A team of Greek and German researchers found it on an engraved clay plaque in Ancient Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games in the Peloponnese peninsula, the Greek culture ministry said on June 2018.
It holds 13 verses from the Odyssey’s 14th Rhapsody, where its hero, Odysseus, addresses his lifelong friend Eumaeus. Preliminary estimates date the finding to the Roman era, probably before the 3rd century AD.
The date still needed to be confirmed, but the plaque was still “a great archaeological, epigraphic, literary and historical exhibit,” the ministry said.
The Odyssey consists of 12,109 lines of poetry attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer. It tells the story of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, who wanders around the Mediterranean for 10 years trying to get home after the fall of Troy, which ended the siege at the end of June 1218 BC.
But there is a problem. Although the find is an important one, another, earlier find was dated some 700 years earlier. There are about a hundred that are older than the 3rd century CE, the date of the recently discovered tablet from Olympia.
The oldest written record known is a potsherd found at the Greek colony of Olbia in modern Ukraine dating to the 400s BC, which has Odyssey 9.39 written on it: ‘a wind bearing me from Ilios put me ashore among the Kikones’.
As the epitaph 'oldest record' is clearly wrong, some might think that the tablet is the oldest copy discovered in Greece. That's not correct too. One of the two oldest papyri found in Greece, the Derveni papyrus, found in Thessaly (Macedonia) and dating to ca. 340-320 BCE, quotes a line with a variant of Odyssey 8.335. It is possible that it wasn't meant to be a line from the Odyssey and it could even be a fragment from an Orphic poem that happens to resemble the Odyssey line closely. Aside from that, there are a number of Hellenistic vases that do quote lines from Homer.
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