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Greek and Indic Myths: History or Fiction?

Contemporaneous Classifications of the Iliad and the Mahabharata


Greek and Indic Myths: HISTORY OR FICTION?
Contemporaneous Classifications of the Iliad and the Mahabharata

To start of with, let me say that yes, I?m as confused about what this means as you are. In fact, the entire seminar brief we had to write turned out to be wrong because I didn?t understand what the words in the subtitle meant. Let me start with apologising from the beginning? the topic demands a much more rigorous understanding of history, historiography then I can muster up. However, within these limitations I?ll try to do the best I can. .
First off, what does the topic mean? The First part is fairly simple, History or Fiction?. Do the Iliad and the Mahabharata fall within the realm of verifiable history, or are they to be relegated to the world of the mythical make-believe? Contemporaneous classifications, as I understood it, means ?how did the people at the time of authorship of the two texts, look at their epic traditions??. However, there is hardly any evidence and hence work done in this field. Evidence of this period is either archaeological, epigraphic or literary. The only forms of evidence that can help us understand contemporaneous classifications are literary, but can we really use literary texts as historical artefacts? That is, can we really use literary texts to reconstruct history? Vedic and later Vedic texts in the case of the Mahabharata are not wholly reliable sources of information with which to determine ancient Indian history. It would be similar to a future historian coming to conclusions about our culture through say, a bunch of car manuals, if that is all that survives from our times. The problems are far worse in terms of Greece, since we have practically no literature surviving which is contemporaneous to Homer. However, let me first deal with the historicity of the two epics, taking the Greek first.

Homer's conception of his ancient world would have been entirely different from the 'history' available to us of his times. His history would have been borrowed from the Iranian tale of decline of man/fall, in which there are four ages characterised by metals in descending order gold, silver, bronze (interestingly the same standards used by contemporary sporting events) or copper, and iron, the decrease in the quality of metal signifying a fall in man?s stature. The Age of Heroes would have been placed between the bronze and the iron age of the present; surprisingly paralleling the Indian mythic tradition which places the Mahabharata at the end of the Dwarapara and the beginning of the Kali Yuga.
However, the point of this is that Homer is not a historian. He is a poet concerned was with certain fictionalised facts of the past, not with their relationship to other facts. The historian would have been interested in the outcome of the war; the fall of troy Homer omits these completely. For him dates unimportant, in its place we have 'once upon a time'. So, firstly, let us dispel the notion of the epics being historical texts when they are clearly in the realm of literature.
However, the question we must ask is how much of this literature is based on history? Heinrich Schliemmann, an amateur German merchant with an interest in archaeology was the pioneer in answering this question. He dug in Asia Minor at a place called Hissarlik and rediscovered what many believe to be Ilios, the city later Greeks established on what they thought was the site of Troy. He tunnelled into the ruins and the seventh strata of habitation, called VIIa, bore the signs of violent destruction, thought to be a result of the war in the Iliad. Recently, fragments of a human skull and a complete skeleton were discovered outside at the fortifications. These bones presumably belong to the casualties of the destruction of VIIa, and are noteworthy because human skeletal remains are absent from the debris of earlier destruction levels at the site, (Troy 2 and Troy 6) and are said to be indicative of the scale of destruction of Troy VIIa and of the failure of the survivors of the final catastrophe to bury all its victims.
However, no evidence found linking Mycenaean Greece with the destruction of Troy VIIa. Nothing in the Linear B tablets of Mycenaean Greece tell of any tale to attack Troy. Also, Hector (along with several Trojan names) is a fairly common Greek name, in fact, the name of an old Grecian hero, adding credence to the theory that the Iliad is the work of an overworking Greek imagination.
However, references in the Iliad to Greek cities have found some co-relation in history. But even this is problematic. The Mycenaean civilisation that Homers seems to be referring to had no temples; Homeric heroes do. Mycenaeans built tombs for their dead; the poet cremates his. Another interesting thing is the battle chariot. Homer had heard about them, but did not really understand their use. So he makes his heroes drive from their tents to some distance away from the war, where they nicely dismount, and walk to fight. Therefore we see that Homer had little or no notion of the age he was writing about, understandably so because he had no evidence or source to refer to which modern archaeology is equipped with. The Mycenaean world is a modern construct, wholly unavailable to Homer since it had been completely destroyed by the time he came around. That there was a Mycenaean kernel in the Iliad cannot be doubted, but it was small and what little there was of it was distorted beyond sense or recognition. What we may assume, therefore, since Homer?s only source was oral transmission over the centuries from fellow-bards, whatever little was historical was distorted to a large degree. There was possibly a war of some scale, but a ten-year war is unlikely since even in the Iliad, there are no replacements for fallen men, no supply of food etc. Also, it is unlikely that a war of this magnitude would not have appeared in the Linear ?B? tablets at all. Another approach would be to place the war slightly later, AFTER the destruction of the Mycenaean civilisation but nonetheless, before the time of Homer. However, all that I have said about distortion of sources would hold true even for this approach.

