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What the Odyssey Gets Wrong About Bronze Age Greek Religion · Abide Meditation App

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  Speaker 1: A lot of people are mad at director Christopher Nolan
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  Speaker 1: right now. When the first trailer for his Odyssey dropped,
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  Speaker 1: Matt Damon as Odysseus showed up wearing this a bronze
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  Speaker 1: helmet with a big red horsehair crest, and the historical
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  Speaker 1: accuracy crowd descended because this is an anachronism, which just
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  Speaker 1: means something in the wrong period, like a Roman gladiator
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  Speaker 1: checking his apple watch. This helmet is an anachronism because
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  Speaker 1: the Odyssey is set at the end of the Bronze
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  Speaker 1: Age around twelve hundred BCE, at the end of what
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  Speaker 1: scholar is called the Mysinian civilization, the first Greek civilization
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  Speaker 1: attested in writing, and we actually know what Mysonian warriors
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  Speaker 1: look like. This is the Dendra panoply, a suit of
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  Speaker 1: armor made out of bronze plates from neck to knee,
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  Speaker 1: topped with a helmet made of bores tusks. So the
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  Speaker 1: critics have a point, but they're also assuming that Homer
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  Speaker 1: himself is a reliable guide to the Bronze Age, and
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  Speaker 1: scholars used to think that too. In the eighteen seventies,
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  Speaker 1: archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann dug up the Palace of Myceni, basically
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  Speaker 1: with a copy of Homer in one hand and his
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  Speaker 1: shovel in the other. When he found a gold death mask,
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  Speaker 1: he announced he gazed on the face of King Agamemnon himself.
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  Speaker 1: Now almost no scholar believes that today Homer is a
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  Speaker 1: complicated source. He's telling a story set in the late
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  Speaker 1: Bronze Age. But Homer himself, if he even was a
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  Speaker 1: single historical person, would have lived in the seven hundreds BCE,
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  Speaker 1: and the poems may not have even reached their final
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  Speaker 1: fixed form until the late seventh or sixth centuries BCE.
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  Speaker 1: Either way, that's a gap of five hundred years at
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  Speaker 1: least between the Mycenae and palaces in Homer's epics, roughly
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  Speaker 1: the distance between Christopher Nolan and Christopher Columbus. And it
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  Speaker 1: turns out that both Nolan's Odyssey and Homer's Odyssey are
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  Speaker 1: full of anachronisms. Sometimes Homer gets it right. He actually
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  Speaker 1: does describe Odysseus wearing a boores tusk helmet, an amazing
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  Speaker 1: detail for the historical accuracy crowd. But other times he
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  Speaker 1: gets things wrong. And armor is the easy case. We
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  Speaker 1: have the armour Nolan could have modeled his costumes after it.
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  Speaker 1: I'm more interested in whether he gets the religion right,
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  Speaker 1: and that's much harder to check, because there's religion as
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  Speaker 1: Homer describes it and religion as the Mysnians practiced it.
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  Speaker 1: Homer's poems are full of God's Athena, Zeus, Poseidon, Hermes.
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  Speaker 1: But it's fair to ask are these anachronisms too? So
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  Speaker 1: today we're exploring Mycenian religion, and to learn about it,
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  Speaker 1: we can't just read Homer. We have to go to
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  Speaker 1: the evidence they left behind. Our main source of evidence
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  Speaker 1: for Mysinean religion is a writing system called linear B.
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  Speaker 1: It's the earliest written Greek. We have a script pressed
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  Speaker 1: into clay tablets where each sign stands for a syllable
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  Speaker 1: rather than a single letter. It was deciphered in the
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  Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, when scholars suddenly realized that the language of
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  Speaker 1: the tablets was the earliest form of the Greek language
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  Speaker 1: attested in writing. The linear B tablets come from a
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  Speaker 1: few major centers, Canoso, Sancrete, Pilos, and Myceni in the
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  Speaker 1: Peloponnese Thieves in central Greece, with a scattering from elsewhere,
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  Speaker 1: and they're basically administrative texts Pallas bookkeeping from the palace accountants.
