內容簡介
內容簡介 The most famous adventure story on Earth is wrapped around the corpse of a real civilization. Around 1200 BC, the golden world of Bronze Age Greece - the palaces, the fleets, the gold-masked kings - burned in a single terrible generation. Greece forgot how to write. Four hundred years later, a poet sang of that lost world in astonishing, impossible detail. He was not inventing. He was remembering. Drawing on archaeology, the decipherment of Linear B, the Hittite royal archives, and the modern science of oral tradition, The Odyssey Before Homer excavates the real history inside the greatest adventure story ever told: - A real Troy - named, under its Homeric names, in the files of a foreign empire- A ghost map of kingdoms four centuries dead, hidden inside the poem- The perfect storm - drought, earthquakes, and raiders - that ended the first globalized world- The four-hundred-year relay of singers who carried the memory across the dark With 22 original engraved-style plates: maps, timelines, and diagrams of the evidence. The honest answer to "Was the Odyssey true?" is not yes - and it is not no. This book walks the whole territory between, evidence in hand, every claim clearly labeled: what we know, what is reasonable, and what is only a beautiful guess. The verdict is yours. Book II of the series that began with THE FLOOD BEFORE THE BIBLE.
