC), are the earliest surviving tablets for a single Epic of Gilgamesh narrative.