Historic Homer

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In a vigorous denunciation of the so-called Biblical minimalists, William Dever makes a very important observation on a subject not directly related to the Bible:

A generation ago, even a decade ago, Classicists and ancient historians would have dismissed Homer as a mythical figure and would have argued that the tales of the Trojan Wars were mainly “invented” by much later Greek writers. (Sound familiar?) … It is now thought that those stories of warfare do not simply reflect the situation of Greece in the eighth–seventh centuries [B.C.], but go much farther back to a genuine historical situation of the 13th–12th centuries, that is, to the period of the movements of the various “Sea Peoples” across the Mediterranean (including the Biblical “Philistines”). Thus, it is now argued, a long oral tradition, preserving many authentic details of earlier Greek history, persisted down until about the eighth century, at which time these traditions were finally reduced to writing.¹

This raises an intriguing possibility: If the Hellenic world could have kept alive accurate historical details in an oral tradition lasting many centuries, couldn’t the Biblical world have done so too?

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In the 1870s the German businessman and adventurer Heinrich Schliemann began uncovering a Bronze Age city at the mound of Hissarlik in the Troad, the northwest corner of Anatolia. This ancient city lay near the site identified as Homer’s Troy in Greek and Roman tradition. Schliemann immediately identified Hissarlik as the Late Bronze Age city described in Homer’s Iliad. University of Cincinnati archaeologist Carl Blegen, who excavated the site from 1932 to 1938, agreed with Schliemann’s assessment, though he and others pointed out that the occupation level Schliemann identified as Homer’s Troy (Troy II) was in fact an Early Bronze Age city of the third millennium B.C. For Blegen, the ruins of the Late Bronze Age city (1700–1180 B.C.)—levels VI to VIIa—represented the city destroyed by the Achaeans, as Homer calls the invading Greek forces.

The British classical scholar Moses Finley criticized Blegen’s interpretation, arguing that excavations at Hissarlik had produced “nothing, not a scrap, which points to an Achaean coalition or … which hints at who destroyed Troy.”² Finley later conceded that a number of early Mycenaean objects are faithfully described in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but he still insisted that the epics are unreliable as sources of information about Mycenaean history or institutions.³ He argued that the Homeric epics, instead, reflect the Hellenic world of the tenth and ninth centuries B.C., the period of the so-called Dark Age in the eastern Mediterranean.⁴ Many scholars, then and now, have agreed with Finley that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey cannot be regarded as reliable sources for reconstructing the Mycenaean period of the 14th and 13th centuries B.C.

The reluctance of historians to accept Homeric traditions lacking archaeological corroboration is understandable. But such skepticism may be based on a failure to understand the fragmentary state of available archaeological evidence.

In Homer and the Monuments (1950), the British scholar Hilda Lockhart Lorimer considered all Homeric elements not attested by archaeological evidence to be aspects of Homer’s own time (eighth century B.C.) retrojected into the Mycenaean period.⁵ Lorimer held that ivory, imported from Syria and Phoenicia, was barely known in Greece before 750 B.C.⁶ References in Homer to such ivory objects would therefore be anachronistic. Today, however, archaeologists have amassed a rich collection of Mycenaean ivories from Greece. Moreover, since the decipherment of the Late Bronze Age Linear B script by Michael Ventris in 1952,^a we have detailed descriptions of furniture 031inlaid with ivory and other materials to illustrate, for example, Homer’s reference to the favorite chair of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, being “inlaid with ivory and silver.” (Odyssey 19.56).⁷

In 1950 Lorimer also noted that “no metal greaves of Bronze Age date” had been found in Greece.⁸ She therefore held that the epithet eukne–mides (“strong-greaved”), which is used of the Achaeans some 36 times in the epics, could only have come from a later period. But the Achaean greaves could have been made of some other, more perishable material than metal, and thus not have withstood the ravages of time. In fact, Homer makes only one reference to greaves that are unambiguously metallic; the god Apollo says that the “bronze-greaved Achaeans” (chalkokne–mides, Iliad 7.41–42) will “send forth a single man to do battle” with the Trojan hero Hector. In any case, the archaeological record has changed since 1950. A pair of Late Helladic III (c. 1400–1150 B.C.) bronze greaves was found in Achaea (in the northern Peloponnesus) in 1953, and a pair of Late Helladic II (c. 1550–1400 B.C.) bronze greaves was found at Dendra (in the eastern Peloponnesus) in 1960.

