Homeric Religion: The Gods and the Poet

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Real World ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Epic Tradition ◽  
The Real ◽  
Key Players ◽  
Greek World

The epics that are associated with Homer’s name, the Iliad and the Odyssey, emerge from a long tradition of oral song that extends back into the Late Bronze Age. The poems themselves, however, date from the late 8th or early 7th centuries bc. From the perspective of religious belief and religious practice, the society that is described in these epics, like the society of the 8th- and 7th-century Aegean world, is a polytheistic society: the heroes within the epics, like the audiences themselves of that epic tradition, worship not one but a number of gods. The gods of the epics, such as Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, and Aphrodite, are, however, remarkably vivid, in that they have not only been intensely personalized, being endowed with humanlike form and appearance, but also socialized. These gods are portrayed as a family that lives together on Mount Olympus, where they are embedded in a complex web of interpersonal relationships. And yet, despite their divine status, the gods of epic mingle with the race of heroes on earth; indeed, when they choose, they are key players in human affairs. On occasions the gods behave in ways that, to another culture, might appear undignified, ridiculous, or ungodly; but, for the most part, they presented as powerful figures and at times terrible. To turn from theology of belief, as represented in the Homeric epics, to the theology of religious practice, it will become clear from the discussion in this article that the Homeric account of religious practice is different in some respects from the religious practice of the archaic Greek world; what is observable is that the epic tradition has omitted from its account of religious practice a number of elements important to worshippers in the real world, such as divination through the consultation of entrails or rituals of fertility. And a certain poetic stylization of presentation has made some real-world practices less recognizable. More recently there have been fruitful attempts to identify elements of religious belief and practice that can be traced back in time to the wider Bronze Age world. At the same time, too, scholars have reflected on the gods’ role in the epic as participants in and observers of the action.

Understanding Minoan In-House Relationships on Late Bronze Age Crete

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Driessen
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Spatial Organization ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Social Unit ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Production And Consumption

Houses, space, and architecture are ways through which identities and social relations are enacted and performed; they produce and support practices that themselves are needed to reproduce or generate identities and interpersonal associations. As archaeologists, we are especially interested in the ways static structures can be used to identify ever-changing social relations; and this chapter is an attempt to approach the architectural configurations and spatial organization of larger residential complexes of Minoan Crete more socially and to see what structured these (Ensor 2013). My aim is to advance our knowledge on the micro-scale of proximate interactions, in other words what the evidence is for in-house relationships. As such it may help in an eventual peopling of the past. For a house to become a home, more than an architectural form is needed. Hence the linkage of house and household and the need for a house to become a social unit, the place of reproduction, socialization, and the setting of primary social and economic dealings. In this sense, the house as a home is also a nexus of social and economic activities and hence achieves a political importance since its roles in production and consumption are pivotal to the amalgamated whole which is the community. He who rules the home, rules the community. The house is the society. Throughout the different periods of Minoan civilixation, houses are given great prominence and many of them are striking architectural creations, surprising because of their size, design, elaboration, and decoration, clear signs of the significance of houses in interpersonal relationships. They are unmistakably more than physical residences; they are also transcendent categories with a life of their own (Bloch 2010: 156–7). Houses stand for social groups and are symbolic foci, something also underlined by J. D. Schloen (2007) in his monograph The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East.

The antiquity of the Greek epic tradition: some new evidence

1980 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.C. Horrocks
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Epic Tradition ◽  
Narrative Poetry ◽  
Greek Epic ◽  
Careful Handling ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
The Bronze Age

Since the decipherment of Linear B a number of scholars have argued, on the basis of supposed Mycenaean survivals in the Homeric poems, that the Greek legendary poetic tradition ran continuously from the Bronze Age through the Dark Age down to the singers of the Ionian towns in the ninth and eighth centuries. However, the directness of the connection between the narrative poetry of the Mycenaean Age, if indeed such existed, and the subsequent development of the Epic in Greece has been called into question. Thus Shipp, for example, has argued that most of the items listed by Chadwick in his article Mycenaean elements in the Homeric dialect in fact left their mark for a time at least on forms of Greek other than that of the Epic, and so could well have entered this tradition in post-Mycenaean times and in some other way than through a direct poetical current from the Bronze Age. A similar conclusion has been reached by Kirk, who has expressed his views forcefully in a series of publications. Consider the following:The two objective criteria for dating elements within the Homeric poems, namely archaeology and language, require careful handling and reveal less than is generally claimed for them. They enable certain elements to be recognized as having existed as early as the late Bronze Age, but do not necessarily prove that these all passed into the Ionian Epic tradition by the medium of late Bronze Age poetry.