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  Speaker 1: They record livestock, grain, bronze, orili personnel, all moving around
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  Speaker 1: the palace. Economy interesting if you're a fan of ancient economics,
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  Speaker 1: and who among us is not but not exactly the
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  Speaker 1: most useful data when reconstructing ancient religion, As the scholar
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  Speaker 1: Thomas Palima puts it, we find in the linear B
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  Speaker 1: tablets no myths, hymns, prayers, ritual prescriptions, or laws or
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  Speaker 1: sanctuary regulations. In other words, we have nothing where a
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  Speaker 1: Mycenaean Greek tells us in their own words what they
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  Speaker 1: thought about the gods, why they mattered, and how to
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  Speaker 1: worship them. What we have instead are gods showing up
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  Speaker 1: as line items in a budget, basically as the recipients
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  Speaker 1: of various offerings. Here's an example. This is tablet p
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  Speaker 1: y TN three sixteen, a document from Pilos. Each line
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  Speaker 1: lists the sanctuary and the gods to which offerings are
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  Speaker 1: given at Swagianes for Potnia Manassa, Posidaia, Triceros Doptas at
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  Speaker 1: the sanctuary of Poseidon. Then it lists two goddesses for
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  Speaker 1: Guowea Coomawentia at the sanctuary of palaiwa Iphimedia and Dewia
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  Speaker 1: at the Sanctuary of Zeus for Zeus Hera and Dreman
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  Speaker 1: son of Zeus. It's not much to go on, but
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  Speaker 1: we can learn a lot from this, the names of gods,
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  Speaker 1: the locations of specific shrines, and possibly the clustering of
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  Speaker 1: certain gods like Zeus Hera and this otherwise unknown son
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  Speaker 1: of Zeus Dremios. But it's kind of like learning about
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  Speaker 1: Christianity three thousand years from now. But the only record
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  Speaker 1: that survives about the entire religion was the financial ledger
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  Speaker 1: from a megachurch accountant. You could learn a lot from that.
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  Speaker 1: You could learn that money flowed to the church on
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  Speaker 1: certain dates, usually in the spring and around December twenty fifth,
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  Speaker 1: and from that you could reconstruct a rough liturgical calendar
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  Speaker 1: that important festivals must have been celebrated in the spring.
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  Speaker 1: In late December, you'd also see line items for a
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  Speaker 1: lot of wine and bread, which might tell us that
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  Speaker 1: they were feature as an important regular ritual. And you
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  Speaker 1: might even see a salary for someone with a religious
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  Speaker 1: title called pastor or priest or deacon, enabling you to
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  Speaker 1: piece together a rough sketch of their religious authorities. But
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  Speaker 1: you never recover from a ledger alone what anyone believed
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  Speaker 1: about Jesus, or the Trinity or the Gospel stories. The
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  Speaker 1: ledger records what the institution considered to be worth tracking financially,
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  Speaker 1: and belief theology, mythology, and rituals don't necessarily show up
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  Speaker 1: in a budget. So with the limits of our sources
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  Speaker 1: in mind, let's start with something we can learn from
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  Speaker 1: the Linear B tablets the Mycenaean Greek gods. Roughly fifty
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  Speaker 1: to sixty individual gods are named in the Linear B tablets,
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  Speaker 1: and some are recognizable and many are not. First, there's Zeus.
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  Speaker 1: His name appears in the tablets as Dway and there
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  Speaker 1: was probably an s at the end of that pronounced
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  Speaker 1: something like Dweus. The name goes back to the Proto
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  Speaker 1: Indo European word for shining sky or bright sky, which
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  Speaker 1: may indicate he started as a sky god long before
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  Speaker 1: the Myceneans. I talk about this in one of my videos. Actually,
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  Speaker 1: if you're interested in the Proto Indo European sky god,
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  Speaker 1: and Zeus appears all over the tablets. At Kanya on Crete,
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  Speaker 1: there's a whole sanctuary that bears his name, and on
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  Speaker 1: that Pilos tablet that we looked at, he receives a
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  Speaker 1: gold vessel, and he's grouped with Hera and a figure
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  Speaker 1: called Derimios, son of Zeus, a divine child who doesn't
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  Speaker 1: appear in later Greek mythology. Hera appears as Era, and
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  Speaker 1: her pairing with Zeus in this tablet may indicate that
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  Speaker 1: Zeus and Hera were already considered to be a divine couple,
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  Speaker 1: as they appear in later Greek literature, though we can't
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  Speaker 1: be one hundred percent sure. The tablet puts them side
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  Speaker 1: by side, but it doesn't tell us they were married.
