Homer's The Iliad codex from approximately the late fifth-early sixth century B.C.
Image: Iliad VIII 245-253 in codex F205
-
The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
Read More »
This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service.
(ISNS)—Scientists who decode the genetic history of humans by tracking how genes mutate have applied the same technique to one of the Western world's most ancient and celebrated texts to uncover the date it was first written.
The text is Homer's "Iliad," and Homer -- if there was such a person -- probably wrote it in 762 B.C., give or take 50 years, the researchers found. The "Iliad" tells the story of the Trojan War -- if there was such a war -- with Greeks battling Trojans.
The researchers accept the received orthodoxy that a war happened and someone named Homer wrote about it, said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England. His collaborators include Eric Altschuler, a geneticist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, in Newark, and Andreea S. Calude, a linguist also at Reading and the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico. They worked from the standard text of the epic poem.
The date they came up with fits the time most scholars think the "Iliad" was compiled, so the paper, published in the journal Bioessays, won't have classicists in a snit. The study mostly affirms what they have been saying, that it was written around the eighth century B.C.
That geneticists got into such a project should be no surprise, Pagel said.
"Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes," Pagel said. "It is directly analogous. We tried to document the regularities in linguistic evolution and study Homer's vocabulary as a way of seeing if language evolves the way we think it does. If so, then we should be able to find a date for Homer."
It is unlikely there ever was one individual man named Homer who wrote the "Iliad." Brian Rose, professor of classical studies and curator of the Mediterranean section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, said it is clear the "Iliad" is a compilation of oral tradition going back to the 13th century B.C.
"It's an amalgam of lots of stories that seemed focused on conflicts in one particular area of northwestern Turkey," Rose said.
The story of the "Iliad" is well known, full of characters like Helen of Troy, Achilles, Paris, Agamemnon and a slew of gods and goddesses behaving badly. It recounts how a gigantic fleet of Greek ships sailed across the "wine dark sea" to besiege Troy and regain a stolen wife. Its sequel is the "Odyssey."
Classicists and archeologists are fairly certain Troy existed and generally know where it is. In the 19th century, the German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the Englishman Frank Calvert excavated what is known as the Citadel of Troy and found evidence of a military conflict in the 12th century B.C., including arrows and 5 feet of burned debris around a buried fortress. Whether it was a war between Troy and a foreign element, or a civil war is unknown, Rose said.
The compilation we know as the "Iliad" was written centuries later, the date Pagel is proposing.
The scientists tracked the words in the "Iliad" the way they would track genes in a genome.
The researchers employed a linguistic tool called the Swadesh word list, put together in the 1940s and 1950s by American linguist Morris Swadesh. The list contains approximately 200 concepts that have words apparently in every language and every culture, Pagel said. These are usually words for body parts, colors, necessary relationships like "father" and "mother."
They looked for Swadesh words in the "Iliad" and found 173 of them. Then, they measured how they changed.
See what we're tweeting about
24 Comments
Add CommentInteresting. The same technique may be used to find out when the Pentateuch (the Torah) was written. There are enough samples of Sumerian, Akkadian, Canaanite, and Paleo-Hebrew available to apply the same research method. Worth doing, in my opinion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn genetics there is a not unreasonable assumption that random mutations occur at a roughly constant rate. That seems rather unlikely for languages I would have thought.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a retired Sanskrit instructor I would like to see this technique applied to India's two national epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; ditto for the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat helps a lot, I alway was told that it was from 800BCE. can now rest in peace.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that's already been done.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe look forward to the Swadesh shift results for other sacred texts, like Dianetics & The Book of Mormon
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you're going to copy a story, at least copy it accurately. The codex illustrated is AD, not BC.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd the original?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank you for the article and the linguistic methodology.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLanguages are not really that different, generalized over a population over time. There is no one authority that changes or preserves language (as much as certain institutions would like to believe otherwise), so the evolution of a language occurs organically, rather than deliberately or teleologically.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo...why did they use Hittite instead of, you know, Linear B? Which is Mycenean Greek?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo, I would like to disagree on this as a student of Indian scriptures - Vedas and Shastras, which are only 2,500 to 2,000 year old. Iliad may be at the most 2,500 year old.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis technique could determine the age of Indian writings. Son far they were all constrained by the boundaries set by Bible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm puzzled by the repeated use of the word "wrote" to describe the composition of the Iliad by Homer. I have always understood that poetic epics such as the Iliad or the Odyssey were created, memorized and embellished spoken performances. Homer (an alias referring to his having been a hostage), if he existed, surely never wrote these down—especially because he was blind! Any written versions must have significantly post-dated their actual composition.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA propos: 'hound' vs. 'dog': This is a tell-tale sign of Scandinavian immigrants who brought their own 'dogs' with them, relegating the old word 'hound' to specific 'hunting' dogs; German, in contrast, which was never invaded by Scandinavians, retained its old word 'Hund'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWords truly tell the evolutionary history of a language and the lifestyle of the people that shaped it!
The comparison is pretty obvious for any linguist I think. Already a quarter of a centuries ago I incorporated the metaphore of languages being like the seeds that carry the memory of a species as I argued in favor of a different model of citizenship you will find in www.institutosimoneweil.net in Spanish and English under "Guide to an Ecological Model of Citizenshíp"... Also visit www.mama-doc.com if you find the time for some poetry and stuff...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe comparison is pretty obvious for any linguist I think. Already a quarter of a century ago I incorporated the metaphore of languages being like the seeds that carry the memory of a species as I argued in favor of a different model of citizenship you will find in www.institutosimoneweil.net in Spanish and English under "Guide to an Ecological Model of Citizenshíp"...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor poetry and stuff try us out at www.mama-doc.com
I wonder why the word for dog is still "Hund" in German.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMorris Swadesh developed a method called glottochronology based on his lists using methods like those described here. Linguists debated their usefulness back in the 1970s and it remains controversial. Check glottochronoly in Wikipedia for a quick introduction to a large body of work and debate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this15.sunnystrobe answered my question. Thanks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPublication date? This was oral tradition.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI had understood that Homer (not Simpson) was a blind storyteller, who recited the Illiad by heart, if that is so, he could have gotten it from someone else like Gilgamesh became Noah on a copyright violation affair some years ago, if that is so, and someone took his time to write it after Homer, then the earliest time to trace it is when the writer sat down and wrote it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthen, you'd need an original, because copying texts was done by hand, and that means someone might have updated an expresion or made a mistake here or there, adding to the evolution of the language.
Since Dianetics was written in the modern era the only linguistic drift you may find is the absence of moronic emoticons and internet shorthand. As far as the Book of Mormon, whether it is true or made up by a bunch of horny young men as an excuse to practice polygamy, it reads like a book translated in the early to mid 1800s. A translation is going to read like the time period it was translated in simply because that is what translators do. If you can find the original golden plates and check them then you may get something useful out of it in regards to date of original creation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am much more interested in pre-Constantine versions of the Bible stories and the Vedas and similar such scriptures from a variety of religions.
I would also like to see the Pastafarian Menus translated into Sanskrit just because it would be cool.
Compare the King James Bible with a modern translation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAround four hundred years has caused many changes.
One of the problems with time travel would be understanding the language.
Dickens and Jane Austen are easy to read. Shakespeare is sometimes a problem, and Chaucer is very difficult.
Anything earlier is like a foreign language.