10-11-2012, 01:29 PM
You're kidding right?
The dark ages are hardly a useless concept, despite the evidence of Lefkandi and some Cypriot sites. But as for the fall of Troy, read Burkert's article summarising all the ancient Greek writers on chronology...they give anything from the 15th to the 9th century. Arbitrarily choosing a date from this and correlating it with physical ruins to imply a definitive date is sloppy and, at best, fallacious. That's just now how oral poetry or cultural memory works anyway.
Define "as little as a few generations" please? I thought you accepted a bronze age date for the Trojan war? In which case a few generations really is a few centuries. The relative chronology of the epics themselves ensures this, this is a fact, sorry. The Epics are at best from the 8th century BC.
Gulan: Yes, Vermeule's comments were a bit of a crock but to be fair her way of thinking is fast becoming unorthodox amongst bronze age archaeologists too do they're starting to be more sensible. It does scare me, the way they throw around the words "oral tradition" to mean "lol whatever the fuck we want to mean" and cite no modern Homerists but Nagy.
The dark ages are hardly a useless concept, despite the evidence of Lefkandi and some Cypriot sites. But as for the fall of Troy, read Burkert's article summarising all the ancient Greek writers on chronology...they give anything from the 15th to the 9th century. Arbitrarily choosing a date from this and correlating it with physical ruins to imply a definitive date is sloppy and, at best, fallacious. That's just now how oral poetry or cultural memory works anyway.
Define "as little as a few generations" please? I thought you accepted a bronze age date for the Trojan war? In which case a few generations really is a few centuries. The relative chronology of the epics themselves ensures this, this is a fact, sorry. The Epics are at best from the 8th century BC.
Gulan: Yes, Vermeule's comments were a bit of a crock but to be fair her way of thinking is fast becoming unorthodox amongst bronze age archaeologists too do they're starting to be more sensible. It does scare me, the way they throw around the words "oral tradition" to mean "lol whatever the fuck we want to mean" and cite no modern Homerists but Nagy.
Jass