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  Speaker 1: Mysenian Zeus possibly had another female companion who appears as Deweya,
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  Speaker 1: which is simply the feminine form of Zeus's own name
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  Speaker 1: same route, deriving from the concept of the bright shining sky,
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  Speaker 1: but as a feminine noun a goddess. On that Pilos tablet,
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  Speaker 1: she has her own shrine, just like Zeus. So the
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  Speaker 1: Mysnian Zeus comes with a kind of female double, but
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  Speaker 1: we have no idea about her nature or her relationship
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  Speaker 1: with Zeus. By Homer's time, she had vanished. No Greek
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  Speaker 1: myth mentions her Dionysus also shows up in the tablets
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  Speaker 1: as Dewo Nuso. His name means something like son of Zeus,
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  Speaker 1: which fits a tablet found at Kania and Crete which
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  Speaker 1: records him receiving an offering of honey inside that sanctuary
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  Speaker 1: of Zeus. So that's the rough sketch of Mysonian Zeus,
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  Speaker 1: a skyfather, a possible consort with Hera, a forgotten female
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  Speaker 1: double named Dewea, a forgotten divine son named Rimios and Dionysus.
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  Speaker 1: And even though Zeus is the king of the god
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  Speaker 1: in later Greek religion, he might not have been the
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  Speaker 1: top god in Mysonean religion. That honor may have belonged
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  Speaker 1: to Poseidon, who appears as Posadao at Pilos. He is
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  Speaker 1: the dominant god woven into the state religion. There's a
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  Speaker 1: whole series of Pilos tablets recording contributions of grain to
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  Speaker 1: Poseidon from named individuals, almost like a tithe to the god.
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  Speaker 1: No other deity at Pilos gets anything like that treatment.
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  Speaker 1: There's also a tablet known as un seven eighteen, which
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  Speaker 1: records the provisions for a feast in Poseidon's honor wheat wine,
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  Speaker 1: a bowl cheese and honey, all offered to him. The
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  Speaker 1: contributions seem to come from the highest figures in the kingdom,
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  Speaker 1: including the wanax the king in Mysenean government lingo, as
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  Speaker 1: well as from the second highest ranking official called the lawagaetas,
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  Speaker 1: and from the demos, the local community. So from this tablet,
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  Speaker 1: the entire social pyramid of Pelos from the top to
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  Speaker 1: the bottom, donated food for Poseidon's feasts, which scholars think
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  Speaker 1: amounts to the state worship of Poseidon. And then there's Potnia,
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  Speaker 1: which we can translate as lady or mistress in later Greek.
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  Speaker 1: The word potnia survives most as an epithet, a title
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  Speaker 1: you tack onto a goddess's name, like calling hera potnia,
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  Speaker 1: hera lady, hera, and by the classical period around forty
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  Speaker 1: different goddesses bear that title. But in Mycenaean religion, potnia
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  Speaker 1: seems to have played a bigger role. It can also
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  Speaker 1: mean something like she who has power, and the title
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  Speaker 1: designates a plurality of goddesses of specific places and domains.
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  Speaker 1: There's the Potentia of horses. She's mentioned in a Pilos
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  Speaker 1: text alongside a list of men, which means she may
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  Speaker 1: have had a role in the military. There's also Cito Potnia,
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  Speaker 1: the mistress of grain, and Potnia Asiuella Potnia of Asia,
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  Speaker 1: a goddess somehow linked to the western coast of Anatolia,
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  Speaker 1: where the Mycenaean Greeks were already active at the time.
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  Speaker 1: And finally, on one tablet from Kenosos, there's a phrase
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  Speaker 1: Atana Potinia, something like mistress of Athena, maybe mistress of
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  Speaker 1: Athens Athena herself. This lines up closely with a phrase
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  Speaker 1: Homer uses when he refers to Athena as Potni Athanaia
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  Speaker 1: lady Athena. So is Potnia one goddess or many? Well?
