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READER PLEASE NOTE: The views expressed in this article first written August 1997 contain a small measure of un-Homeric humour which might not to travel well on the internet. Please add a pinch of two of salt, according to taste.
I was delighted to receive constructive criticism and very positive suggestions from an e-friend from The Netherlands, knowledgeable on Linear B and Homeric studies. In gratitude for his contribution I have inserted almost the whole of his observations ( marked as [Note #]) with the minimum of alteration for the benefit of the reader interested in the topic.
Two of the most prosaic arguments in favour of oral transmission (through the school of the Homerids) are:
1. In Homer's time there was no paper to write on. Papyrus was very expensive and stone tablets were too heavy to carry around. Remember, the Iliad has 16000 lines of verse and the Odyssey 12000. A single verse of hexameter is quite long (about 18 imperial feet), too. Some twenty syllables. Homer would have needed a fleet of fork-lift trucks (and black-bottomed container ships) to carry the script from performance to performance throughout the Aegean.
2. The Greek alphabet had not been invented yet.
Homer must have been illiterate! More to the point, his audience were illiterate.
No publisher would have taken on the Iliad and the Odyssey as viable economic
propositions.
[Note 1]
Here are my counter arguments:
1.The writing medium: Writing was needed during composition, not during performance. In this case, what was the writing medium? Surely not stone. Although stone inscriptions date not long after the time Homer is supposed to have lived, it is hardly the medium the Muses would have approved of. Stone was reserved for law-givers and politicians in control of the public purse strings.
Papyrus? An expensive Egyptian import well beyond the means of a travelling artist. The rats would have eaten it anyway. Parchment, a later invention, was also rather expensive and only an enlightened Athenian tyrant, Peisistratos, could afford to pay for it (one drachma a page, a week's wages) out of the proceeds of the silver mine in Lavrion.
What then? Homer himself, the source of all wisdom and knowledge in the ancient world, mentions writing only once, and even then rather obliquely. The celebrated story in the Iliad (6, 160) of young prince Bellerephon who, having resisted the amorous desires of queen Anteia, wife of King Proitos of Argos, ends up being sent on an errant to Proitos' father-in-law King of Lycia carrying a "folded tablet bearing magic signs", his death warrant.
What was this "folded tablet"? One such folded tablet was found recently on the "Oldest Known Shipreck" (National Geographic, Vol. 172, No 6, December 1987) dated by dendrochronology to 1216 BC. Sailors used wax tablets to list the cargo they were carrying. Very sensible. And very cheap. And very water-proof, too. Wet clay tablets would have been a reasonable alternative for poetry on dry land, after which the contents were committed to memory and the tablet recycled. The (allegedly) Homeric poem, Vatrachomyomachia (The Battle of the Frogs and the Rats) begins with "
Here I begin: and first I pray the choir of the Muses
to come down from Helicon into my heart to aid the lay
which I have newly written in tablets upon my knee.
[Note 2]
2. The script: If wax or clay tablets were
the writing medium for the poet's own use, what script could he have used?
Up to 1952 the world believed that the Greek alphabet had scarcely been
invented at the time of Homer. Herodotos is the first to mention that it
was the Phoenician King Kadmos, the founder of Thebes in Boiotia, who "brought
letters to Greece". This has been taken to mean that the Greeks adapted
the Phoenician alphabet and developed the "archaic Greek" letters
(phoenikia) which were very much the same as the ones in use today (upper
case characters only, lower case characters, aspirations and accents were
an Alexandrian invention to aid foreigners pronounce Greek proper and burden
Greek school children with rules of orthography). The first archaic Greek
inscriptions (on stone) date from ca. 7 century BC, not earlier.
[Note 3]
Kadmos lived before Homer and the Trojan War. If
he had "brought" Phoenician letters, archaeologists should have
found Phonician inscriptions in Thebes. Recent excavations have unearthed
a bagful (~300) of Linear B tablets, in the ruins of Kadmos' palace. The
same Linear B found in Mycene, Tirynths, Pylos, Knossos and other places
named by Homer. Furthermore, we now know since Michael Ventris' decipherment
of Linear B in 1952 (long after the oral-composition and Phoenician origin
of the Greek alphabet theories had taken hold) that Linear B is not only
a Greek script, but that many of the words have a strong Homeric flavour.
Names such as Potnia (the Lady), Hector, Achillees, Alexander as well as
fine points in the Homeric syntax have been unambiguously identified. Alas,
no such names as Agamemnon, Menelaos, Nestor or Odysseus. What a pity.
The conclusion has to be that, if Homer needed to, he could have used a script. Just like the Sumerians and Hittites, a millennium or so before him, had used cuneiform to keep detailed accounts of excruciatingly boring commercial transactions on clay tablets, as well as diplomatic letters, treaties, and, wait for it, literature. Of the quarter of a million or so clay tablets unearthed in Mesopotamia, only 1% can be classified as literature. Amongst them, the most amazing of archaeological discoveries: The Story of the Flood. So similar to the account given in the Bible that Victorian Bible fundamentalists went bananas with excitement. The Gilgamesh Epic, a couple of millennia or so older than the Odyssey, was also found written down, in several copies, on clay tablets. Just like school children in classical Greece used the Iliad and the Odyssey as The Textbooks, so did the Sumerian children copy stories handed down to them from generation to generation onto clay tablets, not unlike the slate tablet I and my generation used in primary school to scratch our first letters.
