Archaeologists working in Egypt in the late 19th century began collecting scraps of papyrus containing lines, quotations and even complete chapters of the stories. In fact, just last year the first English translation of the story by a female classicist was published.īut not all of the earlier versions of Homer are lost. After those texts were rediscovered during the Rennaissance, they became classics and have been translated endlessly, with each generation adding their own scholarly take or literary spin to the tales. The versions we know now come from medieval copies made of the complete works based on ancient sources that are now lost. Scribes transcribing the recitations would have heard different versions depending on the storyteller, so there were likely various versions of the Homer epics works floating around the ancient world. Instead, bards would have told slightly different versions of the epics each time they recited them, using a technique known as composition-in-recitation. That’s because, as Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy points out, the oral tradition of these poems was not a matter of rote memorization. Whether the stories were composed by a blind poet named Homer is a source of debate, though many researchers believe Homer was probably not a historical individual but a cultural tradition that developed the stories over many decades or centuries, with scribes writing them down sometime around the 8th century B.C.īut it’s likely there were many different versions of each work transcribed throughout the ancient world. It’s believed that The Odyssey and The Iliad come from an oral storytelling tradition. In fact, any glimpse into Homer before medieval times is rare, and any insight into the composition of the epics is precious. If verified, it will be a priceless literary and historical artifact. In a press release, the Greek Culture Ministry says that the preliminary date of the text has been confirmed. The verses are from the epic’s fourteenth book, in which Odysseus speaks to his lifelong friend Eumaeus, the first person he sees on his return from his decade away from home. The tablet was discovered near the ruins of the Temple of Zeus during three years of excavations in the ruins of the ancient city of Olympia on the Greek peninsula the Peloponnese. or earlier, representing the oldest lines of the poet found in the ancient land. But now, reports the BBC, archeologists in Greece have found 13 verses from The Odyssey chiseled into a clay tablet dating to the third century A.D. The ancient papyrus these books were written on rarely survives, meaning that ancient copies of Homer from the lands he wrote about simply don’t exist. You might think that ancient copies of these books are dug up in Greece all the time, but that’s not the case. The epics of the Greek poet Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, have been recited around campfires and scrutinized by students for 2,800 years, if not longer.
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