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  Speaker 1: The tablets make it very difficult to tell, because because
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  Speaker 1: alongside all of these different Potnias, the scribes often just
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  Speaker 1: wrote Potnia full stop, no epithet or place name, just
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  Speaker 1: the mistress. At Pilos, this unmodified Potnia gets some of
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  Speaker 1: the kingdom's most valuable offerings, and entire teams of palace
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  Speaker 1: workers are labeled Potnian, like you'd have a Potnian blacksmith
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  Speaker 1: and a Potentian leather worker, basically craftsmen who are somehow
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  Speaker 1: working for the goddess so scholar's debate whether we're dealing
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  Speaker 1: with a specific goddess with many manifestations or multiple different
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  Speaker 1: goddesses sharing the same title. But the Mysonian Greeks may
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  Speaker 1: not have felt any need to choose, and the tablets
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  Speaker 1: don't give us enough information. Regardless, some sort of potnia
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  Speaker 1: played a major role in Mycenean religion, and the single
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  Speaker 1: most common divine figure in Mycenean art is female. Scholars
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  Speaker 1: argue that potnia worship seems to be older than Mycenean civilization,
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  Speaker 1: perhaps inherited from the Minoans on Crete, where a goddess
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  Speaker 1: was venerated under some other non Greek name before the
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  Speaker 1: Mycenians ever arrived, and an unspecified potnia with no epithet
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  Speaker 1: at all, seems to have had a special connection to
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  Speaker 1: the wan Ox, the king of Mysonean palaces, perhaps functioning
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  Speaker 1: as a protector of the royal family. Now, it's very
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  Speaker 1: tempting to take all of these potentias and roll them
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  Speaker 1: up into a single, original, all powerful mother goddess, and
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  Speaker 1: that idea was very influential for decades, tracing back to
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  Speaker 1: Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Kenosos, Evans reconstructed Minoan
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  Speaker 1: and Mysonyan religion as centered overwhelmingly on a great goddess,
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  Speaker 1: with other divine figures often treated as her aspects, attendance
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  Speaker 1: or subordinate companions, and even scholars today admit that if
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  Speaker 1: you judge the Mysone and Pantheon from the images alone,
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  Speaker 1: you might conclude that it was focused largely on a goddess.
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  Speaker 1: But as we've seen, the text name fifty or sixty
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  Speaker 1: separate deities male and female, and roughly equal numbers, all
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  Speaker 1: receiving worship. Moreover, gods like Poseidon dominate in certain regions
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  Speaker 1: like Epilos, and there are a bunch of different potentias
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  Speaker 1: of different domains, so it's hard to maintain that a
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  Speaker 1: mother goddess was the central figure, and historians have largely
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  Speaker 1: dismantled Evans model over the course of the twentieth century.
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  Speaker 1: Other Olympian gods appear in the Linear B tablets, including Hermes, Artemis,
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  Speaker 1: and Ares. And then there's some notable absences. Two of
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  Speaker 1: the biggest names in later Greek religion are conspicuously missing.
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  Speaker 1: Aphrodite is entirely absent, Demeter is missing as well, at
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  Speaker 1: least under that name. The scholar Thomas Palma suggests that
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  Speaker 1: her role was already being filled by one of those
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  Speaker 1: potentias we just mentioned, Sitopotnia, the mistress of grain. This
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  Speaker 1: may have been a goddess who covered the same ground
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  Speaker 1: that Demeter would later occupy. There's also a few gods
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  Speaker 1: absent from later Greek religion. The aforementioned tablet from Pilos
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  Speaker 1: lists a deity named Palua, which might mean dove, and
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  Speaker 1: we also encounter a figure named Anyalios in later Greek
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  Speaker 1: and Yalios is just another name for Ares, but in
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  Speaker 1: the Canosos tablets he appears as his own god, receiving
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  Speaker 1: his own offerings. And there are also gods with clearly
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  Speaker 1: non Greek names, like a god named peep Tuna and
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  Speaker 1: another named pad, but we know nothing about them except
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  Speaker 1: that they may derive from the Minoan pantheon the Bronze
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  Speaker 1: Age civilization of Crete. Okay, so those are the gods
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  Speaker 1: of the Mycenians, But how do the Mycenean Greeks actually
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  Speaker 1: worship them? The linear Be tablets give us a lot
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  Speaker 1: of names, and they tell us that oil went to
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  Speaker 1: Poseidon and woolwin to Potnia Athana. But reading between the lines,
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  Speaker 1: and with the help of archaeological excavations, we can also
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  Speaker 1: piece together the palace rituals that were going on. First
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  Speaker 1: of all, temples now classical Greek temples are easily recognizable
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  Speaker 1: and found all over the ancient Greek world, but archaeologists
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  Speaker 1: have had a harder time locating and recognizing Mycenaean temples.
