See how to enable JavaScript in your browser. Homer and the Aegean Prehistorian. With academic subjects as with people, many a close and intimate relationship can become cool and distant. It may even be broken off altogether, and replaced by a different relationship. In the case of academic disciplines, such a transfer of affections can lead to a radical and positive transformation of a subject, even when this also means the virtual disappearance of its older configuration.
My offering to Greg discusses a development of this general kind: the radically changed tendencies of Aegean prehistory, with respect to Classical studies in general and Homer in particular, since its foundation as a discipline nearly a century and a half ago. This is admittedly not an objective finding; but, for the moment, we need not be too shy of pursuing more subjective value judgments. So let us start with the proposition that Aegean prehistory could never be just another regional branch of prehistory: it is special, and not only in ways that derive from the development of its successor-culture, Classical Greek civilization.
Even if that development had never happened, its content would never have been treated in quite the same way as, say with no disrespect to Greg , the prehistory of Hungary, mainly as the heritage of one European nation-state among others. This is primarily because it deals with a series of important processes and advances, many of them new to Europe, in agriculture, metallurgy, dressed stone architecture, the use of writing and several other fields โ advances essentially made possible by the maritime contacts, eastwards and westwards, of the Aegean world.
Their lasting impact would still make this a subject of wide interest, regardless of developments in the Greek world in the ensuing millennia. These arguments could be and have been seen as encouraging a closer institutional association of teaching and research in Aegean prehistory with European, Near Eastern, Egyptian or even World prehistory, or indeed with anthropology, rather than with Classics.
Yet this has been slow to happen. Consider the institutional evidence. A new hard-copy edition, say the editors, will not be issued until enough changes have been made to the edition to merit it. That point has evidently not yet been reached so, for very general purposes, the second edition may still suffice. Thus, Germany secured only six entries, at a date when sizeable teams were involved in the excavation or publication of at least three major German undertakings in Aegean prehistory, at Tiryns, Troy and Pevkakia magoula in Thessaly, to say nothing of the even larger diachronic projects with major prehistoric elements, at Samos, Miletos and elsewhere.
