Fountain of Knowledge

Well, Greece is what, arguably beginning at 2500 BC or thereabouts with Minoan stuff, with mythology really codifying at like 850 BC. Egypt would have had a thriving mythology before that (hieroglyphic writing starting about 3500 BC)--I know the Egyptians had a Cinderella story, for instance, where a girl gets slippers from Ra--not to mention Babylon, the Cannanite cultures, etc. etc.. Now we're trying to draw a line between mythology and religion, however; I wonder if the criteria is that people might be telling stories about the gods, but nobody really believes they're true? Because you have lots of Babylonian stories about things, but if people thought they were fact, at least in a religious sense, does that count as fantasy?

I'd vote for the more fanciful Egyptian stories about cats and frogs and things (as distinct from the ones they thought were true, about whether the gods thought your heart was stinky after death determining your eternal destiny) as being the original fantasy that we know about. But I'm pretty sure that, as long as people have been telling stories, they have been inventing stories about gods farting and wenching and about magic items that would give you power. And I'm pretty sure that, while they probably believed a percentage of these stories, there was probably also a percentage they knew was just fun fiction.

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