Is there any evidence that Homer’s Odyssey was inspired by the activities of the mysterious sea peoples that led to the bronze age collapse? That is, was the epic based on cultural memories of the raids that led to the collapse of bronze age societies?
Well, it doesn’t really seem to be about settled societies on land being attacked by people from the sea. Are you thinking that Odysseus and his crew represent the sea people? That it is told from the “sea people” point of view? It doesn’t really seem to fit the story.
Also, although tradition may have it that Egypt and some other bronze age cultures suffered from the depredations of “sea people”, the traditional story of the collapse of bronze age (Achaean) Greece is that they suffered land invasion from the north, by the Dorians. I believe some revisionist accounts of this would place the “Dorians” as already in Greece, as perhaps a lower caste, but I do not believe there is any real suggestion that they were “sea people” (except in the sense that most Greeks were, relying, economically, largely upon fishing and sea trade).
Indeed, I was wondering if The Odyssey (or the stories that led to poem) had its genesis from orally passed stories about the sea people. Odysseus sacking Troy and then wandering the Mediterranean seems like a story that could have resulted from one too many retellings of ancient memories of sea people raids. But I’m afraid you are correct; the geography is all wrong!
One theory I’ve heard is that the “sea people” were Tartessians, a group of people who lived in southern Spain. (S.M. Stirling fans will recognize them.)
Well, the story is wrong too. The Odyssey does no tell of the sack of Troy at all, it is about the travails of Odysseus trying to get home after the sack. I thought you meant the fact that Odysseus and his men do fuck up a few land based people, such as the cyclopses, along the way, but that scarcely seems a large enough part of the story to make it, plausibly, an allegory about the sea people destroying “civilization”.
The Iliad is about the sack of Troy (or, at least, the events leading up to it), but, although it does take them a short sea voyage to get there, the Greeks who destroy Troy are not represented as “sea people”, they are firmly based on the land quite as much as the Trojans are.
Yes, I’ve read both and I’m aware of the differences. But the Odyssey is mainly about Odysseus’s wanderings, and thus more appropriate in the context of my question about seafaring raiders (not to mention that it’s clear that the Odyssey tells the story of events happening after the Trojan war).
I do agree with your analysis, however. My original thought was that stories of the Sea People’s raids may have entered common lore, becoming bastardized through retelling and ultimately reshaped into Greek epic poems. But this now clearly just seems like unecessarily complicated speculation.
The description of armor and such in The Iliad matches in most ways the archaeological finds of Mycenaean artifacts. The cultural setting seems to match well, also.
Most telling, the catalog of ships that Homer gives contains a lot of place names of known, real Mycenaean sites. Several of which were abandoned by Classical Greek times. (A few place names continue to be a mystery.)
The Iliad was originally written by someone who knew a lot about Mycenaean Greece. Someone coming out of the Sea People culture would have been unlikely to care about such details.
The caveat being that we assume that most Sea Peoples were not Mycenaean Greeks.
Given the destruction seen throughout Mycenaean Greece shortly after the fall of Troy, it makes it hard to argue that a people who suffered so much at that time were also the people causing the suffering.
Unless it was civil strife, which I believe is one of the many hypotheses tossed around.
It’s interesting that this thread came up now. I was just doing a little reading on Wikipedia the other day about hypotheses for the Bronze Age collapse.
Of course, the old-time theory as far as Greece is concerned is the Dorian Invasion. People seem to be less and less sure about this as evidence for it doesn’t seem to be coming in.
That would be Greek on Greek violence, but not a civil war necessarily. And in the Dorian Invasion scenario, you’d have to explain why the Dorians were so keen on the tales of The Heroic Age. Keep in mind, the two surviving books were part of a larger corpus that included the now mostly lost Epic Cycle. Those Greeks really loved the tales of the Heroic Age.
If the Dorian Invasion is out, and you don’t want to go with non-Greek Sea Peoples, then another explanation (in general) is some sort of tech revolution. Hard to justify iron weapons and such given the time line.
But one thing I read that may have happened is a change in warfare that was effective against chariots. Chariots were the tanks of the day. (Hard to imagine them being effective in Grecian topography, but they were.) Perhaps new, massed formations with spears or something were found to work against them. The warrior elites found themselves at a disadvantage to low class masses. Havoc ensues.
Chariots are mentioned in the Iliad. E.g., in the battle where Patroclus gets killed. But some say Homer (or his late Bronze Age sources) didn’t really understand chariots in warfare for the most part. “Something” happened fairly soon after the Trojan War where the rule of chariots in warfare went away.
Whether this was a cause or effect, we don’t seem to know yet.
Usually in a civil war, especially with so many states, there would be winners. And Linear B writing would have persisted somewhat. But all the big cities were destroyed. Rural vs. Urban strife? Why would the rurals all over be against the Urbans all over? Ancient Greece seems just too segmented for such widespread internal destruction.
Perhaps it was a series of events. Invasion, volcano, civil war, tech.