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  Speaker 1: But we know some sort of religious structure must have existed.
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  Speaker 1: The tablets mentioned sanctuaries for the gods controlled by the palaces,
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  Speaker 1: called nahwoi, literally dwelling places of the gods. This word
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  Speaker 1: carried through to the classical Greek word for temple naos,
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  Speaker 1: though we're not sure what they looked like. The best
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  Speaker 1: preserved religious complex we have is the cult center at Myceni,
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  Speaker 1: tucked alongside the citadel and connected to the palace by
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  Speaker 1: a processional way. Archaeologists found a bunch of clay figurines
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  Speaker 1: there that possibly depict gods, as well as a fresco
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  Speaker 1: that some scholars believe as a god as holding sheaves
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  Speaker 1: of grain. This may be the same potentia of grain
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  Speaker 1: we just mentioned, and in fact, that tablet bearing her
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  Speaker 1: name Sitopotnia was found just next door to this Fresco.
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  Speaker 1: Animal sacrifice apparently a core ritual for Myceneane religion in
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  Speaker 1: these palaces, as we've seen, the tablets mentioned food being
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  Speaker 1: gathered for a sacrificial feasts in honor of Poseidon at
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  Speaker 1: the Pelos sanctuary, and archaeologists have also found burnt male
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  Speaker 1: ox and bones from the Palace of Pilos. The bones
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  Speaker 1: were burned after the meat was removed, which actually mirrors
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  Speaker 1: later Greek religion, where burning the god's portion while the
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  Speaker 1: community eats the meat is the signature of the ritual
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  Speaker 1: called thusia, where you kill the animal, burn a share
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  Speaker 1: for the gods, and the community eats the rest. The
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  Speaker 1: word thusia does show up in Mycenaean Greek, but only
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  Speaker 1: in reference to offerings of incense, so it doesn't seem
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  Speaker 1: to yet refer to animal sacrifice, even though the ritual
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  Speaker 1: does seem similar. Mycenean frescoes and administrative seals complete the picture,
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  Speaker 1: which depict bulls being sacrificed. Now you've probably noticed that
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: everything we've covered so far could be called state religion.
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  Speaker 1: This is because of the nature of our data, official
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  Speaker 1: state documents and the archaeological excavations of the Mycenean palaces,
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  Speaker 1: so almost everything we know about mycene in Greek religion
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  Speaker 1: is the religion of the elite. The central figure in
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  Speaker 1: a Mycenae kingdom was the Wanax, and most scholars think
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  Speaker 1: the Wanachs drew a lot of his power from religion itself.
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  Speaker 1: In fact, the title may have been religious in its
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  Speaker 1: very roots. Wanax is not originally a Greek word from
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  Speaker 1: the Indo European language family. It's a borrowing, probably from
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  Speaker 1: the older Minoans, and the scholar Thomas Palima argues that
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  Speaker 1: its root meaning may be tied to something like birth
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  Speaker 1: or regeneration. If he's right, the title might have echoed
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: something closer to sacred renewal. And you can actually see
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  Speaker 1: this religious power carved into the most famous monument in
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  Speaker 1: all of Mysonia and Greece, the so called Lion Gate
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  Speaker 1: at Myceni. It depicts two lions flanking what scholars think
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  Speaker 1: is an altar. Other Mysonian era art shows lions flanking
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  Speaker 1: a goddess, sometimes on a pedestal that looks a lot
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  Speaker 1: like what we see on the Lion Gate. Archaeologists and
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  Speaker 1: art historians read this as a public statement the power
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  Speaker 1: of the ruler is founded on this connection to ritual
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  Speaker 1: and the gods, and inside the palace the king both
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: funded rituals and conducted state rituals. The heart of the
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  Speaker 1: Mysonian palace was a great ceremony hall called a megaron
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  Speaker 1: a throne room built around a huge central hearth. Scalas
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  Speaker 1: think this was the main stage for state religion, a
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  Speaker 1: room where the Wanax presided over rituals on behalf of
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  Speaker 1: his territory, and religious imagery was painted on the surrounding walls,
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  Speaker 1: presumably reflecting the function of the room, a procession bringing
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  Speaker 1: a massive bull in for the sacrifice, and banqueters at
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  Speaker 1: the feast. The hearth probably had religious significance too, possibly
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  Speaker 1: tied to a form of Hestia, who appears in later
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  Speaker 1: Greek religion as the goddess of the hearth, though to
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  Speaker 1: be fair, she's completely absent from the linear b tablets,
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  Speaker 1: so this is just educated speculation. Becoming king was also
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: a religious event. A tablet from Pilos known as a
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  Speaker 1: un two records provisions gathered for the initiation of the Wanax,
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  Speaker 1: which was held at the kingdom's most important sanctuary, Spagianes,
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  Speaker 1: the place of slaughter, and since the coronation was happening
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  Speaker 1: at the Palace sanctuary, presumably the sanctuary's religious officials were presiding,
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  Speaker 1: which means that these religious officials had a hand in
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: legitimizing royal power itself. As the scholar Helen Whitaker puts it,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: the mycenean elite used ritual in order to reinforce its
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  Speaker 1: claims to socio political power, and these religious officials appear
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  Speaker 1: to have been a whole professional class employed by the palace.
