E. M. Forster describes the Mouseion in ancient Alexandria, where Greece “first became aware of her literary heritage”:

The whole of literary scholarship, as we know it, sprang up, including that curious by-product the Scholarly Joke. For instance: one learned man wrote a poem that had, when transcribed, the shape of a bird, another wrote a poem in the shape of a double-headed axe, and a third re-wrote the whole of the Odyssey without using the letter S.

— from Alexandria: A History and a Guide

Thus the Ptolemies could justly claim to have invented concrete poetry, and left us with an example of a lipogram centuries before the Oulipo movement was founded in France.