Time cools me with laughter

[sovay]

Good morning, says the world, sociopolitically everything is on fire and environmentally it feels just the same and you spent too much of your afternoon on difficult phone calls with doctors and bureaucracy, but here is a third-century CE clay tablet engraved with an extract from Odyssey 14, which no one expected to exist. Don't say I never gave you nothing.

Comments

[asakiyume]

What's crazy is that that fragment is still 11 centuries from the time of the Odyssey's composition. More than a millennium earlier. I know Gilgamesh and things are even older, but those others don't live in the present with such vibrancy. The Odyssey has had an active, interactive grip on human imagination continuously for so long!

...

Or now I'm having doubts. Was it continuous? I suppose that's what wikipedia's for...

[sovay]

I know Gilgamesh and things are even older, but those others don't live in the present with such vibrancy. The Odyssey has had an active, interactive grip on human imagination continuously for so long!

Oral traditions are flexible, durable, and extremely important!

Or now I'm having doubts. Was it continuous? I suppose that's what wikipedia's for...

I think of it as continuously known, just not continuously recorded, or recorded in any fashion that survived. (There is a lot of attestation in visual art and other texts make reference to it, including ancient biographies of Homer which otherwise can't be trusted so far as you can throw a statue.) Maybe more of the older versions will turn up now that we know they exist. As I said to thisbluespirit, I really want to know if this version varies from the one we've had in twelfth-century CE manuscript onward.