Homer's Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Skies Decoded

by: Wood, F. Wood, K.

Price: 39,62 EURO

(in stock)

During the 1930s the young daughter of a Kansas farmer spent night after night watching the stars and planets wheel across the vast prairie sky. Later, as a teacher in England, she combined her devotion to astronomy with a passion for Homer. This led her to a discovery which would lie buried until her daughter, Florence Wood, inherited her papers in 1991." "Her years of study, it became clear, had revealed Homer's great epic to be also the world's oldest book of astronomy. In the Iliad, battles between Greeks and Trojans mirror the movements of stars and constellations as they appear to fight for ascendancy in the sky. The timescale of Homeric astronomy is breathtaking; elements can be dated to the ninth millennium BC, long before the recorded astronomy of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Geography is also represented, since the shapes of constellations were used as 'skymaps' to direct ancient travellers throughout Greece and Asia Minor." "Homer was probably the last and most accomplished of a long line of bards who wove such knowledge into the epics they memorized and declaimed. The astronomical content of the Iliad was gradually forgotten." "This book unlocks its hidden meaning once again. It documents one of the most important discoveries this century about the ancient Greek world."

Homer's Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Skies Decoded

by: Wood, F. Wood, K.

• ISBN-13: 9780719557804 / 978-0-7195-5780-4
• ISBN-03: 0719557801 / 0-7195-5780-1
• John Murray, London, 1999

Price: 39,62 EURO

(in stock)