> little kids can memorize the entire Koran (8 hrs)
> western academics don't believe Homer was one man, his works must have been the result of collaboration over the span of many years
>>7437514
>western academics don't believe Homer was one man, his works must have been the result of collaboration over the span of many years
>implying there is a academic consensus on the homeric question
>>7437519
20th century has largely been one of academic skepticism towards Homer and many subjects.
"Well, this is here stuff is really olde. It was probably bullshit because it WE are the only generation to have found the truth, that there is no truth! Can't believe all those idiots actually thought Homer was real! Even Aristotle, what a chump!"
>>7437536
There has been tons of studies on the oral tradition and the capability for transmission especially in the dying elderly of central Ireland who can still recite the poetry and in many African tribes for whom oral transmission is key. Michael Woods has a good documentary on it.
>>7437514
>> western academics don't believe Homer was one man, his works must have been the result of collaboration over the span of many years
I thought that was the Alexandrians which is why they edited some of it out from the copies they had and divided it into books. I mean, they obviously didn't remove all the plot inconsistencies, but still it would be unfair to say it's the work of one man which we received. Whether Homer existed or not, what we got isn't even the 5th Century BC version.
>>7437514
I fail to see the link between these two assumptions.
Do you imply that the length of the Iliad and Odyssey are the reason for which "Homer" is supposed to be a combinaison of aeds?
>>7437824
Has it not been argued that the structure of the works couldn't have been done in mental/oral form, that it must have been written?
>>7437625
>but still it would be unfair to say it's the work of one man which we received. Whether Homer existed or not, what we got isn't even the 5th Century BC version.
But is there any evidence of multiple versions? I thought we had more versions of Shakespeare plays than we do of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
>Written obviously before writing became popular
>MUSTA BEEN WRITTEN
Literal retards. There's a reason he repeats himself so much.
We know for a fact that in Chios the Homeridae were able to memorize the entire Iliad and Odyssey. And they did this often.
>>7437862
>But is there any evidence of multiple versions?
How we got a "complete" cycle was they assembled the pieces which people had written down. Nobody bothered to write the whole thing out because that takes for fucking ever, so people copied down or got scribed their favourite parts and favourite puns on those parts. There were some near complete versions and lots of contradictory parts that could be assumed to be joke about the actual wordings, so the librarians kind of best guessed it. (It's actually a really good best guess: The first compiler at Alexandria was criticised then for doing it without sufficient Greek, and now is considered the originator of metadata.) They speculated some parts were written by different people entirely, but left them in because it was the most common version, and divided both works into chapters and separated off the odes.
It's an amazing editing job considering they were working off a massive collection of what was essentially as reliable source material as greentext.
That version then became (after a few revisions) the standardised library copy across all the library branches which spread out from Alexandria. There's earlier quotes and paraphrases and references to lines in Homer in Athenian works of the 5th Century which we still have which could have influenced, or didn't influence enough in other cases, that finalised version which happens much later than our earliest written references to Homer's work.
>tl;dr- yeah bro you're totally reading the ~280BC edition of Homer, which is like reading Penguin's Gravity's Rainbow lol
>>7437915
Yeah but did people seriously think they were all Homer?
Longinus, Plato, Aristotle, all seem to think the Iliad and the Odyssey are the work of the same guy. No one really took seriously that the other 7 or so "Homeric" books were by the same "blind" lyricist.
>>7437514
Some questions about Homer:
>1 - Did he used punctuation?
>2- Does anybody here have read the Iliad and Odyssey in the original Greek? What’s the feeling? How different it is from the Greek of Plato, or from the Greek of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides? And the modern Greek?
>3 Did he composed all the thing in his memory or did he used paper or papyrus and wrote it down? Did people had such materials back then?
>>7437915
This.
I remember hearing about a version we had before we found the really good Alexandrian text.
If I remember correctly from my classics class, this older text wasn't very good. It was what we based a lot of our old translations on.