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  Speaker 1: The tablets record a developed hierarchy, someone called a key bearer,
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  Speaker 1: a title that survives into classical times for an official
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  Speaker 1: with custody of a shrine, and someone called Asfagius, literally
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  Speaker 1: the sacrificer. Many of them held their own land, and
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  Speaker 1: some show up doing palace administration, so the highest ranking
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: religious officials may have stood on the same level as
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: the palace elite themselves. For example, one tablet from Pelos
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: records a priestess named Aretha locked in a property dispute
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: with the Damos, the local community. The argument is over
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: how to classify a piece of land. Aretha insists that
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: she holds it on behalf of the God, which would
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: make it privileged and tax exempt, but the community says no,
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: this is ordinary communal land with all the normal obligations.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: So basically, she's fighting the town over her own tax exemption.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: So overall, what the tablets and the palaces give us
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: is a portrait of Mysonyan religion from the top down.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: A king whose authority was bound up with the gods,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: a great ceremonial hearth at the center of his palace,
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: royal initiations at sacred sites, and a whole professional class
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: of priests and priestesses on the payroll of the palace,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: all of them leading massive state sponsored sacrifices. It's vivid,
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: but remember it's a lopsided view. What we're seeing is
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: the religion the palace paid for, and therefore the religion
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: that the palace wrote down in their bookkeeping. But ordinary
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: people were obviously doing religion too. All across the Mycenean world,
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: in houses and graves, archaeologists keep finding small clay figurines,
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: most of them female and only a few inches tall,
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: with their arms folded or up over their heads. Scholars
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: call them fee and Paci figurines, after the Greek letters
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: that their shapes resemble. Nobody assure what exactly they were
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: used for, whether they were household charms or offerings or
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: grave goods. But they turn up by the hundreds, and
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: they're the best hint we have that religion reached deep
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: into everyday life, well beyond the palace walls. The problem
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: is that people who are us using these figurines were
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: not keeping records, So the popular household religion of the
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: ordinary Mysonian Greek is mostly invisible to us. So let's
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: come back to where we started with Homer. Back in
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: the mid twentieth century, the historian Moses Finley argued that
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: Homer is no reliable witness to the Bronze Age. So
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: now that we know what Bronze Age religion actually looked
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: like in Greece, how much of it survived into Homer,
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: let's start with what he gets right. One of the
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: most striking connections starts with Pilos. In the Odyssey, the
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: son of Odysseus, Telemachus sails into Pelos, and the first
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: thing he sees is the entire community gathered on the
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: shore and sacrificing bulls to Poseidon. Nine companies of men
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: sacrificing nine bulls each, all of it presided over by
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: King Nestor. It's the defining image of Nestor in the
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: entire poem. He's a pious king, endlessly careful about the gods.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: And this lines up pretty well with Mesenean era Pilos,
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: a kingdom where Poseidon was the dominant god, where the
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: entire social pyramid from the Wanacs on down funded his feasts.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: Thomas Ima argues that Homer might be recording a genuine
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: memory of the reputation of Pelos carried down through the centuries.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Then there's the sacrifice itself. Remember those burnt cattle bones
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: from Pilos. Archaeologists found the thigh bones stripped of meat
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: and then burned for the god. Homer describes that exact
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: procedure of defleshed bones being sacrificed in Iliad Book one,
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: when the priest creases sacrifices to Apollo and they cut
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: out the thigh pieces, wrap them in fat, and then
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: burn them while the men feast. But for every glimpse
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: of the Bronze Age, there's a place where Homer is
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: anachronistically wrong, where his own period shows through. As one
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: historian puts it, while Homeric epic purports to remember a
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: remote past similar to the Mycenean era reconstructed by archaeologists.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: The poems also exhibit firm links to the so called
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Greek Renaissance of the eighth century BC. You can see
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: this in death rituals. Homer's heroes are cremated, think of
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: the Great Funeral Pyre of Patroclus and Iliad Book twenty three.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: But the Myceneans largely buried their dead. Cremation only became
