#30daysofbooks day 5: the oldest book you've ever read . Not only is this the oldest book I've ever read, it's arguably the oldest book there is. Along with The Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Hesiod's Theogony and Works And Days, it's considered one of the oldest extant works in the western literary tradition. . The story itself is interesting, if only to recognize how many other works reference it. But meta-analysis of the text is so much more fascinating. . For context, there actually was a city called Troy, or Ilion (hence the Iliad). And there actually was a war of some sort that happened there, and the city really was destroyed. We've found Greek arrowheads there, so we know the Greeks were involved somehow as well. The best we can tell, it happened somewhere around 1250 BCE. . But it wasn't until around 800-750 BCE that anyone bothered to write down what happened. So as a result, The Iliad is the result of a 500 year long game of broken telephone. . The story was passed down via an oral tradition, and each bard added their own flavour to the story. So you can read battle descriptions where someone is wearing a helm whose description matches one we've actually found in archaeological digs that date to a period of time far later than the Trojan War. In fact, the technology to create them hadn't even been invented yet. . What's even cooler is that you can see someone wearing that helm, using a cuirass from the year 1000, a spear from the year 1200, and a shield from 700. No one would ever have worn these things in this combination, but because it was passed down orally it ended up being told like this. . But how on Earth could someone possibly memorize a story as long as the Iliad, you may be wondering. Good question. The theory is that bards would know the general narrative, and the general style of the poem, and just fill in the blanks with a set of lines they memorized and could slot in wherever. If you analyze the original Greek, it supports this theory - 95% of the half lines in the poem are repeated at least once. . . . . . #history #historynerd #classicalhistory #greekhistory #ancienthistory #books #bookstagram #instabook #bookaddict#booklover https://www.instagram.com/p/B1rL3xsA-rA/?igshid=ihvbuc3fe1ge