Huurlingen, mobiliteit en reizigerslatijn

Lampas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-419
Author(s):  
Jorrit Kelder
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Near East ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Private Entrepreneurs ◽  
Greek World ◽  
Do So

Summary The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it argues that the Mycenaean Greek world served as a nexus for international trade between the Near East and Europe during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 to 1100 BCE). Rather than a barbarian periphery, Europe – and in particular regions such as the Carpathian basin and the southern Baltic (Denmark and Scania) – was an integral part of the much better known ‘civilised’ world of the ancient Near East. Second, it argues that ‘mercenaries’ (a term that I will use rather loosely, and which includes both private entrepreneurs and military captives) served as a hitherto overlooked conduit for knowledge exchange between Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Near East. It will do so by highlighting a number of remarkable archaeological finds, and by discussing these against the backdrop of contemporary (Late Bronze Age and Iron Age) texts as well as later legends.

The Philistines

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-169
Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Early Experience ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Archaeological Work ◽  
New Nation ◽  
David And Goliath

In a political and military sense, none of Israel’s neighbors loom as large in the biblical imagination as the Philistines. Indeed, the Bible depicts the Philistines as inextricably involved with Israel’s early experience with the monarchy, threatening the existence of the new nation. Throughout 1 Samuel—most famously in the story of David and Goliath—the Philistines antagonize Israel. Decades of archaeological research have given us an independent view of the Philistines—as a cultured people who were a contingent of the so-called Sea Peoples who migrated east after the collapse of the Late Bronze Age political system in the Mediterranean world. Though no substantial native Philistine literary culture or even a script to speak of survives, archaeological work at sites along the coastal plain has presented rich examples of a distinctive Philistine pottery tradition, iconography, and glimpses into their religious practice.

scholarly journals An alienated person in the novels “Do not Feed or Touch the Pelicans” by Andrey Astvatsaturov and “A Brief Life” by Juan Carlos Onetti Borges

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-193
Author(s):  
Boris V. Kovalev ◽  
Andrey P. Zhukov
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Juan Carlos Onetti ◽  
The Real ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach ◽  
Santa Maria ◽  
Subsequent Comparison

The article compares the methods of describing the “alienated person”, landscape and interpersonal relationships in the novel “Do not Feed or Touch the Pelicans” by the contemporary Russian writer Andrey Astvatsaturov and in the novel “A Brief Lifeˮ by the Uruguayan prose writer Juan Carlos Onetti Borges. The aim of the work is to identify the points of contact between the texts of the Uruguayan and the Russian authors within the framework of the hermeneutic approach. The research reveals a number of similarities in the authors' poetics at the narratological, compositional, philosophical and socio-psychological levels. Particular attention is paid to the analysis and commenting of dialogues in Andrey Astvatsaturov and J.C. Onetti. The communication of the characters in the texts is unproductive, the characters are alienated from each other and from the “soilˮ, and the spiritual in them is in irreconcilable conflict with the bodily. Montevideo and Santa Maria with J.C. Onetti as loci are Latin American analogues of St. Petersburg with Andrey Astvatsaturov. The “carnivalˮ finals of the novels are compared. The conclusion is made about the typological similarity of Andrey Astvatsaturov and J.C. Onetti as authors who hold pessimistic views of the real world and model fictional worlds in an attempt to overcome the oppressive longing of reality. The authors borrow techniques and strategies for text arrangement from authors such as William Cuthbert Faulkner, Jerome David Salinger, and Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre while working on his novels. The question is raised about the further observation of the evolution of the poetics of Andrey Astvatsaturov and the subsequent comparison of his new texts with the novels of J.C. Onetti.

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