The Odyssey: A Terrific Yarn

Sexy, sexy peril.

I still feel sort of bad about the Iliad leaving me so cold. I understand its importance, its primacy, even, as one of the first works of western literature. I can sort of appreciate the beauty of the language (it’s hard to judge when reading a translation, especially one that is prose rather than verse). But at the end of the day, to me it seemed like endless, repetitive battles and Olympian politics, and there were too many important characters for me to latch on to or feel sympathetic towards.

The Odyssey was different: I loved it.

Homeric Epithets As Parlor Game

I didn’t really like the Iliad, as I mentioned earlier (you know, a month ago), but after I’d read it I found that some of the stylized language was sticking with me. Specifically the epithets. Ox-eyed Hera, lovely-maned horses, Hektor of the glinting helmet/gleaming armor/ godlike strength, and so on and so forth. It began to seep into my internal monologue: my husband became T– of the deadly thundersnore, my infant daughter dribble-chinned E, and at the foot of my bed slept no mere tabby, but soft-footed Quinn of the lovely stripes.

The most likely explanation for my brief obsession is that I don’t get out that much. The other is that thinking like this makes one’s daily life seem a little more… epic. Try it:

Planned Diversion from the List: The Gospel of Luke

It’s on my list for later in the project, but seeing as how we’re coming up to Saturnalia the feast of Sol Invictus Christmas, I’m planning to read the nativity story, as covered in the Gospel of Luke, later this month. Meanwhile, here is one of the more touching renderings of a passage from that story:

Gets me every time. And the music’s first-rate.

“And his armour clattered about him.”

Achilles Slays Hector (Spoiler!), Peter Paul Rubens, via Wikipedia

Sorry about the hiatus. I’ve been on vacation– away from home, and away from screens. It was much-needed.

I’d like to point out that my blogging is a lagging indicator of this project’s progress: currently I’m neck-deep in the Upanishads, which is a fair few entries down the list.  Like anyone else with a kid and a full-time job and a spouse I actually like spending time with, it can be difficult to make time to write, especially when I’m enjoying the reading so much.

Well, mostly enjoying it. I wasn’t really wowed by the Iliad. I’m not sure why that is. I’ve been re-reading bits of it while trying to compose my thoughts about it. I’ll assume that the fault lies in the reader rather than in the material.

The Cradle of Civilization

 

Coin from a Queen of the Sassanid Empire, 630 AD

Here’s a really fantastic animated map from some folks at Maps of War that takes you through more than 53,000 years of the history of the Middle East and Mediterranean Basin in 90 seconds. It’s a simple, graphic, illuminating depiction of how often that region has changed hands. There were two empires I’d never heard of (Sassanid and Seljuk, being the last pre-Islamic Persian empire and the Medieval Sunni Muslim empire, respectively), and I had not quite grasped the extent of the Macedonian or Mongol empires. Whoa.

 

In the modern era, it’s pretty horrible to see how Westerners just sort of carved the place up for their own purposes (and still are).

Since this region is so important to the first two sections of the reading list, I thought it was relevant. Found via StumbleUpon.

Who Was Homer?

 

5th or 6th Century AD Greek Manuscript of The Iliad

 

Moving on now to Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey. These stories are not only a hugely important part of the Greek identity: for more than three thousand years, artists from Dante to William Shakespeare to Led Zeppelin have drawn on the characters and themes laid out in Homer’s treatment of the Trojan War and its aftermath. They are perhaps the first great achievement of Western culture we’re aware of.

 

But we don’t know who Homer was, and we may never know. There’s an old joke that says the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, but by another man of the same name. (I never said it was a good joke.) There is an entire branch of scholarship dealing with what’s called The Homeric Question, wherein lots of clever people sift through the evidence to try to figure out:

• If Homer existed
• Whether “he” was a single historical figure or a group of poets
• When and how the epics attributed to Homer were composed

From what I can tell, based on about a week of reading superficially, here is what we know:

Meta-Reading: A History of Western Philosophy

We are about to get into the Ancient Greeks, so I’ve been looking for good commentary and historical works. So far I’ve been working with Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy.

If you want to have a good basic overview of western civilization, you could pretty much get there with this one book. For the general reader who didn’t have a western civ course during college (or didn’t go to college at all), this book helps you understand historical contexts of different ideas in ancient philosophy and gives a more cursory, but still valuable, sketch of modern philosophy.  Now and then it’s even funny.

Marks against it: it was written during WWII, so some of the historical research will be out of date. Russell’s personality is very deeply stamped on it; it bears his own biases (particularly as regards the Catholic Church. Spoiler: he was not a fan).

