* "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" by Homer (8th century BCE)
* "The Epic of Gilgamesh" (2100-1000 BCE)
* "The Vedas" (1500-500 BCE)
* "The Bible" (Old Testament written over several centuries BCE and New Testament written in the 1st century CE)
* "The Analects" by Confucius (551-479 BCE)
* Classical Period:
* "The Histories" by Herodotus (484-425 BCE)
* "The Peloponnesian War" by Thucydides (c. 460-395 BCE)
* "The Republic" by Plato (c. 427-348 BCE)
* "The Poetics" by Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
* "The Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
* Medieval Period:
* "The Song of Roland" (11th century)
* "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400)
* "The Decameron" by Giovanni Boccaccio (1351-1353)
* "One Thousand and One Nights" (compiled over several centuries during the Islamic Golden Age)
* Renaissance and Reformation:
* "The Prince" by Niccolò Machiavelli (1513)
* "Utopia" by Thomas More (1516)
* "The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser (1590-1596)
* "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare (c. 1603)
* "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes (1605-1615)
* Enlightenment and 18th Century:
* "The Spirit of the Laws" by Montesquieu (1748)
* "Encyclopédie" edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1751-1772)
* "The Declaration of Independence" by Thomas Jefferson (1776)
* "Critiques of Pure Reason" by Immanuel Kant (1781)
* "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith (1776)
* Romantic Period and 19th Century:
* "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen (1813)
* "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley (1818)
* "Les Misérables" by Victor Hugo (1862)
* "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville (1851)
* "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens (1861)
* 20th Century and Contemporary:
* "Ulysses" by James Joyce (1922)
* "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
* "Animal Farm" by George Orwell (1945)
* "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee (1960)
* "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
These are just a few examples of the many important books written throughout history.