Tracing the historicity of the Mahabharata is an even more complicated task. Among scholars in this field, we have a divide between belief-disbelief. In 1975, Dr. Sircar declared that the Mahabharata was without historical basis, and essentially a mythical creation. He stated that its origin was most probably a small family or tribal feud. His main contentions are that there is no reference to the Great War or Kurukshetra as a battlefield in the Vedic literature, or any literature up to 4th century B.C. Also, the mythical figure of tens of lakhs of fighting men on a single battlefield is impossibility even in modern proportions. This view is supported by the like of Prof H.D. Sankalia.
On the other side of the divide are Prof. V.N. Datta and Dr. H.A. Phadke of the Kurukshetra University among others. They state that the lack of reference in Vedic literature can be explained by understanding that Vedic literature is predominantly socio-religious and disinterested in describing wars. The findings and research of this camp is based on what I refuted at the very beginning, a dependence on literary, socio-religious texts as historical artefacts. For example, they use Vedic texts to count the number of kings from Manu, approximate the length reigns, and reach an approximate date of the Mahabharata war. They arrive at dates around ranging from 5000 -3000 B.C., ridiculous for obvious reasons, and refutable with cross-cultural evidence from Greek and other histories.
Astronomers have come to wildly divergent conclusions. Swami Ben Maharaja fixes the date of the war on Paushya Amavasya day in February 3136 B.C. Raja Prof. Raja, is of the opinion that the war was fought on November 22, 3067 B.C. calculated on the basis of the position of certain stars and the position of the Sun in the zodiac. The problems with this go on to prove my case of the unreliability of literary sources to determine historical data.
Let us then move on to archaeology. A prominent name in this respect is Prof B.B. Lal. His research is a curious mix of literary and archaeological evidence. According to the Puranas, a flood in the Ganga destroyed Hastinapur, and King Parikshit, descendant of the Pandavas, shifted his capital from Hastinapur to Kausambhi. His excavations at sites of the Mahabharata reveal from their lowest levels the material items of a culture designated by archaeologists as the 'Painted Grey Ware Culture' since it is characterized by a Painted Grey Pots. PGW pots have also been found at Kausambhi. Also, there is clear evidence of a heavy flood in the Ganga, which destroyed the settlement of the Painted Grey Ware people at Hastinapur. According to Prof. Lal, the archaeological evidence of flood at Hastinapur, and the finding of a similar and later culture at Kausambhi corroborate the historicity of the epics.
There are problems with this approach too, since PGW is essentially a rural culture and Mahabharata does not seem to follow its pattern. Also, the flood in question could have been just one of many which struck the Ganga valley. My more serious objection is that B. B. Lal often blatantly lies. For example, his claim to have found the actual dice Yudhisthira and Shakuni gambled with is not any of us can take seriously.
A more rational approach is that of Prof Sankalia, although more on the side of Sircar than Lal, on the side of the idea of tribal feud than a large-scale war, argues how most of the Mahabharata is reflective of the time of its composition, the turn of the millennia. Rather than reflecting the past, it reflects the time contemporaneous to the period of authorship. I will come back to this when I talk of interpolations and the process of authorship of the Mahabharata.
Therefore, the conclusions I draw from the belief-vs.-historicity debate is that it is next to impossible to determine the historicity of the Mahabharata for the lack of evidence. At the most optimistic level, there may perhaps be a basis for the Jaya, the description of war, which started at a local level. However, a collective imagination and the work of a thousand years added considerably to the repository, and took it away from the realm of history to a new realm of mythology. Therefore, any archaeological co-relation with the text would first require the de-stratification (i.e. the removal of interpolations and the excavation of the basic Jaya core) of the text, an impossible task.
In the case of the Greek epic Homer?s information is already in the realm of the mythical. The memories and traditions out of the archaic past were transmitted over a gap of at least 400 year only by story-telling bards. Hence, looking for historicity in Homer would be as futile a task as it would be to look for the same in the Mahabharata. So finally, how much history is there in the texts we are looking at? The Iliad yields an easy answer to this question..
Mythology is more than history; the mythographer or poet is the historian of the unconscious. At the core of the Homeric poems lies the remembrance of one of the greatest disasters that can befall man; the destruction of a city. The Iliad reflects not only a single episode but also a great catalogue of ruin. The fabled Knossos fell in circa. 1400 B.C. The cause of its overthrow is not known, but legendary recollections of the event reappear in the Greek imagination for centuries thereafter. The next two hundred years are a period of extreme obscurity. What is certain though is that the Mycenaean world with its great palaces and complex dynastic and commercial relations also met with violent disaster. The citadels of Pylos and Iolokos were burnt around 1200, and golden Mycenae itself was destroyed within the century. The remembrance of ancient terrors, of city gates broken and towers burned, beats loud in the Iliad. The Odyssey speaks of the aftermath. It is therefore epic of the displaced person.

