Once the technology of writing had been established in the cultures of the Ancient Near East, Egypt and Greece, the first kinds of texts that seem to have been committed to clay tablet or papyrus were the laws and wisdom collections, and next, hymns of praise to the deities who guarded and guided humankind. Fragments of epics detailing the adventures of the gods also fall among the earliest kinds of writing. Sumerian hymns to such figures as Enlil and Inanna, and fragments of the Flood-myth are preserved among the oldest tablets from the mid-fourth millennium BC onwards. Funeral inscriptions and hymns are preserved in the earliest form of the Egyptian language. The Greek poet Hesiod probably composed his Theogony between 750 and 650 BC, at the same time as the Homeric epics that related interactions between gods and heroes were also composed. The Theogony is a hymn invoking Zeus and the Muses; it describes how the gods came into existence and how they gained control over the cosmos. Using writing on different media to record information about, invocations of, and hymns of praise to, the gods seems an obvious application of the new technology; the act of inscription itself may have been viewed as meritorious, and reading and reciting the hymns pleased the gods and brought their favour.

In western European cultures, tracing the historical associations between perceptions of the divine and the development of different genres in which to transmit such material is complicated by the close relationship between literacy and Christianity. Nevertheless in Scandinavia, some early runic inscriptions have religious functions; the Rǫk stone, dating from the mid-eighth century, makes cryptic allusion to Þórr and to Gunnr, thought to be a valkyrie. We might assume that hymns in praise of the Norse gods were composed and sung by their devotees, but such poems would have been highly unlikely to be written down by the Christian antiquarians who preserved pre-Conversion material in various contexts.