Living in Iron, Dressed in Bronze: Metal Formulas and the Chronology of the Ages (original) (raw)
2018, Brolly. Journal of Social Sciences
Names of important metals such as gold, silver, iron, and bronze occur many times in the Homeric Epics. We intend to look at them within the framework of oral poetry, with the purpose to determine if they form a more or less coherent set of “formulas”, in the sense defined by Milman Parry and the Oral Poetry Theory2, and to test a possible link with the stages in the evolution of humankind. Though several specialists criticized some excess in Parry’s and Lord’s definitions of the formula, we deem the theory still valuable in its great lines, and feel no need to discuss it for the present study3. The frequent use of bronze in epical formulas for arms, while the actual heroes fight their battles with iron equipment, and the emphasis of gold in descriptions of wealth may reflect a deep-seated linguistic memory within the archaic mind-set of the Ages of Mankind. With Homer’s language as our best witness, metal formulas testify to the importance of the tradition of the Ages of Mankind in understanding the thought patterns and value- systems, as well as some linguistic usages of the Homeric Epics.
Related papers
Living in Iron, Dressed in Bronze: Metal Formulas and the Chronology of Ages
2018
Names of important metals such as gold, silver, iron, and bronze occur many times in the Homeric Epics. We intend to look at them within the framework of oral poetry, with the purpose to determine if they form a more or less coherent set of “formulas”, in the sense defined by Milman Parry and the Oral Poetry Theory2, and to test a possible link with the stages of the evolution of humankind. Though several specialists criticized some excess in Parry’s and Lord’s definitions of the formula, we deem the theory still valuable in its great lines and feel no need to discuss it for the present study3. The frequent use of bronze in epical formulas for arms, while the actual heroes fight their battles with iron equipment, and the emphasis of gold in the descriptions of wealth may reflect a deep-seated linguistic memory within the archaic mindset of the Ages of Mankind. With Homer’s language as our best witness, metal formulas testify to the importance of the tradition of the Ages of Mankind ...
A. M. Dodson, J. J. Johnston & W. Monkhouse (eds): A Good Scribe and an Exceedingly Wise Man: studies in honour of W. J. Tait. Golden House Publications, London, 2014
The Egyptologist Jan Assmann characterises a Bronze Age ‘revolution’ that brought an end to ‘primary religions’ as an era when religious thinking was able to ‘emancipate itself’ from autochthonous origins. This argument presumes an intellectual deficit in ancient thinking, which is not warranted by modern evolutionary theories and is otherwise contradicted by the demonstrable awareness of the complexity of language and its relationship to meaning, for example, in a Ramesside poem about the appearance of the king of Egypt upon his chariot. The issue is not that a poet perhaps 150-200 generations removed from ourselves could employ the full complexity of human language, because we may expect any human adult to do so even in the Bronze Age. The issue is that the poet is obviously aware of the complexity of language, of language difference, and of the sophisticated relationship between languages and meaning.
Homer's Entangled Objects: Narrative, Agency and Personhood In and Out of Iron Age Texts
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2013
In recent years, material culture studies have come to embrace contemporary Melanesia and European prehistory, but not classical archaeology and art. Prehistory is still thought, in many quarters, to be intrinsically more ‘ethnographic’ than historical periods; in this discourse, the Greeks (by default) become proto-modern individuals, necessarily opposed to Melanesian ‘dividuals’. Developments in the study of the Iron Age Mediterranean and the world of Homer should undermine such stark polarities. Historic and proto-historic archaeologies have rich potential for refining our notions both of agency and of personhood. This article argues that the forms of material entanglements we find in the Homeric poems, and the forms of agency (sensu Gell 1998) that we can observe in the archaeological record for the Early Iron Age of Greece (broadly 1000–500 bc) are of the same kind. The agency of objects structures Homeric narrative, and Homeric descriptions allow us precisely to define Homeric...
All that is wrought is not gold : locating Wealth in Old English Gnomic Texts
2015
That references to wealth are present all over Old English poetry is beyond doubt; likewise beyond doubt is the fact that representations of wealth attained a form of cult status in our contemporary renditions of Old English culture: we see Beowulf wanting to feast his eyes on the treasure before he dies, our imagination is captivated by the serendipitous finding of the Staffordshire hoard and we are transfixed by the Beowulfian, Tolkienian, and Peter Jackson’s dragon guarding the gold-hoard. The present essay shall be an attempt at outlining several of the cultural contexts in which wealth and ideas related to it operated within Old English wisdom poetry
Chasing Bronze Age rainbows. Studies on hoards and related phenomena in prehistoric Europe in honour of Wojciech Blajer, 2019
In the midst of Godelier, Facebook and bloody forays. Several comments on metal and its availability in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. This paper consists of several impressions on the subject of the availability of metal among communities of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. The discussion therefore leads the reader on a journey between Oceania, the British Isles, the Bóbr River basin, Pomerania, northern Wielkopolska and the Apennine Peninsula – with the hope that the arguments advanced shall constitute an impetus towards considerations on the availability of metal in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, as well as being a voice in the general research discussion focused around this very issue. A number of questions can therefore be posed, such as: Who had the right to possess metal tools? Were differences in the frequency of metal objects, especially those out of copper and its alloys in various regions of the continent, a testimony to a community’s access to a network of exchange? Or were perhaps the intensive contacts initiated because of the desire and possibility to make use of metal? Was bronze in fact so rare that some communities did not have the means to acquire it, or were lower amounts in this context associated with cultural norms, or in fact ones that limited its exploitation?
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Related papers
"Ancient Poetics." Pp. 141-53 in M. E. Vogelzang and H. L. J. Vanstiphout, eds., Mesopotamian Poetic Language: Sumerian and Akkadian. Groningen: Styx, 1996, 1996