The Odyssey, the Bronze Age Collapse, and the World Before Israel
Reconsidering the Odyssey with Eberhard Zangger
Bust of Odysseus in Stavros, Ithaca (Greece). Credit: Deiadameian via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
For many, Homer’s Odyssey is a story about journeying home. The cyclopes, Sirens, and sea monsters who prolong Odysseus’s voyage have made it one of the most enduring epics in world literature. Eberhard Zangger, the co-founder and president of the Foundation for Luwian Studies, has a different take. In an article for The Ancient Near East Today, he suggests that the poem preserves memories of the Late Bronze Age collapse and all that had been lost.
The end of the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 BCE, reshaped the entire eastern Mediterranean. Great kingdoms disappeared as palaces were abandoned or destroyed. International trade networks broke down. Out of this turmoil arose the Iron Age moment, populated by peoples and kingdoms familiar to readers of the Bible—including ancient Israel, the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, and the Philistines.
Zangger’s argument centers on an often-overlooked part of the epic: Odysseus’s stay in Scheria. Odysseus recounts fantastical adventures while in Scheria, but Zangger notes that these famous episodes are actually flashbacks. Structurally, the Scheria portion of the Odyssey provides stories within the story. Zangger invites us to resist being beguiled, and to focus on the present.
Unlike every other stop on Odysseus’s journey, told in the form of a memory, Zeus decrees that, in real time, Odysseus must go to Scheria. Poseidon, despite hating Odysseus, drives him there, and, in the expressed logic of epic, Odysseus cannot return home without passing through it.
As opposed to the lands of monsters and enchantresses, Scheria is portrayed as a remarkably prosperous and orderly society. It possesses advanced seafaring, flourishing agriculture, impressive architecture, stable government, and generous hospitality. Yet, beneath its prosperity lies an unmistakable sense of impending doom. Homer repeatedly hints that this civilization is destined to disappear, as if he’s writing in a time when many advanced civilizations already had.
Zangger suggests that Scheria represents an idealized memory of the Bronze Age civilization that existed before the widespread destruction associated with the Trojan War and the broader collapse of the eastern Mediterranean world. Rather than serving as another stop on Odysseus’s journey, Scheria is a literary window into a better age.
Zangger suggests that Scheria also becomes the setting for Odysseus’s moral reckoning. He argues that the hero’s celebrated ruse—the Trojan Horse—did more than bring the war to an end; it helped destroy the Bronze Age world. This gives new significance to one of the Odyssey’s most poignant scenes, when Odysseus asks Demodocus to sing of Troy’s fall and then is overcome with tears. Rather than expressing simple nostalgia for lost comrades or victories, Zangger suggests Odysseus is grieving the civilization whose destruction he helped bring about.
Seen in that light, Homer’s Odyssey offers a cultural memory of what it felt like to live after the Bronze Age collapse, remembering times gone by and rebuilding with a sense of loss. Melancholy indeed runs through the epic. Although Odysseus eventually reaches home and restores order in Ithaca, authority has broken down, powerful families compete for control, and violence is common. The old order is dead and the world is simply not the same.
It is within this new Iron Age world that biblical history begins to unfold. The emergence of Israel occurred only after the height of the great Bronze Age empires. Phoenician city-states expanded their maritime influence during this period, and the Philistines established themselves along the southern coast of Canaan. The political map familiar from the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings was, in many respects, the product of this earlier upheaval.
If Zangger is right, Homer and the Hebrew Bible stand on opposite sides of the same historical divide: one looking back with longing at a lost Bronze Age civilization, the other introducing the new peoples and kingdoms that emerged, hopeful, from its ruins.
Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.
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Superb analysis. However, does not consider that the Bronze to Iron transition was of different durations at different locations. 50 years one place, 300 at another. The continuity was uninterrupted. Homer (not a single person) expresses memory of individuals in both his (?) works.
BTW: I have never received an answer to my oft asked question, whether Homer’s Telemachus and Talmai of King David’s time, were the same name. If so, it is evidence of Greek world tribes having residence in Cna’an during Bronze age.
Thank you for your comment. I actually see the time-transgressive nature of the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age as one of the central themes of the Odyssey. Different regions are portrayed as being at different stages of the transformation. The Hittites and Hattusa have already faded from memory, while the destruction of Troy (VIIa) lies only about a decade in the past and remains a vivid traumatic event. Mycenae has already fallen into the hands of competing factions, whereas in Ithaca we witness, almost in close-up, how the old order collapses within just a few years. By contrast, the royal courts of Pylos and Sparta still appear to function according to the traditional aristocratic model. In my view, this juxtaposition of different historical time horizons is precisely what makes the Odyssey such a remarkable source for understanding the end of the Bronze Age.