The Iliad and the Odyssey

They are just early bastardized versions of the Maharbharata and Ramayana, aren't they? Another "invention" of the West turns out to be copied from the East.

• It's either the Maharbharata or a "Mame" thread around here. Over and over again. Can't you people come up with something NEW?

• The Mahabharata dates from the 8th or 9th century BCE. The Iliad and the Odyssey date from the 8th century BCE. It is extremely unlikely the ancient Greeks and the Sanskrits had contact with one another. The epic texts originated form their national cultures separate from one another. I cannot think of a single Classicist or Sanskritist who would argue otherwise. The Ramayana dates from the 5th to 4th century BCE, several centuries after the Homeric and the Mahabharata.

• Awww. Someone is just taking his first comparative lit course. How ADORABLE!

  Pollyanna%20Prisspot%2C%20School%20Marm

• R2 is so wrong.

• Nothing is brand new.

  Brian%20De%20Palma

• [quote]Nothing is brand new. True. Just ask Gaga.

  Madge

• The Ramayana sounds like a dance Mitzi Gaynor would teach us how to do in Go-Go boots, backed up a bunch of chorus boys.

• R7, that's coming soon in a Bollywood movie near you.

• The Iliad and the Odyssey are said to be a retelling of Gilgamesh.

• Long years ago, I did a paper comparing Mythology & the Bible. It surprised me how many of our earliest legends, stories, and oral traditions are so similar, like Samson and Hercules, for example. or the Norse god, Whodin and Zeus. Yes, there are obvious dissimilarities and details and cultural changes from civilization to civilization, and age to age, but the similarities persist. Makes you wonder. It's as if there was one universal Truth that got reinterpreted and revised yet the basic elements remained the same. Probably handed down from our forefathers the Ancient Aliens.

• Are there no educated people on DL anymore? It's the Hebrew Bible that is a retelling of Gilgamesh. And Greek and Sanskrit are both Indo-European languages that share an Aryan origin and mythology, so their epic sagas could be distantly related.

  Sumerian%20housewife

• I agree, R11. We don't even get links to the NYT op/ed pieces anymore. Maureen Dowd is greatly missed.

• Are you kidding, OP? You're a fucking idiot. Have you read the Maharbharata or Ramayana? I've tried reading both (wasn't able to get through either), but even in my short study of those works, they're not like the Iliad or the Odyssey, other than certain archetypal themes and characters, and even then, that is only in passing.

• Sumerian housewife, shouldn't you be out planting chickpeas?

• R13, you may not agree with OP, but calling him a "fucking idiot" seems a bit much.

• You could look at it that way. Or you could, more intelligently, look at it as a confirmation that the themes of myth are universal. I doubt very highly that Homer and Virgil were personally familiar with the classic Indian sagas.

• Joseph Campbell owns this thread!

• The works have little in common. And the Iliad and Odyssey are very different in every way but structure. Try reading all four works, OP, instead of regurgitating nonsense.

• Congrats, OP. You've got the most pretentious post of the year. Not to mention dullest. Wake me when the conversation gets interesting and turns to a comparison of Valley of the Dolls vs. Lucky/Chances.

  Barbara%20Thorndyke

• Has anyone out there ever planted chickpeas? Are they easy to grow?

  Budding%20gardener

• Shout out to Joseph Campbell. He moved me from agnosticism to atheism - the good little Catholic school girl that I was. The Power of Myth should be required reading/viewing for every middle schooler. For me, who was never interested in mythology or ancient history, it was a beautiful discovery of human nature and connection. Though I completely lost my "faith" in my religion I discovered a new found faith and comfort in humanity.

• The New Testament is the retelling of The Odyssey

• The Jewish religious texts were not written down until the Babylonian Exile. Think about it.

• This scholar actually makes that argument, r22. R23, that isn't entirely true. Some of the texts of the Hebrew Bible were written down or reached their final form around the time of the Exile. But some were written long before (Much of Psalms, the J and E strains of the Pentateuch, the David-Solomon royal history) and some long after (Daniel).

  http://www.amazon.com/The-Homeric-Epics-Gospel-Mark/dp/0300080123

• The Iliad and Odyssey are more likely 7th century than 8th century (but using older stories, poetic formulas, etc.). Any similarities to Indian epic could depend on shared Indo-European background (going back almost a millennium) or common story motifs, not direct influence. Similarities to Gilgamesh could very well come from direct influence, since there were presumably enough people bilingual in Akkadian and Greek in that time and place. Also, Joseph Campbell is ahistorical shite.

  Mythologus

• Joseph Campbell was barely dead when there was a Jewish outcry about his supposed Anti-Semitism. In the late 80s and early 90s, no celeb or public figure could die without a review and judgement being passed on whether or not they were friends of Jews. It was very odd.

• Most scholars date the Iliad to the mid-8th century (@750 BCE), and the Odyssey to a little later (@720 BCE).

• And yet the oldest place names in Palestine are Indo-European, Sanskrit sounding names.

• Some say the Maharbharata is the Iliad translated into Sanskrit.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata

• If the Mahabharata is 10 times the length of the Iliad, the Iliad is not a "translation" of it.

• Can you back that up in some way, r28?

• Of course R31

  http://veda.wikidot.com/sanskrit-origin-names

• There are only two plots: 1.) someone embarks on a journey of discovery; 2.) a stranger comes to town.

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• There are certain thematic elements that recur in these epics, but, overall, the Iliad and the Odyssey are very different from the Sanskrit epics in topic. I'm quite familiar with the Homeric epics and the Mahabharata, and it never really occurred to me to suppose that any "copying" is going on. (On the other hand, the Aeneid does bear some resemblance to several books of the Mahabharata.) Unless I'm mistaken, the oldest sections of the Mahabharata date no earlier than ca. 400 BCE, although the events being "described" are much earlier. Most scholars date the Iliad and Odyssey to the eighth century BCE, although, again, the events being "described" must be several centuries older.

• Absurd. No similarities in epical motive, scale, theme, world view, plotting, characterizations, or underlying cultural motifs. Given the broadly disparate rationales of the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, attempting to overlay a migration from India is laughably twattish. Besides, no one seriously thinks anyone from the India subcontinent actually came up with the Mahabharata (at least try to get spellings right for things you know nothing of, OP), Ramayana or any of the Vedas, Upanishads or other texts without heavy borrowing from other materials. The inability of the Indians of any epoch to do anything original is a given from prehistory to the present.

• That is quite the load of crap at the link in r32. Ethnic championing is not scholarship.

• The Illiad was an oral story handed down approximately 400 years before written down around the 8th century BC by someone known as Homer. It is based on true events as archeology has proven. There was city in that locale that was subjected to a siege and destroyed. Certain lines of the poem describing the views and scenery can still be seen to this day, once the correct vantage point is found. The (contemporary) Hittite Empire's records contain traces of a invasion by the Greeks of a city on the coast of Asia Minor - they referred to this city as steep wilios - close to "steep Illium." Finally, even little things tie to the evidence, Troy was a walled city, one wall built by men, the rest built by gods. And the excavated city had one wall weaker than the rest.

• Didn't they even find the boats or something recently? Like in the past 100 years? Troy was in what is now Turkey. It's much further inland then it was and I believe there were seven walls to get to the city, the outer wall, and six more.

• No. They are not even vaguely similar. OP must have decided not to even read any of the works mentioned. Ignorant.

• In the 60s, all those wiry haired anteater radicals decided the Classics weren't relevant and the Dumbing Down of America began. But when their kids came along, they dropped radicalism and put their energies into getting their little darlings into the best schools.

• You should get some sleep, r40.