>>7437951
>1.Did he used punctuation?
No. Classical Greek was written in a stream of words, even with no spaces between.
>2. Does anybody here have read the Iliad and Odyssey in the original Greek?
I do, because I study Classics. It's fun. Plato and the philosophers are more prosaic though, as is Thucydides.
>3.Did he composed all the thing in his memory or did he used paper or papyrus and wrote it down?
According to tradition Homer was blind, and recited the whole thing to a scribe. For this reason and other reasons, he might not have written/recited the whole thing alone.
>>7437951
Also, what materials did Plato, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides used to write their works? They not only had to write for themselves, but probably also some copies for the actors to read and memorize their lines.
>>7437514
>little kids can memorize the entire Koran (8 hrs)
1. The Qur'an lends itself to memorization
2. little kids? dubious claim at best (also vague)
3. eight hours? cite a source, one that doesn't refer to a memory prodigy or other individual edge case but supports the general claim made in OP
D. also yes >>7437824 the second point doesn't follow
ε. Philip K. Dick made the assertion that Stanisław Lem couldn't possibly be a single individual but was rather a collective intended to spread socialist propaganda
>>7437973
No idea what ink they used, but they did use papyrus, as did most of the region in that time.
>>7437986
It was ironic, since Lem was a known fan of Dick's. But, dick was also descending into paranoia.
>>7437951
It was not written down.
For evidence of illiterate oral epicists (epic writers?), check out the Guslars.
He probably wasn't blind. The Greeks (and other cultures) have a thing where blind = wise. See Tiresias and some others I forgot. But then again Milton was blind, and Paradise Lost exists.
People don't think that Homer came up with the stories, right?
Everyone knows he was using well established stories that his audience was familiar with, right?
>>7437986
Not a dubious claim. Most Huffadh (memorizers of Qur'an) complete their Hifdh (memorization) around age 8.
Little kids have sponge-like minds, and people in societies where the written word is not the prevailing form of discourse tend to have stronger memories than those in societies with widespread literacy.
>>7437996
I will agree that memory is more fully developed/utilized in societies with relatively stronger oral (as opposed to written) traditions, to their advantage.
I still think the claim is not generally applicable as is made in the OP.
How common are Huffadh?
The idea that Homer was a long-term collaboration is ludicrous. The style is far too uniform (you can tell there were differences in styles from other Greek epic fragments), and the plot is too structured. For instance, the theme of anger in the Iliad starts definitively and ends definitively. If the story were a long term work, the beginning and ending would have been pushed back and forward, respectively. Also, while all the other Greek epics often go over material by each other, the Odyssey covers zero material from the Iliad, even in the flashbacks, indicating they were by the same author.
>>7437536
you just don't know anything about 20th century academia my friend. but keep on keeping on, surely you are making things better on your end and i will try to as well
>>7437986
> 1. The Qur'an lends itself to memorization
And Homer's works do not? There is no repetition and cues for recital?
> 2. little kids? dubious claim at best (also vague)
Yes, little kids. There's a whole niche culture of getting your kids to memorize the Koran. Even ones who can't speak Arabic and are illiterate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeEEA_vk51g
>>7437986
>3. eight hours? cite a source,
Find me a source where the entire recitation of the Koran is more or less than ~8 hours total.
It's not to say that they would recite non-stop for 8 hours, but neither did the oral poets in ancient Greece. A little bit was recited at a time. But it still stands that someone can memorize a massive amount of text and if you're proficient enough, you can create a massive amount of text and memorize it and re-organize it in your brain.
>>7437948
I think I see where you're getting hung up: the problem is that if your collection of Homer contains both shit everyone agrees is Homer, and shit which 65% of people would believe is Homer or close enough, eventually, it shifts the record to reflect the popular lines. It doesn't affect the existence of one guy 400 years before, it affects the record of that guy's work. Bits that people thought were Homer didn't always make it, and pieces that people had never heard were Homer did make it. What Plato thought was Homer doesn't match entirely what was finally compiled as Homer; likewise, what Plato says of his contemporaries and predecessors doesn't always match their accounts or later ones.
