One of *those* topics.
Posted on 07/08/2011 11:33:43 AM PDT by wildbill
“Now when did Odysseus return to Penelope? The date is given with a precision most unusual in epic poetry.”
"Because the lines describing the alleged eclipse are considered suspect, we shall use other passages in the Odyssey to shed some light on the issue, without assuming an eclipse. Given an interpretation of certain passages in the Odyssey as describing astronomical phenomena, we will look for dates in which the phenomena match. We shall find that the most likely day matching these other phenomena is 16 April 1178 B.C., suggesting there may be corroborating information in the epic for the eclipse hypothesis. In other words, the passages we analyze appear to cohere.
Two important caveats: first, that if our interpretation of such passages as astronomical phenomena were incorrect, our calculation of dates and their probability or improbability would also be incorrect; and second, that even if correct, we get no indication whether the events narrated in the epic did happen.
(Excerpt) Read more at pnas.org ...
I’m not talking about being able to recognize isolated skeletal parts. Only a real woodsman, or a person who kills his own food, could probably tell the difference between the isolated pelvis of different game species that are about the same size.
But when anybody encounters and entire skeleton, it’s pretty clear whether it’s a cow, a deer, a human being, a dog, a small rodent-like mammal, an elephant, or something you’ve never seen before. You can certainly look at a whole skeleton and recognize the shape of a horse’s skull and neck, even if you’re not a horseman, so you know you haven’t found the skeleton of a deer or muskrat. Naturally if some primitive person, or even a modern-day person, came across the newly-exposed skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, they could see that this huge thing was like nothing that had been seen before, and it doesn’t take much to flesh the bones out in one’s mind.
...It appears, however, that in the Iliad Homer telescoped into a few weeks events that took place in the space of several decades. At least some of the events may be placed in a chronological order with the help of ancient Israelite sources: namely, on the day when King Ahaz was interred the motion of the Earth was disturbed so that the Sun set before its appointed time; ...In Greek legendary tradition the first event took place in the days of the two brothers, Atreus and Thyestes, contesting the throne of Mycenae... The fixing of the event to the early spring of -687 is made on the strength of the information from Hebrew sources that the event took place on the night of Passover, during the second campaign of Sennacherib against Judah, the ninth campaign of his reign. The exact date for the last of this series of catastrophes is provided by the records of the astronomical observations of the Chinese... in the year -687, on the 23rd of March... Romulus was a contemporary of Hezekiah; and the 23rd of March was the most important day in the Roman cult of Mars... The siege of Troy under Agamemnon followed by less than one generation the natural disturbances of the days of his father Atreus, when this king of Mycenae competed with his brother Thyestes for the crown of the realm and the Sun was disrupted in its motion. Atreus and Thyestes, being contemporaries of Ahaz and Hezekiah, and Agamemnon, son of Atreus, a contemporary of the latter king of Jerusalem, it seems that the time in which the drama of the Iliad was set was the second half of the eighth century, and not later than -687; yet the poet condensed the events separated by decades into the tenth year of the Trojan siege, the time of the Iliad's action. Thus we come to realize that it was a rather late time; clearly Homer could not have lived before the events he described; and therefore Homer's time cannot be any earlier than the end of the eighth century. But more probably he wrote several decades after the Trojan War...
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