Now for the question of authorship and the process of composition of the epics.
The best words on this subject come from an unlikely 19th century Kara-Kirgish bard from the region north of the Hindukush. About his own oral poetry, he says: ?I can sing every song; for God has planted the gift of song in my heart. He gives me the word on my tongue without my having to seek it. I have not learned any songs; everything springs up from my inner being, from myself.?
The Iliad and the Mahabharata started out as exactly this, oral poems recited by travelling bards. We have already seen in what way Homer derived his material for his two epics. There existed in the collective consciousness a repository of myths and legends (their history) and travelling bards, and later rhapsodists collated and transmitted the same orally. Debates over the similarity and dissimilarity of the Iliad and the Odyssey and thus arguing a single Homer or several poets have raged on for decades. For example, the myth of the blind Homer lies entirely on the basis of a reference to a blind poet in the Odyssey, seen as a self-reflexive gesture. Again, we cannot conclusively say whether there is a single poet at work in the Iliad or several, but we can take the theory of the orality of the text a little further.
Certain scholars such as Milman Parry and Alexander Lord have argued that the texts were not only orally transmitted, but also orally and spontaneously composed. For this, the poets depended on certain pre-existing formulae on which the entire poem was based. These same kind of formulaic bards still exist in Yugoslavia and certain tribes in North Africa. In fact, Parry took tape-recorders and used Slav bards to spontaneously compose huge sections of heroic verse, and then studied their structural similarity with the Homeric epics. Greek hexameter allows for great variety because the line may be broken (caesura) at five places. Each of these five segments are filled in by words chosen from a stock of phrases and epithets, and the one that fits the metrical arrangement is chosen to be inserted, irrespective of its merit in the case. Milman Parry and Antoine Meillet thus conceived language as a subordinate and unproductive instrument. Form and content in this case are completely divided in a reassertion of the classic disjunction between signifier and signified, the language and the tale. To prove this, they argue that Achilles is encaged in a prison-house of language. When the Greek ambassadors approach Achilles in his tent his reply speech is incoherent and elusive. Adam Parry says this is so because there is no idiom in the collective orality to articulate individuality. Adam Parry?s Achilles is the hero of Romanticism: an individual with insight but without words to express a rebellion. However, these critics have been criticised by later critics and linguists such as Michael Lynn George. He argues how epithets shape the nature of the texts, as in as in Nestor?s re-giving of kingly status to Agamemnon in Book IX through certain epithets, which reaffirm his authority. Also, One reason Achilles may be seen to be unhappy with the reconciliation offered by Agamemnon is that it was all gifts and no words as opposed to gifts and words suggested by Nestor. The gesture hence perpetuates the voids it was designed to overcome. Repetition and formulae is not simply a transportation of fixed meanings as portable property. Odysseus? repetition of the catalogue marks the absence of Agamemnon and the subsequent shift to the third person. Meaning is adrift in the unstable space of language. The final word comes from Homer himself:
?The tongue of man is a twisty thing; there are plenty of words there
Of every kind; the great field of words extends hither and yon.?
For the lack of time, I will not go into orality in detail in terms of the Mahabharata, the Indian epics have also certainly been constructed along oral lines. In a largely oral tradition of story-telling in India, the first attempt to write down a definitive Mahabharata has come as late as this century with the critical edition. The Mahabharata was passed down orally, as was the Iliad, and it is interesting to note that a scholar whose name I forget has used the same ?epithet? describing dawn to argue the formulaic orality of the Mahabharata as was done for the Iliad.