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: common in Greece after the Bronze Age collapse. In fact,
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: Homer seems to be reflecting Iron Age practice. On the
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: island of Euboea. At a site called lef Kandi, archaeologist
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: dug up a tenth century burial that reads almost like
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: a checklist from the Iliad. A cremated man, his ashes
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: wrapped in cloth, weapons laid beside him, horses killed and
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: buried in the same shaft, and an enormous mound raised
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: over the whole thing. So Homer's heroes are being buried
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: like Iron Age lords. And as we've already seen with
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: the gods in the Linear b tablets, Homer's pantheon itself
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: has been renovated. Two of the biggest names in Homer
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: are missing from the tablets, Aphrodite and Demeter. Meanwhile, a
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: lot of the gods who were there in the Bronze
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Age have disappeared. Dewea, the female Zeus with her own shrine,
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: as is Posidia, a female version of Poseidon, and the
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: whole Potnia system, arguably the central feature of Mycenean religion,
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: has largely disappeared. Her name only appears as an epithet
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: for other goddesses. When Homer says Potnia Athena or Potnia Hera,
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: he's using the fossil of a title that once named
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: arguably the most powerful goddess in the Aegean. Homer also
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: demotes the Mycenean king. In the Bronze Age, there were
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: two words for a powerful man, the wanox, the sacred
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: king at the top, and the guasileus, a local big
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: man or small time chief who answered to the palace.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: When the palace is burned in the late Bronze Age collapse,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: the office of the wanox apparently died with it, but
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: the guasileus continued, So the Greek word for a king
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: that comes down to us Wassileus loses that sacred edge
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: of the wanox. As for the oneox. It survives in
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: Homer as the word onox, but it's better translated now
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: as lord. When Telemachus is stripped of his father's power
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: by the suitors, he says he'll at least be the
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: onox of his own house, but one of the suitors
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: throws it back in his face. Sure, go ahead, be
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: lord of your own hall. So it's not that the
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: word itself gets demoted. Homer still applies the title onox
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: to gods like Zeus and Apollo, and great men like
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: Agamemnon and Achilles. But what's gone in Homer is the
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: office behind that title. The sacred palace king who once
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: ran an entire economy is gone, and all that's left
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: is a free, floating title that is grand enough to
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: apply to Zeus, but loose enough for Telemachus to claim
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: over his own four walls. So how much of Greek
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: religion actually continued from the Myceneans to the classical era.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: For a long time, the standard answer was minimalist, and
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: its most influential voice was Walter Burkote. In his classic
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: book Greek Religion, he argued that the evidence for continuity
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: is scant. A few divine names carried over in the
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: linear B tablets, some religious vocabulary as well, But the
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: religion the classical Greeks actually practiced, from his view, largely
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: took shape after the Bronze Age collapse. But more recently
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: scholars have pushed back on that minimalism. Doctor Susan Lupak,
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: a linear B specialist who has spent her entire career
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: studying the religious sector of the Mesoneine economy, makes the
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: countercase in a twenty twenty essay on continuity and change,
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: and her argument hinges on a distinction. We've been circling
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: this whole episode palace religion versus everybody else's religion. When
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: the palace has burned, what actually died, well, the palace governments, obviously,
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: the whole system with the Wanax as its central sacred
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: king figure collapsed and everything connected to him with it.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: That's the layer Homer lost, and that's why his world
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: looks so different from the tablets. But doctor Lupak points
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: out that most Mecenean religion was never palace religion in
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: the first place. When you trace the place names on
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: those offering tablets, the palace's religious reach barely extends past
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: its own sphere of influence. And remember those clay figurines
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: scattered far beyond the citadels. The entire religious landscape must
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: have been full of shrines. The Wanas never touched local
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: sanctuaries run by local religious leaders whose authority came from
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: their own local communities, and those communities didn't collapse when