The number of Linear B tablets found so far is about 4000. Most of them are very brief accounts (not more than ten words, typically inventories of tools and weapons, commodities, place names where they came from and people's names that owed or produced them). Not a scrap of evidence of any literature, not yet anyway. Is it at all possible that Homer used Linear B to write his poems down, at least until he memorised the verses? How did he learn his trade? Was he born with a prodigious memory? According to tradition, part of the Epic Cycle of poems was Homer's "Cypria", which he is supposed to have "given" as a dowry to his daughter. How on earth did he "give" this poem to his daughter? On magnetic tape? or write-once read-only CDs (Clay Tablets)?
And at any rate, if Homer had such a fantastic memory, what about the Homerids and other lesser bards that kept his magic verses alive long after his death? Was no one tempted to write them down until a century or two later? Not even short passages? And what about his audience? Were they all illiterate? Homer must have been singing his epics in the courts of royalty and rich merchants (for a fee) as well as to the plebs (for fun and a night's food and free lodging). Surely some of the scribe hanger-ons (accountants) would have been tempted to use their precious knowledge, the magic art of writing, to immortalise the glorious verses, and make a bob or two by re-selling them.
Linear B is supposed to have died with the collapse of the Mycenean power centres, shortly after the Trojan War. It is very reasonable to assume that the buraucratic and priestly order that surounded the men of power and wealth, those that had riches worth worying and writing home about, also collapsed and dispersed once their paymasters met their inglorious and mysterious end. It's only the Cypriot variety of Linear A/B that lived on until the 5th century BC (despite the poximity of Phoenicia). The Greek Dark Ages that followed the Trojan adventures end with the (out of the Aegean blue?) appearance of Homer, Sapho, Solon, Herakleitos, Pythagoras, Thales, Aeschylos and other poets, mathematecians, historians, tragedists and philosophers, not all of which had prodigious memories.
Is it at all likely that some fragments of the (original) Homeric Epics are still waiting to be discovered? What script would they have been written in? Would they be recognised as such if they are written in Linear B, the mainland or the Cypriot variety? At any rate, wouldn't it be fun to see whether Linear B is suitable or not for writing poetry? What better test case to use for this purpose than Homeric hexameters?
And this is what I am attempting to do. For fun, not profit.
[Note 4]
Linear B scholars (I am delighted to know that
there quite a few of them around the globe) will probably frown in disbelief
or smile with amusement. I only need one of them to guide me towards composing
a "professional" transcription. Or even just set it as an exercise
for Linear B students. After all, the Iliad and the Odyssey have been translated
in almost every writen language in the world. Why not in the script that
was in use at the time of the events Homer so graphically describes?
[Note 5]
I am fully aware that the paucity of material and
the inherent ambiguity of the script makes the task quite formidable. Only
some ninety syllables can be assigned with any confidence (and there are
many more syllabic constructs in Homeric Greek). There don't seem to be
any definite or indefinite articles in Linear B (just as in Russian). Homer
doesn't use them often, either. In fact for all we know he might have invented
them for poetic convenience. Other difficulties arise from the fact that
syllables starting with p-, v-, f- are rendered by the same sign. Ditto
for a few other groupings. The most remarkable ambiguity I find is
the RA=LA, RO=LO, RE=LE, RI=LI, RU=LU set of syllables. The kind of problem
very young children have in pronouncing R. If you have any, ask them to
say "Ratty Ramesis". More interestingly, compare the Russian
word Rabot and the Latin Labore. Spot the difference?
[Note 6]
The first task I tried to accomplish was to decompose
Homeric words into syllables, not using Greek grammar as I was taught it
at school, but as I thought they would best reflect Linear B equivalents.
To do it by hand would be too raborious for such lengthy works (and my
memory or competence at spelling is nowhere near as good as that of the
Linear B scribes). The decomposition is done by a computer program with
in-build look-up tables and decision-making code to resolve ambiguities.
It operates on the Homeric text source after stripping apostrophes and
replacing the eclipsed vowels, dropping word-end s', and n's, dropping
consonants where Linear B does not care for, and by grouping letters
into syllables, as appropriate. The final run substitutes the recognised
syllables with the ASCII code for the keys used by Curtis
Clark's font. Thank you Curtis, I might be the only person in the world
to use your font, a labour of love, but who knows, you might see it on
TV News one day.
[Note 7]
The first-attempt result for the first two verses
of the Odyssey is shown at the top of the page. I refrain from publishing
the rest until I have had time to refine and test the code and understand
Linear B grammar a little better. The obstacles are many and free time
is in short supply. Are there any other "nutters" like me out
there in cyberspace with a similar preoccupation for resurecting dead scripts?
Please get in touch.
An example of how Homeric text trascribes into Linear B syllables using the latinised phonetic convention is given for the first 105 verses of Book 1 of the Odyssey. The text will be revised on advice from experts or Muse-cal inspiration.
[Note 8]
Selected Bibliography
E.Pantos
First written Sunday 25 September 1997