(Plato does a lot of things for poetic license in changing the wording of common sayings attributed to other authors. For instance, we have other accounts of the saying attributed to Herakleitus, "panta rhei", while Plato uses "panta chorei" to give greater resonance with the saying he follows it up with about rivers in Cratylus. We've no idea if Herakleitus said either, but we know there was a fine tradition of attributing any good play on words in line with his philosophy to him because it's what survives as "his" work.)
Socrates doesn't match up as a character in all of Plato's works, let alone when compared to his characterization in Xenophon or Aristophanes, and people should rightfully laugh at you if you think Plato is a wholly reliable version of Socrates.
>>7437584
Also a famous study of Balkan (forgive me balkanites, I forget which country) oral epic poets in the 30s.
>>7437862
>Has it not been argued that the structure of the works couldn't have been done in mental/oral form, that it must have been written?
no
well, maybe. but surely by absolute retards with no bearing on any kind of academic society
>>7437915
What's bad about the penguin editon of GR?
>>7438026
what a trash post
youtube-tier
>>7438027
More than what's wrong with our version of Homer now. They had a really bad typesetting phase.
>>7438027
The Penguin Deluxe GR is shit-tier and contains typos and missing sentences. The regular Penguin GR edition is fine.
>>7438024
>For instance, we have other accounts of the saying attributed to Herakleitus, "panta rhei", while Plato uses "panta chorei"
They don't mean the same though. At all. "rhei" just means (it) flows, but "chorei" means that something, typically a boat, arrives.
>>7438022
>And Homer's works do not?
I never said anything about Homer's works in my post
>Yes, little kids. There's a whole niche culture
>niche
again this is different from the general claim as worded in OP
>recitation of the Koran is more or less than ~8 hours total
The way the OP was written was making the assertion that the Qur'an could be *learned* in eight hours
James Joyce said anyone who considers the Iliad and Odyssey to be written by more than one man is an idiot.
Take that as you will.
>>7437973
The word “paper” is derived from the papyrus plant, an Egyptian marsh reed that was gathered, split, crisscrossed, and pressed wet into a sheet of any desired width or length. When dry, it was about as flexible as thick bond paper and presented a surface that could absorb ink without blotting. Sheets of papyrus could be joined with gum to form a roll (biblos or biblion). On the Internet you can Google a goodly number of sites that describe its manufacture in Egypt from the third millennium B.C. onward. Egyptian papyrus was traded throughout the Mediterranean. In Greece, it was used from the time when any significant literary text needed to be written down, copied, and disseminated, i.e., from the eighth century B.C. onward. (In the earlier Mycenaean period, writing seems to have been used primarily for materials inventories inscribed with pointed sticks on wet clay tablets shaped like palm leaves which must have been used as paper in even earlier times.)
The Greek pen was simply a hard reed (kalamos), perhaps split at the bottom to hold enough ink for a word or two. Ink came in small dried blocks of all sorts of material from octopus ink to vegetable juice which the scribe mixed with water. Again, loads of sites are available for detailed information on page layouts, typical lengths of papyrus rolls, book publishing (using slaves as copyists), etc., along with references to other occasional writing media like parchment (animal skins). You might start your search with something like "ancient Greek writing" or "ancient Greek books."
As the independent, freedom-loving Greek city-states evolved in the first millennium B.C., writing was recognized as a valuable tool for the preservation of culture and tradition, and as an indispensable part of education. Even children practiced writing on wax-inlaid wooden tablets and large pieces of broken pottery. As far as I know, the Greeks were the first people to implement universal literacy. Previous Mediterranean cultures had relegated writing to professional scribes whose task was mainly to record decrees, religious texts, prescribed rituals, inventories, and commercial transactions. The Greeks, by contrast, used writing to create and share an entire culture. And a majority of the population participated, to one degree or another, in this creative process. So the alphabet was turned into a sort of cultural DNA, if you will.