Marks in favor: it’s written by a genius with a rare gift for clear, simple writing. He was also a mathematician, so mathematical and logical ideas expressed in the philosophies are illuminated in a way that shouldn’t intimidate those with a maths phobia. And Bertrand Russell was a naughty guy who looked exactly like the Mad Hatter in his old age.

If you know a better guide to philosophy that also takes history into account, let me know.

Going Forth By Day

When you walk through the British Museum and decide to look for “Egyptian stuff”, it’s hard not to be struck by the large proportion of funerary artifacts in the collection. From cat mummies to kingly sarcophagi to the remains of an actual human tied in the fetal position in a wicker basket, if you’re going just by what’s in the museum cases, so much of Ancient Egyptian culture seems to be about living fast, dying young, and leaving a leathery, heavily salted corpse.

The cynic in me is prepared to think that all the focus on tomb artifacts is just down to what sells tickets: shiny things and dead people (not that the British Museum charges an entry fee, but most American museums do). But it’s hard to deny the weird allure of the Ancient Egyptian way of death: the rituals were so elaborate, and the many people involved took such pains to do it properly, to ensure the dead person would be granted immortality.

The Book of The Dead has the same attraction, even though, like the instruction manual in Beetlejuice, it reads like stereo instructions. Sometimes it’s actually worse..

Book of the Dead: A Digression About The History Of Writing

 

The Rosetta Stone

I’ve been sitting on my hands vis-a-vis this blog lately because I learned a few weeks back that a friend would be coming in to London, giving us an excuse to pop round to the British Museum, where I’d be able to get a look at the Papyrus of Hunefer with my own eyeballs. I went down on the 26th.

 

We took a mosey through artifacts most closely related to the three cultures I’ve been reading about so far: the Ancient Mesopotamians, the Ancient Egyptians, and (coming soon) the Ancient Greeks.  What interested me, in addition to the art, was getting up close and personal with the letters and words, whether they were on stone, in clay, or on papyrus or a sarcophagus. What is it that first drove us to write?

 

Cuneiform tablet approx 2000 BC.

Our stories just got too big to keep in our heads, I suppose, or too good to only be shared in person. Or perhaps, as some have suggested, we just wanted to write about how terrific beer is.

“Written language was the product of an agrarian society.  These societies were centered around the cultivation of grain.  A natural result of the cultivation and storage of grain is the production of beer.  It is not surprising, therefore, that some of the very oldest written inscriptions concern the celebration of beer and the daily ration alotted to each citizen. It’s tempting to claim that the development of a writing system was necessitated by the need to keep track of beer, but perhaps we can be satisfied that it was just part of it.”

Interesting. We’ve gone from a daily ration of beer to a very stern warning not to drink more than 2 units a day. But I digress.

Writing seems to have emerged in four different civilizations: the ancient Chinese, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Mesoamericans all came up with phonetic writing independent of one another.  As far as we can tell, all four systems began as ideograms– pictures representing the object displayed– and gradually developed into glyphs that represented syllables and then into smaller individual sounds (but no vowels, in Egyptian).

 

You may not buy a vowel.

I have heard people declare at various times that humans are unique because they use tools. I don’t really agree with this: crows and dolphins and chimps use tools, too, albeit primitive ones. We’re unique, as far as I can tell, because we use symbols. We tell stories, we keep accounts. We have to offload our memories and ideas onto something that will outlast us.

 

 

The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Beware of New-Age Woo

Papyrus of Hunefer: The deceased's heart is weighed against the feather of truth.

The Egyptian Book of The Dead: Writers Unknown, Dates Various.

The Ancient Egyptians are darned fascinating, so it’s no surprise that all kinds of unsavory or addlepated or merely unscholarly types have latched on to them over the years, spreading a lot of misinformation that results either from poor understanding of what’s actually been discovered, or from wholesale invention. Much is unknown about Ancient Egyptian culture in spite of the relative wealth of artifacts we have from them (how exactly did they build the Pyramids, for example?), so one should tread warily when starting to read more widely on the subject.

It pays to read up a little on Egyptology and Egyptologists first. You shouldn’t, for example, bop uptown to the central library and grab the first edition of The Egyptian Book of The Dead to hand, only to discover that it was written by a pseudonymous martial arts teacher who may or may not actually have a Ph.D., but who definitely believes that the Ancient Egyptians are connected to the mythical Lost Continent of Atlantis. And who also offers this tidbit:

“The circulation of earth energy is one of five types of circulation, which affect our lives physically and spiritually. The subtle energy of earth enters the human body through the feet, hips, and kidneys, and has five currents. These currents mix with the energy of the soul (Ba), which resides in the marrow of the bones, feeding the 12 inner organs in a cycle during the hours of day and night. Each organ is fed for two hours….”

Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.