http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080623175435.htm

ScienceDaily (June 24, 2008) — Among countless other debates about Homer's Odyssey -- not the least of which is whether the entire poem can be attributed to Homer himself -- is whether Odysseus returns home to experience a total solar eclipse. But a Rockefeller University scientist and a colleague from Argentina believe they have found astronomical references in the Odyssey that provide corroborating evidence of this celestial event.

Total eclipses, when the moon briefly but completely blocks the sun, happen pretty rarely. In fact, they're so rare that if what Homer describes is truly an eclipse, it could potentially help historians date the fall of Troy, which was purported to occur around the time of the events described in the Iliad and the Odyssey. But after arguing about the point for hundreds of years, historians, astronomers and classicists finally agreed that there was no corroborating evidence and tabled the discussion.

Now, Marcelo O. Magnasco, head of the Laboratory of Mathematical Physics at Rockefeller, and Constantino Baikouzis of the Proyecto Observatorio at the Observatorio Astronómico in La Plata, Argentina, believe they have found some overlooked passages that, taken together, may shed new light on the timing of an epic journey.

The researchers combed through the Odyssey to find specific astronomical references that could be precisely identified as occurring on specific days throughout Odysseus's journey. Then, they aligned each of those dates with the date of Odysseus's return, the same day he murders the suitors who had taken advantage of his long absence to court his wife.

Magnasco and Baikouzis identified four celestial events. The day of the slaughter is, as Homer writes more than once, also a new moon (something that's also a prerequisite for a total eclipse). Six days before the slaughter, Venus is visible and high in the sky. Twenty-nine days before, two constellations -- the Pleiades and Boötes -- are simultaneously visible at sunset. And 33 days before, Homer may be suggesting that Mercury is high at dawn and near the western end of its trajectory. (Homer actually writes that Hermes -- known to the Romans as Mercury -- traveled far west only to deliver a message and fly all the way back east again; Magnasco and Baikouzis interpret this as a reference to the planet.)

Astronomically, these four phenomena recur at different intervals of time, so together they never recur in exactly the same pattern. Therefore Baikouzis and Magnasco looked to see whether there was any date within 100 years of the fall of Troy that would fit the pattern of the astronomical timeline. There was only one: April 16, 1178 BCE, the same day that astronomers had calculated the occurrence of a total solar eclipse. "Not only is this corroborative evidence that this date might be something important," Magnasco says, "but if we take it as a given that the death of the suitors happened on this particular eclipse date, then everything else described in The Odyssey happens exactly as is described."

Magnasco acknowledges that their findings rely on a large assumption: Although the association of planets with gods was a Babylonian invention that dates back to around 1000 BCE, there's no evidence that those ideas had reached Greece by the time Homer was writing, several hundred years later. "This is a risky step in our analysis," he says. "One may say that our interpretation of the phenomena is stretching it, but when you go back to the text you have to wonder."

Ultimately, whether they're right or wrong, the researchers are interested in reopening the debate. "Even though there are historical arguments that say this is a ridiculous thing to think about, if we can get a few people to read The Odyssey differently, to look at it and ponder whether there was an actual date inscribed in it, we will be happy," Magnasco says.

"Poor men, what terror is this that overwhelms you so? Night shrouds your heads, your faces, down to your knees -- cries of mourning are bursting into fire -- cheeks rivering tears -- the walls and the handsome crossbeams dripping dank with blood! Ghosts, look, thronging the entrance, thronging the court, go trooping down to the realm of death and darkness! The sun is blotted out of the sky -- look there -- a lethal mist spreads all across the earth!" -- Homer (translation by Robert Fagles)

The finding was recently reported in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I don't see how anyone could possibly date the Trojan war by such a method, because why on earth should one assume that the Odyssey describes events which occurred immediately after that war in the first place? If the description in the poem really is of an eclipse, it would surely be more reasonable to assume that an eclipse happened in Homer's own time and he thought it would be a good thing to stick in the poem, not that an eclipse really happened when Odysseus really returned home after ten years of wandering the Mediterranean and that Homer knew this centuries later. So if this is going to date anything I'd say it's more likely to date the Odyssey, not the Trojan war.

When scientists try to interpret ancient texts astronomically they always do this sort of thing - assume that the text is really reporting an actual event that happened at the time of the purported events. It's like when astronomers try to work out what the star of Bethlehem was in order to date Jesus' birth. The notion that Matthew might have put the star in for any reason other than that it really did appear at the time of Jesus' birth never seems to occur to them.

I wonder how their date of 1178 BCE compares to the archaeological dating of the destruction levels found at Troy. It's very odd that the article doesn't mention whether or not the two corroborate. Radiocarbon & geological dating would be infinitely more accurate than astronomical suppositions regarding the text (a text that probably changed over the centuries). Their astronomical dating is interesting in that it could corroborate the much more scientific archaeology & help determine which destruction level Homer was writing about.

It seems strange to me that 1178 BC would be the date, I thought the Sea Peoples' invasion was around 1200 BC, and so the Mycenaeans and Hittites (of whom the Trojans were most likely vassals) would be gone by then?

The Trojan War went for a while, did it not?

That and the initial Sea Peoples invasion seemed to have been focused more to the south, at first. That makes 1178 reasonable.

Also it is unlikely that astronomical events would have correlated with actual happenings by pure chance. The Iliad and the Odyssey as we know them were possibly written centuries later, but that is not to discount the possibility of earlier, now lost, versions which kept consistency and might have, in the realm of possibility, kept details of astronomical events (which have for millenia before then be viewed as divine acts and interventions). For the sake of argument, the Mycenaeans attacked Troy for greed in both real-life and in the Iliad, and the Iliad has them using Helen of Troy as an excuse.

This seems slightly related to chronology in Assyriology (the study of Assyria, Babylon, Sumeria, etc.). Namely there exists three dating systems for the ancient near east - Long Chronology, Middle Chronology and Short Chronology. Long Chronology was long touted as the true system in the late 19th Century but has since been thoroughly discounted. That system gave the most extremely ancient dates which do not in any way, shape or form correspond with archaeology. Middle chronology is whether the Babylonian 2nd dynasty ruled between the 1st and the 3rd, and Short chronology says the 2nd dynasty was a non-ruling dynasty overlapping 1st and 3rd. Archaeology between the two is murky because unlike millenia difference from the Long Chronology, the Middle and Short differ only by centuries. And texts are a bit unclear on the matter. Middle Chronology is prefered by Assyriologists. But Short Chronology corresponds with near perfection to recorded astronomical events.