Homer and His Iliad
A great read. Gets directly to the heart of the problem of ideation of authorship through deep time of an oral tradition transcribed. I can&#x27;t see Homer as a singular, but I wonder which scribe cast the language strongly into a form modern ancient Greek scholars most recognise. We must be working back through fifth and sixth generation retakes on the ur-texts. Qualities of poetic form and things like alliteration go to &quot;one hand not many&quot; a bit.<p>I like how in the Persian&#x2F;Indian tradition the voice of the author comes out &quot;I, Rumi say this to you.&quot; We could do with a bit more of that. People write papers on the presence or absence of &quot;he said&quot;<p>The quality of the pot drawings (exemplified here) amazed me. Look at that bandaging! Nobody who has ever bound a wound would fail to see that as a faithful representation.<p>I struggle with why we can so easily cast the Illiad, Gilgamesh into one box, and put the Abrahamic&#x2F;Judeo-Christian&#x2F;Islamic into another box of literal received wisdom. Faith demands it, but logic about what we say regarding the passage of a song saga or poems across time distinct from the red letter word of God is entirely missing. Its anathema to cast these as &quot;the same&quot; but as an athiest I cannot say there are insurmountable differences. (The new testament has obvious differences noting it draws on the old, but is within the cast of written history where Troy stands before writing was strong in the western world. Certainly before maps were any good. We don&#x27;t have a reliable contemporary place marker)<p>Schliemann wasn&#x27;t helpful. I have a kids introduction to archaeology by C.W. Ceram (not unfree of a bad past, a pseudonym adopted to get distance from his Nazi PR job) which talks a bit about that, and how the post napoleonic  French butchered rolled up papyrus to extract words from shards which modern xray machines would get as whole texts. Schliemann destroyed everything he touched looking for gold, basically.