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Joined: Sep 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
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There was a Troy in Turkey--and there probably was a war, but about in 1200 BC. Homer would have created the Iliad and the Odyssey sometime around 800 BC according to Bernard Knox's notes I'm pouring over these days.
In the introduction to Fagles' 1996 translation, Bernard Knox notes that none of the characters in the Odyssey write--none!--except one. There will be one who writes--and I haven't found that character yet in the first nine books. That's because during Homer's time hardly anyone wrote. Knox notes that the Phoenicians brought some kind of non-alphabetic 'writing' to the Greeks--and I think Faldage has commented on that alphabet along with others here at some time in some thread--but very few people actually wrote, although the Greeks turned the Phoenician symbols into a working alphabet, one sound exactly for each letter.
There's a terrific argument in Knox's introduction in which the following is proposed:
"It is not surprising that many recent scholars in the field have come to the conclusion that writing did indeed play a role in the creation of these extraordinary poems, that the phenomena characteristic of oral epic demonstrated by Parry and Lord are balanced by qualities peculiar to literary composition. They envisage a highly creative oral poet, master of the repertoire of inherited material and technique, who used the new instrument of writing to build, probably over the course of a lifetime, an epic poem on a scale beyond the imagination of his predecessors" (20).
Homer
The Odyssey
Translated by Robert Fagles
Introduction and Notes by Bernard Knox
1996
Penguin Classics
...and this translation won numerous awards in 1996, by the way.
The entire presentation of the various theories about the impossibility of the writing of the epics v. the possibility is pages long in Knox's introduction--and entirely fascinating.
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065 |
Me: 2300-odd years
Mav: Izzat 4600 altogether? ;)
c. 800 BC as WW points out for Homer, and c. 1500 AD (as a wild guess) for the first printed edition would make 2300 years, would it not?
Bingley
Bingley
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
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ha! that's tellin' 'im, Bingley.
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Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757 |
no, it's just getting even ;)
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Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
Get the to a bookery, wwh!
I don't know whether you've ever read Gods, Graves, and Scholars, but I picked up a copy at a library sale--and today read a terrific chapter about the re-discovery of Troy by Schliemann, though he identified the incorrect layer--went down too deep. The whole story--which reads like an adventure book--is on pp. 29-43. I'd quote it fully, but won't. Ha! It's a wonder-filled chapter that I'm sure you'll enjoy reading--and it may even be on the internet. Here the publication info. you'll--or anybody else will--need:
Gods, Graves, and Scholars
The Story of Archaeology
C. W. Ceram
Translated from the German by E. B. Garside
New York
Alfred A. Knopf
1952
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Dear WW: I have read quite a lot about Troy, but don't have any of the magazines or books now, and couldn't read them if I did.
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