Hope I’ve covered the basic ground here. Happy Googling!
>>7438054
Nah, you just can't read.
>>7438062
OP didn't communicate his points well.
>>7437967
I read in an article on a lead letter from a (presumed) apprentice to his mother that it was particularly the work of scribes which lacked word spacing and punctuation, and when the average literate wrote they tended to include spaces.
In pre-Islamic and early Islamic (up to Buyyid era/Mongol conquering) Arab culture, memorization of "texts" was heavily encouraged. In pre-Islamic Arabia, since a writing system was crudely developed oral tradition was passed down poetically so you have great poetry that instructs mundane things and discusses profound things from that jahiliyya.
With the Qur'an, it lends itself extremely well to memorization and has a poetic quality that truly trumps all others in Arabic, which is why it's considered Arabic's greatest literary achievement and why it shaped modern Arabic so much (i.e., why the dialects of certain tribes coalesced into forming a classical Arabic that influenced MSA/fuSHa).
Because of some tribes inserting different words or using different pronunciations into the Qur'an, the Uthman codex was formed to write down this oral text and then you had early Muslims like Ali b. Abi Talib who introduced diacritics (tashkeel, i'jaam). You can read more about compilation, if you're interested, here:
https://althaqalayn.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/al-bayan-ayatullah-khui.pdf
Even after writing became a more important, widespread practice, since it was done on parchment (mostly vellum)--which was expensive and difficult to make--and not paper until the 800s, Islamic scholars and Arabs/Persians/Turks in general still memorized huge texts including the Qur'an and other books. They still did so after paper became huge after the Battle of Talas. There were still books written in a poetic manner, like al-Ajrumiyya which taught classical Arabic grammar and nearly every scholar memorized it.
You have historical events where a scholar memorized his entire library when he had to move after conquest or when it burned down--common mostly among Sufis and Shia because they were considered heretics by some of the ruling class in certain periods.
There is one popular instance where a companion of the Shia sixth Imam known as Muhammad b. Abi Umayr was tortured by Harun ar-Rashid and after he was released from incarceration, he noticed his library was destroyed. He was able to write down all the texts in his library though because he had memorized everything.
This sort of continued even after paper became widespread but less so with the Islamic Empire dividing and expanding in later years. Scholars to this day memorize several texts but usually not their entire libraries. One scholar in Iran, Sayyid Sadiq ar-Rouhani, is said to have memorized volumes upon volumes of texts though (which I guess you have to do when your under house arrest, haha).
Qur'an memorization is still popular among the laity but much less so than in early Islam and even in Ottoman times. This is likely because of economic decline, political oppression, foreign intervention, and especially information now being on the internet.
>>7438018
I'm going to add to this that Homer didn't memorize his shit and pass it down, he probably dictated it and wrote it as he was doing so, or at least didn't necessarily give an identical version with whatever he told before, and it was probably way, way longer
>>7438097
Sorry for typing up that beast. Just providing info to anyone that's interested.
>>7438083
Might be true. I don't have the much knowledge.
>>7438106
that much*
>>7438097
I made some grammar mistakes. pls don't bully
And nearly every Muslim memorizes portions of the Qur'an--they have to do their 5 prayers (it is permissible to read with a muSHaf--written text of oral tradition--but it's discouraged culturally very heavily).
The portions that are usually memorized by everyone are shorter suwar/chapters like al-Fatiha and at-Tawheed.
>>7438060
In Wasps there is an indication that although he is 'writing' something on the wax tablet it's not necessarily the written word, just some sort of significant marking (I'll try and dig out the reference). You may also find it interesting that they used lead to write on, and that the same hard reed stylus was at least sometimes used on that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
>Jaynes asserted that, until roughly the times written about in Homer's Iliad, humans did not generally have the self-awareness characteristic of consciousness as most people experience it today. Rather, the bicameral individual was guided by mental commands believed to be issued by external "gods" — commands which were recorded in ancient myths, legends and historical accounts.