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: the palaces fell. The local priests and ritual specialists most
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: likely just kept on doing what they'd always done. And
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: you can see this in three ways. First, on the ground,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: archaeologists have found open air Mycenean shrines in places like
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: Mount Lechayon in the Peloponnese and Mount Himettos east of Athens,
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: with none of the fancy, elite offerings that would mark
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: them as Palace sponsored sanctuaries. Mount Lacayon in particular, has
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: an ash altar, a great blackened mound built up from
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: the accumulated debris of sacrifice layer on lay with no
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: built structure, and when archaeologists dug into it they found
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: basically a layer cake Mycenean material at the bottom, then
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: iron age, then archaic, and then classical. This ash altar
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: operated continuously from the Bronze Age straight through to the
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: Hellenistic period after Alexander the Great Second. We see this
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: in the rituals themselves. Doctor Lupak argues that the things
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: people did with their bodies, their animals, and their offerings
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: would have looked familiar to a Greek. One thousand years later,
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: communities carried offerings to sanctuaries in processions, the same way
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: they did in classical religion. The frescoes at Pilos and
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Thebes show the processions, and the tablets even name a
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: festival for it, the Teopuria, the bearing of the Gods,
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: presumably a ritual of carrying divine images through the streets,
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: much like what we see in later Greek religion. There's
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: a similar scene in the Iliad book six, when women
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: carry a robe called a peplos up to Athena's temple
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: and lay it on the knees of her statue. A
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: lot of scholars think this is anachronistic because it's almost
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: exactly what we see in the pan Athenia, the festival
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: where Athenian women presented a woven peplos to Athena. Some
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: older scholars argue that the resemblance is so close they
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: assumed an Athenian editor had simply inserted it into the story.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: But other scholars think it's not unlike what we see
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: in Mycenian religion, with female offering processions being one of
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: the oldest motifs in both Minoan and Mycenian art, so
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: even if a later editor added anachronisms to the scene,
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: there might be an earlier substrate to it. A third
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: line of evidence is religious vocabulary. Much of classical Greek
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: religious vocabulary is found in the linear b tablets. For example,
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: the roots fog meaning to slaughter. The most important sanctuary
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: at Pilos is literally named spogg Yanes, the place of slaughter.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: There's also the priest titled Spogus, the sacrificer. Priests and
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: priestess has also received animal hides as their honorary portion,
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: and the tablets call that portion a geros, the exact
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: word that classical Greeks used a thousand years later for
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: a priest's share. So scholars like doctor Lupak argue that yes,
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: the state cult died with the palace bureaucracies, and of
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: course there were changes. Whole gods vanished new myths were composed,
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: but the religion underneath it, on a more local and
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: communal level, carried on. As she puts it, a good
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: deal of the way the Myceneans practice their cult would
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: have been familiar to someone in the Archaic and classical periods.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: So where the critics write about Matt Damon's helmet, sure
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: wrong helmet off by five centuries, and Homer makes the
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: same kind of mistake constantly. Iron Age funerals, iron Age temples,
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: a renovated iron Age pantheon. Religion in the Iliad and
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: Odyssey often reflects a half remembered past in the costumes
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: of Homer's own era, but we also sometimes get striking similarities.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: As the historian Buried Hildebrandt writes, the Decipherment of the
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: Mysonean linear v tablets have made clear that the Homeric
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: epics have astonishing parallels to Bronze Age material culture, but
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: at the same time, vast worlds lie between the Mysonean
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: palace kingdoms and the world that Homer describes. Homer was
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: assembling a Bronze Age world out of fragments, ruined palaces
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: he could still see in his own landscape. Gods, still
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: worshiped with rich Rus handed down by his ancestors. Maybe
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: he even saw a bores tusk helmet held onto as
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: a family heirloom, so I don't blame him for getting
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: a few things wrong. Keeping a literary world consistent is
• 27:10
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• 27:12
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• 27:14
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• 27:17
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