To lay some groundwork, here is the Western Canon.
The Theocratic Age
"Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would think that, of all the books that are in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran...
"I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western canon. The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us."
(Bloom, p. 531)
The Ancient Near East
Gilgamesh
Egyptian Book of the Dead
Holy Bible (King James Version)
The Apocrypha
Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth)
Ancient India (Sanskrit)
Mahabharata
Bhagavad-Gita
Ramayana
The Ancient Greeks
Homer
Iliad
Odyssey
Hesiod
Works and Days
Theogony
Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman
Pindar
Odes
Aeschylus
Oresteia
Seven Against Thebes
Prometheus Bound
Persians
Suppliant Women
Sophocles
Oedipus the King
Oedipus at Colonus
Antigone
Electra
Ajax
Women of Trachis
Philoctetes
Euripides
Cyclops
Heracles
Alcestis
Hecuba
Bacchae
Orestes
Andromache
Medea
Ion
Hippolytus
Helen
Iphigenia at Aulis
Aristophanes
The Birds
The Clouds
The Frogs
Lysistrata
The Knights
The Wasps
The Assemblywomen
Herodotus
The Histories
Thucydides
The Peloponnesian Wars
The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Empedocles)
Plato
Dialogues
Aristotle
Poetics
Ethics
Hellenistic Greeks
Menander
The Girl from Samos
"Longinus"
On the Sublime
Callimach
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