did Homer know his ABC's?
No, it's not a laptop computer!We don't know when Homeric songs first were sung or when they first were written down. The singing may have begun as early as 1200 BC, the best-guess date of the Trojan War, if in fact there ever was a Trojan War. The songs perhaps were not written down until about 750-725 BC, however, because there is no physical evidence for Greek alphabetical writing before that time. (For a quick overview of dates, see my Hellenic timeline.) This is the conventional dating, give or take a few decades, accepted tentatively by many, probably most, scholars.
If this conventional dating is correct, the Troy story, or some Troy story, may have passed down through the generations by word of mouth for perhaps 500 years!
The idea of such a 500-year oral tradition boggles the mind. To us today in century 21 AD, it’s as if we decided to write down the adventures of Christopher Columbus, nobody ever having written about him before! Imagine. How much would we know today about the European rediscovery of America, if writing had not been in use in Columbus' time? Perhaps as much as we know about the pre-Columbus discoveries of the Americas, I'd guess.
The period from 1200 BC to 725 BC, when the Troy story is supposed to have passed down by oral tradition, was the evil era of the Zeus-men, the Helladic Dark Ages. The archaeology of this period has turned up no pottery or anything else with writing on it. Archaeologists generally conclude from this record, or lack of it, that the art of writing was lost in the Greek-speaking world throughout this period.
Linear B clay tablet.Before the Helladic Dark Ages, in the time of high civilization that we call the Bronze Age (or Mycenaean Age), at least some Greek-speakers had written on wet clay tablets using a script that we call Linear B. But insofar as we can tell, this script never was used for literary, historical, religious or cultural purposes. Linear B was a commercial or administrative device used to keep palace inventories and business records. In this cumbersome writing system each character (and there were many) represented a different syllable in speech. Linear B seems to have disappeared completely by about 1200 BC, with the rest of Bronze Age culture.
The modern alphabet does not appear in the Hellenic archaeological record until the middle of the eighth century BC. (That is not to say that it was first introduced to the Hellenes at that time.) It came from Phoenix's homeland in the east. The Hellenes borrowed the Phoenician system of consonant writing and then added some new letters, including signs for vowels so that all of the individual sounds of Greek could be represented. Some scholars contend that the Homeric songs may have been among the first compositions written down in the new script.
The usual history today, then, places Homer at about 750 BC, but only because that is when the first pottery with writing on it begins to show up under archaeological investigation. To get the Trojan War story down through the Dark Ages to Homer's supposed time, the scholars hypothesize a long line of illiterate bards like Demodocus. They say that the bards' stunning feat of verbal repetition was made possible by technology: mnemonic oral style or music allowed remembrance of the words.
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http://www.englishare.net/literature/POL-HS-Homer-Technology.htm
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