🇺🇸▼
In his famous novel, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust suggests that the true value of history lies in our deep desire to recover the past. We constantly search for ways to lift the mysterious veil and discover real events and real people. We hope to understand not just what happened, but how those people felt. As historians and scholars, we always hope to find new sources and new ways of seeing the world. In our modern time, science has opened up many new paths for this search. For example, scientists have adopted techniques used to decode the genetic history of humans. They now track changes in language just as closely as they track changes in genes.
This field of study, known as time depth linguistics, has helped map the family tree of languages. One major branch of this tree is the Indo-European language family. We have known about this family since the 18th century, as it connects languages like Greek, Latin, Persian, and Sanskrit in the east with English, Welsh, and Old Irish in the west. Thanks to modern science, we can now see exactly when and where the branches on this family tree diverged. It has been proven, for instance, that the tradition was correct. Sanskrit-speaking migrants, known as 'Aryans,' moved from Afghanistan into north-west India during the late Bronze Age. This was the period when the earliest Sanskrit texts, such as the Rig Veda, were created.
Scholars have applied the same models used in genetic research to one of the most celebrated texts in Western culture: Homer's Iliad. To solve this mystery, they used a toolkit of word lists invented by the linguist Morris Swadesh and other experts. The focus was on key words that were shared among the various Indo-European languages. Using this scientific approach, researchers arrived at a likely date for the composition of the Iliad: 762 BC, plus or minus 50 years. While the exactness of this date might seem illusory, it supports the older theories of Homeric scholars. These scholars had long argued that the poem dates from the eighth century BC.