Nigga was schiz'd
>>7438050
Plato's use of it is to move: "everything changes place" is the meaning he's going for.
Plato follows up "panta chorei" with the "you can never step in the same river twice because newer waters flow over you" saying generally also attributed to Herakleitos to make the changing waters emphasised.
>λέγει που Ἡράkλειτος ὅτι ‘πάντα χωρεῖ kαὶ οὐδὲν μένει,’ kαὶ ποταμοῦ ῥοῇ ἀπειkάζων τὰ ὄντα λέγει ὡς ‘δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐk ἂν ἐμβαίης.’
"Panta rhei" incorporates this into a shorter aphorism which keeps the allusion, but as far as I know, it's the later attribution.
Your objection they don't mean the same thing perplexes me, because the later one certainly seems to make reference to the earlier ideas of what Herakleitos had been quoted as saying.
(I used a paraphrase for the rivers saying in case you're just autistic and will now tell me how I didn't even translate the words in order or some other retarded shit)
>>7438097
Just to provide more scope, you have volumes of compilations of ahadith (for Sunnis Prophetic traditions and for Shia Prophetic and Imamite traditions) and these scholars usually memorized every hadith in their compilation. If they didn't, they noted down in their text where they were copying it down from another work.
For instance, Allamah Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi (17 c.) compiled Bihar al-Anwar which is around 110 volumes and Shaykh Hurr al-Amuli (17 c.) compiled Wasa'il ash-Shi`a which is around 30-40 volumes.
>>7437514
Notre époque ne sait comment comprendre Homère;
O hommes ignorants! à la parole amère
Vous le voulez tuer, lui retirer ses œuvres,
Faire Laocoon un dresseur de couleuvres,
Thersite un démocrate, un défenseur des masses,
De Troie une bicoque aux murs un peu tenaces,
Partout l’allégorie, le discours figuré;
Vous venez devant moi, et d’un air assuré
Me dites que c’est là le peuple réuni
Qui ensemble a écrit cette œuvre de génie;
Il serait, selon vous, impossible de faire
De pareille épopée en n’étant plagiaire —
Laissez-moi vous le dire: un homme à vous semblable
D’écrire l’Odyssée serait bien incapable;
Mais Homère n’est vous, il n’est pas un Zoïle
Ce n’est un décadent qui de son bras débile
Porte la main aux morts et s’en trouve meilleur,
Qui dégorgant son fiel y trouve son bonheur;
Gardez-vous bien, O chiens, qu’un sceptre à votre épaule
D’un coup ne vous ramène à votre propre rôle.
>>7438106
Ig you've a JSTOR account you can read the article, it's quite interesting. 'A personal letter found in the athenian agora' D. Jordan. It's not the most thrilling or even clear writing, he's one of those academics who can barely bear to commit to a fact, but he's got good info and it's not too long.
He says the letters they've found seem to have the clear writing of a scribe within the text, with no word-spacing, but that the addresses are less finely written and include spaces. He also mentions in a footnote that there are letters with word divisions in the main texts, or at least the line ends.
On papyrus: there are no lead letters after the 4th century, when presumablt papyrus became cheaper and more available.
>>7438147
In that context it seems to work though, but I was just speaking from experience. Whenever I've seen the verb "χωρεῖ", it's almost always been in relation to a boat, or some other object moving, or coming to a place, or arriving.
But thanks for the clarification.
Wait... You think the contention of Homer is that he couldn't have remembered to write it down...?
>>7438133
This sounds pretty bullshit, but then again there is Socrates saying he was 'told' to act in certain manners and do certain thing, instructed when something was wrong, perhaps it is related.
