From Geneticists Estimate Publication Date of the "Iliad."
Of course, publication is not exactly the term one would use for an oral work, which, as the research shows seemed to have grown out of various other oral traditions that go back another 500 years or so before the "publication" date. Still, the language itself served as the bread crumbs that mark the trail of origins to when the compilation of stories known as the Iliad became set in the form that has been passed down to generations.
"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."
The date they arrived at was 763 BCE, give or take 50 years.
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.
They took the language of the Hittites, a people that existed during the time the war may have been fought, and modern Greek, and traced the changes in the words from Hittite to Homeric to modern. It is precisely how they measure the genetic history of humans, going back and seeing how and when genes alter over time.
I just started reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Among other things, he mentions the fact that Homer never mentions the color blue in his works and refers to Gladstones's theory that the Greeks had no name for that color. Observations of this are in a Radiolab under the title "Why Isn't the Sky Blue?" It begins as follows:
What is the color of honey, and "faces pale with fear"? If you're Homer--one of the most influential poets in human history--that color is green. And the sea is "wine-dark," just like oxen...though sheep are violet. Which all sounds...well, really off. Producer Tim Howard introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue!
I confess I did not sit through the 21 minute audio file, but do feel free to do so yourself. Instead, I wondered about whether or not the color blue is mentioned in TaNaCh -- the Bible. To be certain, I looked up the word in a Concordance, and found an absence of the word kachol. (There is a related word in Ezekiel 23:40, which includes the phrase "kichalta eynecha" [you shadowed your eyes].) But there is no mention of blue as the color itself. Some translations do include the color, but that is because they are using it for the translation of techeileth, a blue dye derived from a sea creature that gave a distinctive shade to cloth and thread used in the Tabernacle.
Other colors do appear in the Bible, though, most notably, "red," which is mentioned fairly early on, particularly when Esau describes the dish of lentils for which he sells his birthright.by using the word adom twice.
Curious about whether or not this has been discussed, I did what modern scholars do and turned to Google. Then I found Joel M Hoffman's response to What color is the “blue” of the Bible? He also distinguishes between techeileth and the general color blue.
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Related posts:
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2012/02/representing-randomness.html
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2012/02/on-unexpected.html
