Crossposted from https://mbin.potato-guy.space/m/videos@sopuli.xyz/t/181120

From the description:

This study examines the historical value of the Iliad and Odyssey by asking not whether the Trojan War happened exactly as Homer describes, but how much genuine historical memory survives within the Homeric tradition. Drawing on archaeology, Hittite texts, Linear B tablets, comparative epic literature, and recent Homeric scholarship, it argues that the poems preserve overlapping memories of the Late Bronze Age, the Early Iron Age, and the mythic world of Greek epic.

Topics include the identification of Ahhiyawa and Wilusa in Hittite sources, the archaeology of Troy, oral-formulaic composition, the Homeric Question, Mycenaean political institutions, Bronze Age weaponry and elite culture, Early Iron Age funerary practices, the Catalogue of Ships, and the influence of Anatolian and Near Eastern literary traditions. Particular attention is given to how historical realities were transformed through centuries of oral transmission before reaching their extant form.

Rather than treating Homer as either a reliable historian or a creator of pure fiction, we suggest the Iliad and Odyssey are more like repositories of cultural memory, preserving authentic details from multiple historical periods while reshaping them into one of history’s greatest epic traditions. The result is a synthesis of archaeology, ancient history, philology, and literary criticism that offers a new perspective on the relationship between myth, memory, and history in the ancient eastern Mediterranean.