The first writing we have discovered was actually an inventory record for barley, made in Sumeria (today Iraq) around 3,100 BC. It's an inscription on a clay tablet. We don't know when people started writing about more interesting subjects. Since it was quite laborious to inscribe clay tablets, there couldn't have been any best sellers, and presumably personal communications weren't ordinarily preserved. (Clay tablets could be dissolved in water, then reconstituted for reuse.) Papyrus, a material with properties similar to paper, was invented in Egypt, maybe two or three centuries later, and it allowed for lengthier documents to be made more easily.
Still, they had to be copied out by hand so presumably only highly valued documents were considered valuable enough to be recopied many times and preserved. Since papyrus is perishable, anything less valuable would likely be lost, although some stores of less prestigious papyrus were preserved by accident and are now available to scholars. Most survivors were documents of religious importance. Note that we don't have any early copies of the Hebrew Bible, for example, but rather material that was copied and recopied through the millennia. In fact the only copies we have from BCE are a translation into Koine Greek. The sources of the definitive Hebrew text, the Masoretic text which was compiled in the diaspora in the first millennium CE, are lost.
Anyway, as society and technology grew more complex, and knowledge of the world extended over vastly greater distances and now, thanks to writing, over time as well, the status of knowledge itself became more problematic. How are we to know what is really true, when priests and rulers are making competing claims, rumors come from distant lands, and historical documents don't always agree? And, now that there was a class with leisure to study nature and the stars, what had once seemed obvious or nobody thought to ask became mysterious, and the immediate evidence of our senses often turned out to be misleading.
Presumably people thought and argued about the nature of knowledge, how we can know what is true, and what truth even consists of before any written records of such discourse have survived, but the earliest example we have was written by the Athenian Plato around 369 B.C. It is called the Dialogue of Theaetetus because it purports to be the record of a discussion between a young student of that name and the late Socrates, which would have happened many years before because Socrates was long dead. (Theaetetus went on to become a mathematician who proved that there are five and only five regular polyhedra, although in the dialogue he appears rather dim witted.)
It was necessary to think about this because the Greeks, and especially the Athenians, were making all sorts of discoveries and inventions, some of a purely abstract nature such as the geometry in which Theaetetus participated, some much more concrete. In fact, for one impressive example, just a hundred or so years later, Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth quite accurately. But how could we know he was right?*
In the Dialogue Socrates considered, although he ultimately was not convinced by it, a doctrine which came to be known as Justified True Belief, and which became the core framework for epistemology -- the philosophy of knowledge -- ever since. Since we have a noun modified by two adjectives, we need to work backwards to unpack this construction. First we need to define belief; then we have an entity called a true belief, so we need to define truth; and then we need to consider how a true belief may be justified. Socrates never got into any of that very deeply -- after all, as far as we know [sic] nobody had ever thought about this before, so it was enough just to come up with it. So we'll take up these problems next.
* No, Columbus didn't have the brilliant insight that the earth is round so you could get to Asia by sailing west. Every sailor already knew that the earth was basically spherical, Columbus was just an idiot who thought it was 2/3 its actual size. If he hadn't blundered onto the Caribbean islands, he and his crew would have died of hunger and thirst. Also, he was not Italian, he died thinking he was sailing back and forth to the islands of the South China Sea, and he never set foot in North America or even knew of its existence.
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