It is inevitable that since the epics was built on a core of mythology, that ideologies contemporaneous to the time of authorship would not seek to use these myths to validate their systems of belief, in the same way as certain right-wing religious groups of India do now. There are instances of the same. For example, between the heterodox religions like Buddhism and Jainism in the one extreme, and the orthodox Vedic religion in the other, new system called Bhagavatism was coming into the fore. Vaasudeva Krishna became the chief proponent of this system. By 2nd century B.C. this was gaining popular currency. A Syrian legend further informs us that the cult of Krishna worship was prevalent in Armenia as early as the 2nd cent. B.C. Its success is partly due to its amalgamation into Brahmanism, and identification of Krishna with Vedic gods of Narayana and Vishnu. It was at this time that the Bhrigu cult of Krishna worshippers are said to have interpolated the entire Bhagwad Gita into the Mahabharata, instrumental in cementing the godlike status of the otherwise cowherd Krishna. The memorable scene in the Mahabharata in which Sisupala poured forth the venom of his heart against Bhisma for honouring Krishna as the most worshipful seems to be a reminiscence of the spirit of the die-hards, who refused to acknowledge the divine character of one who was not a Brahman by birth.
As a side note, it is interesting to note the association of the Krishna of the Gita with the Krishna of Brindaban, who is worshipped and known throughout for his amorous relations with Radha. The Mahabharata, the Gita and the Puranas do not mention anything of this Krishna. In popular opinion, however, both are identified as one and the lives of the modern Vaishnava devotees are more influenced by the latter romantic Krishna than the former.
It is also said that the Mahabharata represented the ascendancy of the Kshatriyas classes, since it is essentially centred on the doings of the warrior class. This view holds that the Mahabharata derives it source from the Gathas, traditional literary compositions describing heroism and virtues of Kshatriya princes sung on important ceremonies. In the same way, it is argued that the Ramayana represents the most notable fact during the period under review, the expansion of Aryan culture all over South India. It plainly hints at the methods employed by the conquerors, the missionary enterprises backed by military power, and the setting up of non-Aryan tribes against one another.

In terms of the Iliad, combination of oral transmission and lack of political centralisation could have led to many variants. The temptation to tamper with the text must have been great, on political grounds alone, Homer was an embarrassment to the Athenians whose pathetically small role in the Trojan War was inconsistent with their ascending pride in later Greek world. Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens from 547 - 527 B.C. reputed to have settled the problem of an authentic Homeric text by publishing a formal edition so to speak. We don't know how different this edition was from forms earlier than that available to 6th century Greeks, but it has changed remarkable little to present day form, as proved by studying Homeric quotations in other Greek scholars such as Homer, Plato etc. Besides, 6th century Athens lacked the authority to impose a corrupted Homer on other Hellenes. The Iliad was a canonical text to the Greeks, if there ever was one. If he were well-educated, a Greek was likely to have to learned stretches of the two epics by heart... the fifth-century B.C. Athenian political leader Nicias had his son commit both to memory, in order to make him a better statesman. The contemporaneous classification of the Iliad was certainly history, in the 6th century battle between Megara and Athens on the question of an island, Athens justified her claims on historical grounds of the Iliad. To understand this, we must realise that in mythical imagination there is always implied an act of belief. Without the belief in the reality of its object, myth would lose its ground (Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man). Greek myth was not in the nature of fiction, but a living reality believed to have once happened. Even Plato had no doubts about the veracity of the history in Homer; it was the philosophy and morality that he rejected, not the tale of Troy.

Therefore, in conclusion, to answer the question of the contemporaneous classification of the Iliad. As obvious from attempts to justify ideological positions at the time contemporaneous with that of authorship by referring to epical texts, we see that people then must have classified their epical tradition as more history than fiction. Also, I would say, although it I couldn?t qualify myself more, that if we were to put Fiction and History at two ends of a spectrum, we can see a gradual move from the former to the later from contemporaneous to contemporary times. However, this is more marked for the Greek epic since the Greek people now have distinguished between myth and history. However, as implicit from the belief-vs.-history divide, the Indian culture has not succeeded in doing the same to the same extent.





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