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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
Of the sources of Homer in the literary sense we can know nothing. There is no antecedent, no contemporary literature extant; and no analysis of later works will yield anything that can be proved to represent a literary tradition earlier than Homer. Archaeology, however, which has made the origins of Hellenic culture in some degree intelligible, has at least furnished a solid stage and a veritable background for the action of the Iliad. How much did Homer know of the past? A systematic examination of the archaeological data which the poems offer suggests that he knew a great deal; knew it with a precision which cannot be explained away as fortuitous, and about so remote a past that we must postulate a stream of tradition traceable much further back than the siege of Troy. For the purposes of this paper Homer means the author of the Iliad in substantially its present form, whose floruit the present writer would not put earlier than the ninth century, and the term is used, without prejudice, for the author of the Odyssey also. Eratosthenes' date of 1184 for the fall of Troy is assumed less because it came to be accepted as the standard date in antiquity than because it fits so well into what we know of the history of the Mediterranean world at that time.
1 Klio, xiv.: = Myres and Frost, The Historical Background of the Trojan War.
2 SirEvans, Arthur now brings down the lower limit of the period to 1450, The Shaft Graves of Mycenae, p. 89Google Scholar.
3 Bossert, , Altkreta 2, p. 202Google Scholar.
4 At Mycenae (shaft-grave and chamber-tomb), Asine, Dendra, Kakovatos, Spata, Menidhi, Dhimini. They have occurred once only in Crete, in a tomb at Zafer Papoura (Evans, , Preh. Tombs of Knossos, p. 67Google Scholar) and may therefore be regarded as belonging to the mainland culture. For illustrations see Reichel, , Homerische Waffen 2, pp. 103–5Google Scholar, and Bossert, , Altkreta 2, p. 169Google Scholar.
5 Bossert, , Altkreta 2, p. 205Google Scholar. It is possible that the epithet 
(
270 and 616) also describes a cup of this type. See Bechtel, Lexilogus Zu Homer, sub voc.
6 There are isolated examples from the Vaphio tomb (sixteenth century) and (with no dating material) from Melos, and Thera, . See Essays in Aegaean Archaeology, pp. 63 ff.Google Scholar; Tsountas-Manatt, , The Mycenaean Age, p. 200Google Scholar. The example recently found by the Swedes at Dendra is still unpublished; see Mr.Wace, article in The Times of Sept. 10th, 1926Google Scholar. The earliest known example of the technique is afforded by the three 
found in the tombs of the kings of Byblos, on which hieroglyphs of gold are let into a layer of niello. (See Montet, , L' Art Phénicien au XVIIIe Siécle avant J.C., Mon. Piot, xxvii., Pl. I. 1Google Scholar, pp. 3, 4, 5, Figs. 1, 2, 3.) These weapons are dated to the Twelfth Dynasty by the associated Egyptian objects. Vases of Cretan type show that Byblos was also in contact with the Aegean. To the Egyptian examples quoted above may be added the socket-ring of the spear of King Kames, dating from the first decade of the sixteenth century, which has a design of lilies inlaid in gold See Evans, , The Shaft Graves of Mycenae, p. 38Google Scholar, Fig. 30.
7 J.H.S. xxi. p. 108.
8 Parartema, Eph. Arch., 1916; Arch. Anz., 1916, p. 147.
9 Evans, , P. of M., I. p. 632Google Scholar, Fig. 470.
10 Evans, , P. of M., I. pp. 301Google Scholar ff., Fig. 228.
11 Bossert, , Altkreta 2, pp. 176Google Scholar, 229a, 236b.
12 No material is associated with the black of the grape-bunches, but the daggers show that niello was used to give a black outline. Κυάνϵος (564) presumably indicates the material, though it does not occur on the daggers.
13 v. J.H.S. xxiii. pp. 133 and 137.
14 Arch. Zeit. 1882, Pl. IX.; Ant. Denkm. i. 57.
15 Bossert, , Altkreta 2, p. 41Google Scholar, partially Palace of Minos, I. p. 542.
16 277 Kinkel, D., Ep. Gr. Fr., p. 7Google Scholar.
17 Cf. the inlaid work, presumably from a dagger, representing flying-fish and swimmers, Marinatos, , Essays in Aeg. Arch., pp. 63Google Scholar ff.
18 452–478.
19 Σ 207 ff.
20 See Ker, W. P., Essays on Mediaeval Literature, pp. 32Google Scholar ff.
21 If indeed it is a blot. I have seen in print a denial of the alleged fact by a big-game hunter, but unfortunately cannot recover the reference.
22 Palace of Minos, I. p. 718, Fig. 541a. Cf. the LM. gem from Peloponnese, , Bossert, , Altkreta 2, p. 234Google Scholar, Fig. 325a; here Fig. 3.
23 Rodenwaldt, Tiryns, II. Pl. XIII.
24 This is the unnamed group from the tomb of Senmut (B.S.A. xvi., frontispiece). Even if the Keftiu are not the Minoans whom they so closely resemble, they still testify that Egypt was accessible to visitors; and Egyptian tombs of the fifteenth century have yielded pottery, perhaps rather Mycenaean than Minoan, which bears witness to relations with the Aegean.
25 The subject of defensive armour in Homer has been treated in greater detail by the present writer in Liverpool Annals, 1928.
26 Crete appears to be (in the Minoan Age) the home of the body-shield in both its forms, and here its use later than 1400 is attested by monuments. A gem from Crete representing a duel with the old armature (Furtwängler, and Loeschcke, , Myk. Vasen, Textb. Pl. E 30Google Scholar) belongs to the L.M. III. period, and another found by Mr. Forsdyke in a cemetery of Knossos in 1927 to the very end of that period (B.S.A. xxviii. Pl. XIX. viib. 5). It is, of course, possible that the Cretans carried their big shields to Miletus and that they lingered there till supplanted by the Ionian panoply in the seventh century. The ring from Boeotia now in the Ashmolean, (J.H.S. xlv. p. 26Google Scholar, fig. 30) is ascribed to the L.M. III. period.
27 Eph. Arch. 1891, Pl. III. 2. Possibly a type of Semitic origin to which further reference will be made below.
28 Schuchhardt, , Schliemann's Excavations, p. 132Google Scholar.
29 Helbig, , Das Homerische Epos 2, p. 324Google Scholar. Müller, W. Max, Asien u. Europa, p. 374Google Scholar.
30 Excavations in Cyprus, Pl. II.
31 W. Max Müller, op. cit., pp. 364–5. Hall, , Civilisation of Greece in the Bronze Age, pp. 241–2Google Scholar.
32 Poulsen, , Der Orient und die frühgriechische Kunst, pp. 79, 80Google Scholar.
33 The lobster corslet disappeared before the Idaean type of shield came into being. If the interpretation suggested above is correct, Agamemnon's arming contains anachronistic elements of its own.
34 Helen's wheeled work-basket (δ. 131), though acquired in Egypt, seems to be a product of Cyprus, where various articles are mounted on wheels in the Early Iron Age (cf. 1 Kings vii. 30).
35 J.H.S. xxxii. p. 293, fig. 4.
36 Meillet, A., Les Origines Indo-Européenes des Mètres Grecs, passim, esp. p. 62Google Scholar. K. Meister, Die Homerische Kunstsprache, also maintains the foreign origin of the hexameter, but supposes the Greeks of Asia Minor to have borrowed it from Phrygia.