Nearly all prehistoric societies were thought to have used poetry even before they developed writing systems to store information. Therefore, poetry is a literary form which pre-dates literature itself. One of the earliest recorded forms of poetry dates back 5,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia. In Europe, old languages, like Welsh, used poetic forms to store information about history and culture and pass them down through the generations. Famously, Homer, in ancient Greece, is said to have not invented his famous epic poems but to have adapted them from older, oral traditions.