It has been quite a long time since I have found the time to post here, but when I found this article I felt a strong urge to brush the dust of the ol’ blog and continue sharing again.
This is pretty cool. I love to see developments like this. It always motivates me to pick up an old favorite and look at it in a new way.
“Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.
It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Experts have long debated whether the books of Homer reflect the actual history of the Trojan War and its aftermath.
Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina, acknowledge they had to make some assumptions to determine the date Odysseus returned to his kingdom of Ithaca.
But interpreting clues in Homer’s “Odyssey” as references to the positions of stars and a total eclipse of the sun allowed them to determine when a particular set of conditions would have occurred.
“What we’d like to achieve is to get the reader to pick up the ‘Odyssey’ and read it again, and ponder,” said Magnasco. “And to realize that our understanding of these texts is quite imperfect, and even when entire libraries have been written about Homeric studies, there is still room for further investigation.”
Their study potentially adds…”
Full article at: Odysseus’ Bloody Homecoming Dated to 1178 B.C..
