Dating the birth of the utopian genre is simple enough – Thomas More's Utopia (1516) gives us the name and the model for innumerable later speculations. Dating the birth of utopian thinking is far more contested. Krishan Kumar (Kumar 1987) argues forcefully that discussion of utopias should be confined to the period from More's work onwards. Yet the titles and contents of authoritative studies such as Utopias of the Classical World (1975), Utopian Thought in The Western World (1979) – the first part of which details ‘The Ancient and Medieval Wellsprings’ – or the anthology Utopia: The Search for the Ideal in the Western World (2000), with chapters on ‘Ancient, Biblical and Medieval Traditions’, and Plato, all suggest a far longer historical pedigree. Utopian authority Lyman Tower Sargent notes in his contribution to Utopia: The Search for the Ideal that ‘while More invented the word utopia and the literary genre, utopianism as social dreaming long predated the book’. He concedes the difficulty of ‘specifying the first appearance of utopianism’, but observes that ‘early expressions are found on Sumerian clay tablets, in the Old Testament, and in the poetry of Hesiod of the eighth-century B.C.E., and utopian speculation played a central role in the philosophic and political debates of fifthcentury B.C.E. Athens’ (Sargent 2000: 8). In their sweeping account of utopian thought in the Western world, Frank and Fritzie Manuel note the resilient connections between utopia and paradise: