Writing the Illiad – date confirmed
Posted by Sane Spirit on Sunday, March 17, 2013
Under: In the News
“When the Homeric epics were produced is not known with certainty,” said Dr. Mark Pagel of the University of Reading. “Here we apply evolutionary-linguistic phylogenetic statistical methods to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to estimate a date of approximately 710–760 BCE for these great works.”
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Professor Pagel added, “Our analysis of The Iliad has not been informed by historical, archaeological or cultural information but by a statistical analysis of shared vocabulary between three languages and the rates of lexical replacement in Indo European languages. Yet, our estimated dates fall in the middle of classicists’ and historians’ preferred date for Homer. The outcome of this research on The Iliad demonstrates the way in which language can be used, like genes, to unravel questions in history, archaeology and anthropology.”
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Returning to the Homeric Iliad conundrum researchers, writing in the journal Bioessays, conclude that their “model returns a date for Homer of 762 BCE with 95% confidence intervals from 376 to 1157 BCE.
It is intriguing in this light that the ‘Nestor’s cup’, a vase excavated from an Ancient Greek site in Italy, contains an inscription that some scholars think refers to a line from the Iliad, and is dated to 740–720 BCE. Equally, the new 95% upper limit falls in the middle of the 12th century, the period during which some scholars think the Trojan wars might have been fought.”
Writing the Illiad – date confirmed
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Professor Pagel added, “Our analysis of The Iliad has not been informed by historical, archaeological or cultural information but by a statistical analysis of shared vocabulary between three languages and the rates of lexical replacement in Indo European languages. Yet, our estimated dates fall in the middle of classicists’ and historians’ preferred date for Homer. The outcome of this research on The Iliad demonstrates the way in which language can be used, like genes, to unravel questions in history, archaeology and anthropology.”
[,,,]
Returning to the Homeric Iliad conundrum researchers, writing in the journal Bioessays, conclude that their “model returns a date for Homer of 762 BCE with 95% confidence intervals from 376 to 1157 BCE.
It is intriguing in this light that the ‘Nestor’s cup’, a vase excavated from an Ancient Greek site in Italy, contains an inscription that some scholars think refers to a line from the Iliad, and is dated to 740–720 BCE. Equally, the new 95% upper limit falls in the middle of the 12th century, the period during which some scholars think the Trojan wars might have been fought.”
Writing the Illiad – date confirmed
In : In the News