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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| One would expect a forgery would have a single author/editor who would try hard to produce a believable document and avoid suspicious inconsistencies. |
Forger 1: "Better get this right in case Chad or Bernie read it in a few hundred years".
Forger 2: "Nah, Chad's gunna be too bloody lazy to read it... and Bernie'll believe aught"
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| Chad wrote: | Forger 1: "Better get this right in case Chad or Bernie read it in a few hundred years".
Forger 2: "Nah, Chad's gunna be too bloody lazy to read it... and Bernie'll believe aught" |
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| berniegreen wrote: | | The question of Homer is something else though. Clearly the Odyssey and the Iliad are the retelling of legends in the same fashion as, say, Tennyson or Scott. |
DING DING DING DING DING (as Chad would say)
John Milton or Dante would be the better comparison. There is no ancient text comparable (unless it is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a text about which I have other suspicions).
| However we know from countless references that these poems existed in written form prior to or coincidentally with the beginning of the Greek Classical Age. |
See. If I knew all that I could never think the thoughts I do. Thank God he made me so ignorant.
| Thus my questions to Ishmael are: In what sense do you think Homer is a forgery? |
I strongly suspect the text was written quite recently and never existed in the ancient world. It may be the work of more than one author but I expect the principle author was British and lived in East Anglia. The geography he transfered to ancient Anatolia appears to be the geography of East Anglia.
Obviously I can't think this without also believing that any anomalies you identify have some explanation. I do think this. But I'm not going to be bothered with the hoop jumping you should now wish for me to perform. The matter is not of sufficient interest.
And yet I retain my conviction -- because the reasons for my conclusion have nothing to do with evidence but everything to do with principle.
| What might, in your view, have been the motivation of the alleged forger? |
The love of beauty.
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Okay so this East Anglian composed them in a funny mix of archaic Greek dialects and gets them to Athens among other places in good time for Socrates (to name one person that we have all heard of) to reference then in his famous (and well attested) trial of 399BC.
Are you then suggesting that the Greeks had visited East Anglia and made your author/forger well acquainted with Hellenic legends or that your author/forger made them all up himself and the Greeks gulled themselves into thinking that they were their own?
Finally -for the moment- did this idea come to you in a vision, a dream or was it brought by an angel bearing engraved gold plates which have unfortunately disappeared - or in some other way?
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| Ishmael, speaking of Homer, wrote: | | I strongly suspect the text was written quite recently and never existed in the ancient world. It may be the work of more than one author but I expect the principle author was British and lived in East Anglia. The geography he transferred to ancient Anatolia appears to be the geography of East Anglia. |
Norfolk and Suffolk are flat and boring without cliffs and promontories and without the myriad islands that you need for a mis en sc�ne of the Iliad.
| The matter is not of sufficient interest. |
| And yet I retain my conviction -- because the reasons for my conclusion have nothing to do with evidence but everything to do with principle. | |
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Assume: The Iliad was written around the time of Dante and John Milton.
Given: Socrates references Homer
Your task: Resolve the paradox.
This is how we play our games.
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Preliminary conclusion: Assumption is incorrect.
Next step: Determine soundness of assumption.
The game continues.
P.S. There is about 200 years difference between Dante and Milton but I am not quibbling
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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That's why I don't have time for your posts. So little imagination.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Chad wrote: | | Don wrote: | | thousands upon thousands of them |
They remained unknown and totally hidden for thousands of years... now we find shit loads of them, all over the damned place!
DING! DING! DING! DING! |
Actually, Ding-a-ling, the script had been "known" to archaeologists for some time before Schliemann failed to recognise it as a script rather than just "scratchings". Linear B characters, not recognised as such, were known from Egyptian excavations (on imported pottery and even, I think, on at least one tomb painting). And Linear B tablets, again, not recognised for what they were, were on sale as "engraved gems .. in the antique dealers' shops in Athens." Cretan peasant women used to wear them frequently as charms; "they were known as 'milk stones'". (Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B).
Having something, and knowing what it is you've got, are two different things.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Bernie Green wrote: | | Okay so this East Anglian composed them in a funny mix of archaic Greek dialects |
Including, let's not forget, linguistic (and metrical) features that sorely puzzled scholars from the 15th Century (when Homer was first printed in Italy in 1488) onwards. These features were not fully explained until the "great Linear B conspiracy" of dozens of archaeologists took place in the 10th and 20th Centuries. An interesting conspiracy, because the script was first recognised as such in the 1890s, but wasn't deciphered until the 1950s, after its discoverers were long dead.
(A peculiar hoax, that one, as well as an exhausting one, producing thousands of consistent texts in a made-up dialect, keeping it cnsistent with the few pre-known but undeciphered inscriptions from Egypt, and seeding the results around Europe and eastern Asia in the knowledge that no-one would be able to read them!)
And by the way, "an inscription from Ischia in the Bay of Naples, ca. 740 BCE, appears to refer to a text of the Iliad; likewise, illustrations seemingly inspired by the Polyphemus episode in the Odyssey are found on Samos, Mykonos and in Italy dating from the first quarter of the seventh century BCE" (Wikipedia). Moreover, Homer "was continually read and taught in the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire where the majority of the classics also survived" (ibid.).
On the matter of mixed dialects, I'm working on an Early Middle English text which shows precisely that phenomenon. (There're a number of them.) I'll present it in due course.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Chad wrote: | | Don wrote: | | thousands upon thousands of them |
They remained unknown and totally hidden for thousands of years... now we find shit loads of them, all over the damned place!
DING! DING! DING! DING! |
An additional thought--much the same could be said of Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Eblaite, and Hittite texts, even to the "all over the place", in the case of Hittite. Thing is, you dig in the ground where there's the remains of a civilisation that ran out of steam and disappeared thousands of years ago, you're quite likely to find things you never knew about before. To expect the reverse would be, well, ding-a-ling-ish, really.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Thing is, you dig in the ground where there's the remains of a civilisation that ran out of steam and disappeared thousands of years ago, you're quite likely to find things you never knew about before. |
Does that account for finds as far apart as Germany and Georgia?
I didn't realise Germany had much in the way of remains of Ancient Greek civilisation to dig around in... You live and learn!
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| Ishmael, speaking of me, wrote: | | That's why I don't have time for your posts. So little imagination. |
Now given the paradox that you posed, there are the following possible resolutions that occur to me:
1) The alleged forger was a time-traveller.
2) All the contemporaneous historical records are simply in error
3) All the contemporaneous historical records are fraudulent and/or forgeries.
4) The initial assumption is incorrect.
On the balance of probabilities which appears the more likely?
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Chad wrote: | | Thing is, you dig in the ground where there's the remains of a civilisation that ran out of steam and disappeared thousands of years ago, you're quite likely to find things you never knew about before. |
Does that account for finds as far apart as Germany and Georgia?
I didn't realise Germany had much in the way of remains of Ancient Greek civilisation to dig around in... You live and learn! |
Well, of course it doesn't, dear idiot (written affectionately!). That's to account for the "thousands and thousands" that you were boggling at previously. (I don't know how many thousands, by the way. IIRC, Evans found about 3000 Linear B tablets at Knossos, and further substantial caches--"palace archives"--were found at Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, and Cydonia. But 3000 alone counts as "thousands and thousands," when you're talking generalities.)
The German and Georgian finds were outliers, washed up along ancient trade routes, one imagines. At least, that's the usual explanation for such OOPARTs (Out Of Place ARTefacts).
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| berniegreen wrote: | | On the balance of probabilities which appears the more likely? |
Others writing on the subject have resolved the paradox differently. But I've taken us off-topic.
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