It is something beautiful; it is something that stirs the soul... if you will I don't mean to impose.  This sounds like a philosophical question if I've ever heard one.  It's not one I've asked myself, and I doubt I'll be able to answer it on the first attempt.  I doubt if I'll ever be able to answer it.  I fear the best I can do is provide an archetype to the question.  But I digress.

In the beginning there was the word, I bet this sounds familiar.  But I suppose it’s the truth, whether it was nothing more than a guttural growl or something as mystical as the Om.  It can be all but certain that man's first communication was the word.

But where to from there?  

Perhaps the cave the drawings of the ancients, while we can't be certain that it was anymore than a shopping list.  We know that they took the time to draw in the shelter of their caves.  As time passes the primitive people grow wise.  They gain the wisdom and the knowledge from the natural order of the world.  They begin to form families, and as time passes they form tribes.  Villages begin to develop, then towns, cities, empires.  

But what of the written word?

Perhaps it started, perhaps it always was.  History places writing in the realm of business, in order to keep track of ancient world's trade.  It makes sense.  But I can no more guarantee that than I can that of Adam and Eve, or for that matter evolution.  Somewhere literature made its leap from the oral tradition to the written word.  Somewhere it evolved from something simple to something complex.  Just look at the great epics of the old.  Look at Britain’s Beowulf, the Hindu's story of Arjunna, Greece has the Iliad and Rome Hercules (even if they borrowed him).

I suppose literature is nothing more than written works, whether it is nothing more than a shopping list or as something as complex as an epic.  It is as they say, "the eye is in the beholder."