>>7438215
Socrates was talking about his conscience though, he just used metaphysical language because people clearly didn't know better back then.
>>7438194
Yeah, Plato does some interesting shit which also makes him really annoying as a source of quotes because there's always the chance it's him being artistic. The line from Socrates before that one is:
Τὸν Ἡράkλειτόν μοι δοkῶ kαθορᾶν παλαί᾽ ἄττα σοφὰ λέγοντα, ἀτεχνῶς τὰ ἐπὶ Κρόνου kαὶ Ῥέας, ἃ kαὶ Ὅμηρος ἔλεγεν.
Which makes the later "rhei" phrasing stronger, but still could just be Rheas as in just wife of Kronos, not a stream allusion. And probably still isn't Socrates so much as Plato.
>>7438230
I think that way, but I know some scholars have interpreted it as a schizoid behaviour. If one were to lean with them it could be closely related to bicameralism and it's close enough in date to be interesting.
If you will forgive quoting wikipedia
>Perhaps the most interesting facet of this is Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daimōnic sign", an averting (ἀποτρεπτιkός apotreptikos) inner voice Socrates heard only when he was about to make a mistake. It was this sign that prevented Socrates from entering into politics. In the Phaedrus, we are told Socrates considered this to be a form of "divine madness", the sort of insanity that is a gift from the gods and gives us poetry, mysticism, love, and even philosophy itself. Alternately, the sign is often taken to be what we would call "intuition"; however, Socrates' characterization of the phenomenon as daimōnic may suggest that its origin is divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts. Today, such a voice would be classified under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a command hallucination.
>>7438133
> there was no irony or self-consciousness before Shakespeare!
Harold Bloom pls go.
>>7438133
This is clearly not true. I'm more into Islamic stuff, and self-doubt and consciousness is a very important theme in religious and philosophical work. 19th century German philosophers definitely accentuated it in the modern day and made it a staple of modern Western culture but I wouldn't say humans lacked this self-awareness back then
>>7438301
if anything the voices would have been more aware of your self as they would have acted autonomously without reflective noise
>>7438331
That's a very salient point.
>>7438243
>I seem to have a vision of Herakleitus saying some words of wisdom
Socrates is a troll.
>>7438273
That's interesting.
>>7437514
Is it not about the art of it, and not the size? The Odyssey, for example, sounds more like a campfire collaboration, where the favorite character from The Iliad just goes on some wacky adventures, and every bro pitched some ideas.
>>7438353
Dude, he backs it up with Homer, it's got to be legit.
>>7438395
> great works of art are made by bros chillin by da campfire shooting da shit
>Memorizing any book.
How? I'm beginning to get mad at my parents for not using the prime time of neuroplasticity for making me learn a plethora of languages and forcing me to read and rehearse from memory.
'Churchill was well-known for his love of poetry. He won the headmaster's prize at Harrow for reciting from memory the 1,200-line The Lays of Ancient Rome, by Thomas Macaulay.'
>>7438097
this is fucking great. I know barely anything about islamic scholarship so this was really helpful
>>7438407
I know, it's just the way it's translated makes it kind of funny.
>>7438412
If they're all clever, I don't see why this can't be a thing.
>>7438215
Probably not, considering Socrates lived centuries after Homer.
I know Christians who have memorized the Bible. It isn't that hard if you have a certain type of mind.
>>7438622
but if we are talking about a shift over a couple of millenia it does not seem so odd that there might be an iteration of it 300 years after the man's chosen transition point.
>>7438215
Socrates is also a master trole who pissed off a while city so hard they made him kill himself
>>7438025
Milman parry, and the specific country is yugoslavia
>>7437514
>memorizing the ramblings of a murderous, illiterate pedophile
>>7439694
Your statement doesn't really add much to the thread, but ok. :s
>>7438468
Sure, why not?
Now just go and find out. Anywhere, any time. You'll learn why not.
I recommend the book The File on H.
>>7438060
great post
