Great books

The "Great Books" set opens with a volume titled "The Great Conversation", and that's not a bad way to think about such a collection. Recently they've added some non-Western tradition books to the set, but those probably should be their own series: Great Books of China, or Great Books of ... well, maybe not India exactly, since that's more a modern construct, but you get the idea. Until recently each different culture family's conversations have been more internal.

I don't think you'd get quite the same kind of collection from Africa, or the Americas. Africa has oral traditions--a variety of them, not all in communication/conversation with each other. A problem with oral traditions is that if an idea goes out of fashion for a couple of generations, it's lost. Books, though still fragile, are a bit more permanent, and a tradition may be only temporarily lost.