The Iliad and the Odyssey were written down around 800 BCE, but the events they are describing supposedly happened around the 13th century BCE.
(Pause here and marvel for a moment at the idea of cultural memory of a great war persisting as an oral tradition for 500 years, morphing over the centuries from whatever real event may have been to the myth we know today.)
And then consider this- no one in the Iliad or the Odyssey are ever described as reading or writing anything.
Because the period of time between the fall of Mycenean civilization (which used linear B) in the 11th century BCE and when the Iliad and the Odyssey were written (in Ancient Greek) was a "dark age" where as far as we can tell, cities and palaces were abandoned, most trade routes collapsed, and written language was *completely lost*. It wasn't until about 800BCE that a totally new writing system had to be basically imported from the Phoenicians and adapted into ancient Greek.
Their whole culture just kind of collapsed for a few hundred years, preserving their stories through oral tradition for CENTURIES, until they scrapped together a totally different God damn alphabet to write with.
So none of the characters in the Iliad or the Odyssey can read because as far Homer knew, this whole writing thing was *pretty fucking new*
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