I made a comment recently (https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/y33iff/the_polishlithuanianswedish_union_the_most/is8yz4s/) where I mentioned that a lot of nations converted to Catholicism, because by doing so, they got literacy (or expanded it), an entire literate class (clergy) and frequently some level of bureaucracy (again provided by said literate clergy).
You'll notice, I mention also that they got access to a continual literary tradition stretching back to around 800 BCE (Homer).
But then I wondered - is that the oldest piece of literature available to someone in the Latin (broader Latin Christian literary tradition, not just Romance speaking) west? Not knowingly to the westerners, of course, but something we today know.
I'm wondering if some Egyptian or Sumerian or Akkadian (or whatever other ancient group) story or knowledge was passed down pretty much as-is. I'm aware of how the Noah story in the Bible was inspired by the Sumerian version, but I'm wondering if there's anything that's even more direct - pretty much survived more or less in its ancient form, just translated (probably a few times, as I suspect you'd need a transitory Greek stage at the minimum).
My guess would be that there might be some part of the Bible that's pretty much a direct parallel to something older, or maybe some old Greek source that transcribes an Egyptian work pretty much directly, at least in part.
I'm also wanting to constrict it to before the huge Byzantine importation of Greek texts into Latin after/around the fall of Constantinople, before colonialism (when Latin Europeans got access to literature completely outside of the western canon) and especially before modern archaeology, when a lot of ancient writing got rediscovered.
Am I pretty much on the money with Homer being the earliest piece of literature available to such a westerner, or is there an even older one?
By the year 1400 Homer did exist in a Latin translation, by Leonzio Pilato (d. 1366), but it would still have been a fairly niche text; the first printed editions (in Greek) didn't become available until the late 1400s.
In addition, Homer isn't as early as you think. There's only one Homer scholar active today who would date the Iliad as early as 800 BCE, Barry Powell, and his dating is decidedly fringe. {Addendum: actually I can think of one or two others, but they're even more fringe.}
Most scholars reporting the date quote a 'traditional' date of around 730 BCE -- a date for which no actual evidence exists. The 730 date is more of a guesstimation by consensus, based on being sceptical of ancient biographical traditions which put Homer in the 900s BCE, while still wanting to date Homer earlier than the Hesiodic Theogony (ca. 700). But this isn't nearly sceptical enough, and there's no very solid reason to date the Iliad earlier than the Theogony.
Actual studies of the date of the Iliad in the last 30 years congregate on the second quarter of the 600s. This is based partly on the material culture depicted throughout, partly on supposed (and isolated) references to events in the 600s. The material culture argument is very robust; the isolated references, not so much. Anyway, this last is the date with the most compelling evidence.
So as it turns out there are chunks of the Hebrew Bible that can safely be dated earlier than the Iliad --
Isolated passages in other parts of the Hebrew Bible are probably older still and in some cases may go back to the 2nd millennium BCE: especially the 'song of the sea' in Exodus 15.1-18; and less certainly the song of Deborah in Judges 5.2-31, and the song of Lamech in Genesis 4.23-24.
In addition, there is a substantial (but uncertain) argument to be made that the Hesiodic Theogony is older than the Iliad, too, dating to around 700 BCE (plus or minus a couple of decades). That would put it roughly contemporary with Micah and proto-Isaiah.
For Bible datings I've drawn on The Oxford annotated Bible; different Bible scholars will have other recommended datings of course (though any datings that assign whole books to the 2nd millennium are certainly just religious apologetics and may be safely ignored). For datings of the Iliad to ca. 670-650 BCE, see especially Hans van Wees, 'The Homeric way of war', Greece & Rome 41 (1994), in two parts; similarly (but less compellingly) M. L. West, The making of the Iliad (2011) pp. 15-19.
The discovery of ancient Egyptian and other Near Eastern documentary traditions is a modern thing. No direct knowledge of that material existed until the 1800s. In terms of Greek translations of that corpus, there's Manetho, and second-hand knowledge of Berossus, but those sources were in Greek, not Latin, and would have been even more inaccessible than Homer; and while they certainly used material derived from older traditions, their own material is solidly Hellenistic-era.