The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales
| Author | Felice Vinci |
|---|---|
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
| Genre | Historical essay |
|
Publication date
|
1995 |
The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales is an essay written by Felice Vinci, a nuclear engineer and amateur historian, published for the first time in 1995. The book, translated into several languages, submits a revolutionary idea about the geographical setting of the Iliad and Odyssey. Felice Vinci started reading Greek classics and learned about a passage from the De facie quae in orbe lunae apparet, by Plutarch, which points out the location of Ogygia. This island became the point of departure of Vinci's theory.
According to his assumptions, the events told by Homer did not take place in the Mediterranean area, as the tradition asserts, but rather in the seas of Northern Europe, the Baltic Sea and the Northern Atlantic.
According to Vinci, the Achaeans would have lived at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC on the coasts of the Baltic Sea and, towards the middle of the millennium, since the climate had become harder, they would have moved southward along the Dnepr, reaching the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea. The newcomers would have founded the Mycenaean cities (the most ancient Mycenaean graves are rich in amber, a typical Baltic product, whereas the latest ones are not) and would have named them with the names of their previous settlements in Scandinavia, although not exactly in correspondence of their location, because of the physical differences between the two areas.
During their migration, they would have brought with themselves their traditional oral tales, which were poetic sagas set in their original homeland. Therefore, the Trojan war would not have taken place around the 13th century BC, as it is normally thought, but around the 18th century BC. Then the poems would have been transcribed later, after 800 or 900 years of oral tradition.
In support of the theory, it is important to remember that the Mycenaeans are not considered an aboriginal population, but are thought instead to have come to Greece around the 16th century BC. Felice Vinci also reports the hypothesis formulated in the late 19th century by the Indian expert Bal Gangadhar Tilak, according to whom Indoeuropean populations would have lived around the Arctic Circle in the past. On the other hand, the so-called 'Linear B' documents appear to have been written in a language which was a precursor of what later became Greek.
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