Similarly, Lorimer regarded the epithet chalkochito–nes as an anachronistic reference to the bronze corselet worn by Greek soldiers after 700 B.C. In 1960, however, a Greco-Swedish expedition uncovered a tomb at Dendra, near Mycenae, that yielded a complete bronze cuirass (breastplate) dating to the Late Helladic III period (c. 1400 B.C.). Its several pieces match ideograms in Linear B texts from Pylos (on the Greek Peloponnesus) and Knossos (on the island of Crete). In 1963 a second Mycenaean bronze corselet was found at Thebes (on the Greek mainland).

Homer’s treatment of metals in general corresponds with the state of metallurgy during the Late Bronze Age rather than during the early Iron Age. The former epoch was characterized by a wealth of goldwork and bronze weapons, which was not true of the later period. Homer mentions bronze swords and spearheads but no iron examples. According to the British classicist Anthony M. Snodgrass,

[Homer’s] exclusive use of bronze, for every sword and every spearhead mentioned in both poems, is the point of greatest significance; for these are the two supreme weapons of the Epic. There is no period of Greek history or prehistory later than the first half of the eleventh century B.C. of which such a picture would be representative.⁹

The actual remains from the 11th to 8th centuries B.C. include just four bronze swords but more 032than 50 iron swords, and just 13 bronze spearheads but more than 50 iron spearheads. Although the Homeric epics do mention such iron weapons as axes and maces, most of the 48 references to iron treat it as a precious metal that was not yet common (see, e.g., Iliad 6.48 and Odyssey 14.324).

Lorimer also believed that the references to perfume and certain oils in the epics were anachronistic. But the Linear B texts indicate that in Mycenaean times the manufacture of perfume, using ingredients such as coriander and cypress imported from the Near East, was one of the chief industries at Pylos. Homeric references to shining and fragrant garments, such as Helen’s “shimmering garments” (Iliad 3.141), are also confirmed by the Linear B texts, as is the use of oils in tanning leather. In the Iliad, Homer uses an elaborate analogy regarding the process of leather-preserving to describe the fight over the corpse of the Greek hero Patroclus:

As when a man gives the hide of a great ox, a bullock, drenched first deep in fat, to all his people to stretch out; the people take it from him and stand in a circle about it and pull, and presently the moisture goes and the fat sinks in, with so many pulling, and the bull’s hide is stretched out level.

(Iliad 17.389–393)

According to University of Texas scholar Cynthia W. Shelmerdine, this Homeric description of “oil tannage” is “reflected in the Mycenaean allocation of oil to tanners … at Knossos” as recorded in Linear B texts.¹⁰

Another supposedly suspect practice in Homer was the custom of women giving baths to men. The classic passage is when Eurycleia, Odysseus’ old nurse, recognizes his scar while she bathes his feet in a bronze basin (Odyssey 19.467–475). That this was indeed an ancient practice is confirmed by a terracotta sculpture from a Mycenaean-period tomb in Cyprus showing a young woman bathing a man in a bath tub. Moreover, Linear B tablets from Pylos list 37 women who are called “bath-pourers,” confirming the antiquity of the Homeric word loetrochoos.

That the slaying of horses at the funeral of 033Patroclus (Iliad 23.171–172) was an ancient custom has been confirmed by the discovery of two horse skeletons in the dromos (the passageway leading to a tomb) of a 15th-century B.C. tomb at Marathon. Additional evidence has been found at a Mycenaean tomb at Argos (on the Greek mainland) and a Minoan tomb at Arkhanes (on the island of Crete).

Many 19th-century critics assumed that ancient Mycenaean houses were never more than one story high. This assumption was not based on any evidence and disregarded Homer’s references to staircases. Even after Schliemann’s excavations at the Peloponnesian site of Tiryns in 1884, which revealed clear evidence of staircases and basements, critics continued to maintain their skepticism. According to the British classicist Alan J.B. Wace, “Even modern writers like Miss Lorimer have not been able to cast off the shackles of old assumptions and have failed to take advantage of the information derived from the House of Columns at Mycenae.”¹¹ The latter structure fully illustrates 034the type of building depicted in the Odyssey. Even the British classical scholar Oliver Dickinson, who is otherwise quite skeptical about using Homer to understand the Mycenaean period, concedes that the Mycenaean palace “described in the Odyssey is more complex than any Dark Age building so far discovered, but seems to have many features in common with Mycenaean palaces.”¹²

Carl Blegen’s discovery of a Mycenaean palace at Pylos, similar to palaces at Mycenae and Tiryns, has provided further archaeological evidence for the Homeric megaron (the main hall or central room of a Mycenaean house or palace). The Mycenaean palaces—with their hearths, columned porches and thrones—aptly fit the description in the Odyssey of the megaron of the king of Phaeacia, as proudly described to Odysseus by the king’s daughter, Nausicaa:

[F]or there are no other houses built for the other Phaiakians anything like the house of the hero Alkinoös. But when you have disappeared inside the house and the courtyard, then go on quickly across the hall until you come to my mother, and she will be sitting beside the hearth, in the firelight … leaning against the pillar, and her maids are sitting behind her; and there is my father’s chair of state, drawn close beside her, on which he sits when he drinks his wine like any immortal.

