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How Old Are the Oldest Manuscripts?
How the Iliad and the Bible got from ancient times to you
The Iliad is one of the greatest works of literature in human history. It’s like an action movie, but written in poetry, with some of the most moving scenes and beautiful imagery in the history of books. You should read it!
But what are you reading when you read the Iliad? Most of us are vaguely aware of the history of the book. It is the story of a war between Greeks and Trojans — an event that may have really happened; historians aren’t sure. But the real war probably doesn’t at all resemble what happens in the book, which is heavy on melodrama and the supernatural. You probably learned in school that the poem was passed down orally, maybe sung, for centuries, until a guy named Homer wrote it all down around the year 700 BCE. Unless Homer didn’t really exist, which is entirely possible.
So if you pick up a copy of the Iliad today, what are you reading? A translation of what Homer wrote down 2,700 years ago? Not really.
The fact is that we don’t have “original” copies — meaning copies dating from the time the work was originally written — of many of the most important texts in the history of the world.
What we have instead is a motley collection of fragments and copies of copies of copies. In many cases, there is a millennium or more between the moment when a work was first written and the oldest extant version of it.
Let’s look more closely at the Iliad. There are more than 1,000 ancient and medieval manuscripts (!) of the poem. Many of the oldest ones are mere fragments.
Here, for example, is a papyrus found in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. It dates to the 100s CE, and contains bits and pieces of the second book of the Iliad.
There’s the “Ambrosian Iliad,” a fifth-century set of illustrations — that may have at one point accompanied the text of the poem — depicting the major events of the book. Here’s an image from it, Achilles making a sacrifice to the gods.