(Odyssey 6.302–309).

Homer’s references to temples (e.g., Iliad 1.39) were long considered glaring anachronisms. In 1962 the University of Wisconsin classicist Paul MacKendrick could cite no Greek temple earlier than the ninth-century B.C. structures at Perachora and Sparta.¹³ In that very year, however, John Caskey of the University of Cincinnati published a report of a Mycenaean temple he had discovered on the island of Keos (off the coast of Attica). Then, in 1968–1969, the British archaeologist William Taylour discovered a second Mycenaean temple at Mycenae itself; this temple yielded some unique cultic objects, including a clay snake with a movable tongue. Mycenaean temples have also been found at Kition in Cyprus.

The Homeric Catalogue of Ships (Iliad 2.493–760) also demonstrates the accuracy of oral traditions. Of the 164 places listed, 96 can be identified, and three-fourths of these identified sites show Mycenaean occupation. Indeed, between 1958 and 1961 R. Hope Simpson and John Francis Lazenby surveyed the sites mentioned in Homer’s Catalogue of Ships and concluded,

there is not a single place mentioned in the Catalogue which can be shown not to have been inhabited in the Mycenaean period … [O]f those which have been excavated, none has so far failed to produce evidence of Mycenaean occupation.¹⁴

Moreover, many of these Mycenaean sites were abandoned, some so completely that they were forgotten by the later Greeks.¹⁵

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The converse is also true: The Catalogue of Ships reveals its Mycenaean origins in its failure to mention some of the important towns of eighth-century B.C. Greece, such as Corinth and Argolis.

It seems unlikely that an eighth-century B.C. poet, in a work of utter fiction, would assign the then-insignificant kingdom of Mycenae to Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek armies. On the other hand, the prominence in the Iliad of Mycenae, with 100 ships, and Pylos, with 90 ships, accords with the archaeological picture of these Peloponnesian sites during the Late Bronze Age—as does the lesser status of Athens, credited with only 50 ships. Scholarly skepticism about the prominence of Boeotia (a province north of Attica on the Greek mainland) in the Catalogue of Ships has been proven unjustified, as Boeotia was densely populated in the late Mycenaean period (c. 1200 B.C.).

Despite Homer’s poetic license in describing Troy, some of Homer’s epithets reflect an accurate memory of the Late Bronze Age city. The British classicist Cecil Maurice Bowra has written, for example, that “the faulty structure of the western fortifications of Troy, which has been revealed by excavation, was known to Homer’s Andromache [the wife of the hero Hector],” who advises the Trojans to protect the point “where the city is openest to attack” (see Iliad 6.433–434). Bowra also suggests that the city’s perpendicular battlements, also revealed in modern excavations, are “enshrined in Patroclus’ attempts to scale them” (see Iliad 16.702–703).¹⁶

Quite a few Linear B names may be interpreted as the equivalents of Homeric names: Aiwa (Aias, or Ajax), Akireu (Achilles), Ekoto (Hector), Oreta (Orestes).¹⁷ What is even more significant than the presence of Mycenaean names in Homer is their occurrence in certain clusters, such as in the Pylos cycle and the Thessaly cycle, associated with Mycenaean heroic cycles. As Dorothea Gray concludes:

But the association of the names with families and relationships shows that it was not bare names only that were handed down, and this is confirmed by the Mycenaean names connected with episodes not found elsewhere in the poems.¹⁸

There is also evidence from the Hittites, a people contemporaneous with the Mycenaeans who occupied much of the Anatolian peninsula. Over the past century, a number of Hittite tablets with inscriptions have been found at the Hittite capital of Hattusa, in central Anatolia, and elsewhere. Some of these tablets recount Hittite military conflicts with a people called the Ahhiyawa in western Anatolia. When these documents were published, a heated controversy arose over the possibility of identifying the Ahhiyawa with the Achaeans. Today, however, most scholars do accept the identification of the Ahhiyawans in the Hittite texts with the Mycenaean Achaeans.¹⁹

Another piece of evidence connects Late Bronze Age Troy to the larger struggle between the Mycenaeans and the Hittites. One of the Hittite vassal states in the wars against the Ahhiyawans was “Wilusa,” which lay in the region of the Troad. An ancient Greek name for Troy was “Ilios” (Iliad means “the story of Ilios”), and most scholars now accept the identification of Hittite Wilusa with Ilios/Troy.^b Thus Wilusa/Ilios/Troy was a Hittite vassal state that fought against the Ahhiyawan/Achaean forces that invaded Anatolia. This is the historical context of the destruction of Troy VIIa during a “Trojan War” fought just around 1200 B.C.

Homeric references to the Phoenicians, particularly in the Odyssey, have been understood as accounts of contacts with Phoenicians during the 036eighth century B.C. There has been a long and torrid controversy over the date of the westward expansion of the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean. Many classical scholars have held that Phoenician expansion did not antedate Greek colonization of the western Mediterranean beginning in the eighth century B.C. However, the discovery of early Phoenician inscriptions at Nora, Sardinia (an island off the western coast of Italy), suggests that Phoenicians began settling in the west prior to the Greeks. The so-called Nora Inscription and the Nora fragment have been dated by Harvard paleographer Frank Moore Cross to the 11th–10th centuries B.C.,^{20 c} though others would date these inscriptions to the beginning of the ninth century.²¹ In either case, the evidence indicates that Phoenicians were settling in the western Mediterranean earlier than once thought.

In the Linear B texts, we find the words ponikiya and ponike (Phoenician), as well as such words as Perita (Men from Beirut) and Turiyo (Men from Tyre)—indicating contact with the Phoenicians. We also have imported objects at both ends of the Aegean-Phoenician trade route, which confirm Homer’s references to early contacts between the Greeks and traders from the Levant.

The recovery of a 1200 B.C. Phoenician shipwreck off Cape Gelidonya in southwestern Anatolia has provided vivid evidence of the carriers of such trade. The American maritime archaeologist George F. Bass, the excavator of the shipwreck, concludes:

Further study is necessary, but our findings support the recent statement by [Frank H.] Stubbings that “there is no anachronism in Homer’s Phoenicians; his picture of the heroic age would indeed be less true without them.”²²

Another shipwreck, discovered in 1982 off Anatolia’s Uluburun promontory (70 miles west of Cape Gelidonya) and dating around 1300 B.C., gives dramatic evidence of a seemingly trivial detail in the Iliad. Maritime excavators recovered a two-leaved, wooden folding tablet from the ship; the inner sides of the tablet would once have been covered with wax, and text would have been incised on the wax surface with a stylus.^d Just such a folding tablet is mentioned in the story of the youth Bellerophon (Iliad 6.169ff). The wife of King Proetos falls madly in love with the handsome youth, who refuses to return her affections. Enraged, the queen tells her husband that Bellerophon raped her. Proetos then avenges the queen by sending Bellerophon on a mission to the king of Lycia (in southwestern Anatolia, the region of the Uluburun promontory); Proetos gives the youth a sealed “folding tablet” incised with “murderous symbols” that inveigh upon the Lycian king 037to have Bellerophon killed. (Bellerophon survives by completing a series of dangerous tasks.) It seems likely that the folding tablet mentioned in the Iliad preserves a memory of the kind of waxed tablet found on the Uluburun wreck.²³

Homer’s Odyssey is but one of a number of ancient tales about the nostoi, Achaeans who returned to Greece from Troy. One Greek story concerns a seer named Mopsus, who at the time of the Trojan War led some followers to Pamphylia and then to Cilicia in southeastern Anatolia. The discovery of a bilingual Hittite-Phoenician inscription of King Azitawanda of Karatepe in Cilicia has provided a dramatic confirmation of this tale. In the inscription, Azitawanda claims descent from Mopsus (Phoenician Mpsh, Hittite Mukshush), transforming Mopsus into an undeniable historical figure.²⁴

All this evidence suggests that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are literary creations that nonetheless preserve accurate historical memories.²⁵ The implications should not be lost on Biblical scholars. As William Dever concludes, “The parallels with the early history of Israel and the growth of Biblical traditions and literature are clear, even extending to the chronology of events … If Homer can in a sense be ‘historical,’ why not the Hebrew Bible?”²⁶

This article, adapted from a chapter in The Future of Biblical Archaeology, edited by James K. Hoffmeier and Alan Millard (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), is reproduced here with the publisher’s permission.

In a vigorous denunciation of the so-called Biblical minimalists, William Dever makes a very important observation on a subject not directly related to the Bible: A generation ago, even a decade ago, Classicists and ancient historians would have dismissed Homer as a mythical figure and would have argued that the tales of the Trojan Wars were mainly “invented” by much later Greek writers. (Sound familiar?) … It is now thought that those stories of warfare do not simply reflect the situation of Greece in the eighth–seventh centuries [B.C.], but go much farther back to a genuine historical situation of […]