The text below is meant to be read aloud at the start of the discussion section. It compresses the week's substantially revised lecture — now opening with the Hittite archive and the world behind Homer — into a longer spoken introduction, and hands the room to the two tasks. The fuller notes that follow are for setting each task up in turn.
This week's lecture opens out of order. The first great story preserved in Greek is the Trojan War, and Eratosthenes of Cyrene — who also calculated the circumference of the earth with startling accuracy — dated its fall to 1184/3 BCE, squarely inside the Bronze Age collapse. Archaeology cooperates: Troy VIIa, at Hisarlik in north-western Anatolia, was destroyed by fire in the late thirteenth or early twelfth century BCE. We start here, out of chronological sequence, because the Hittite royal archive at Hattusa lets us hear this world in its own words centuries before any Greek could write a line of it down. The Hittites called Troy “Wilusa” and knew a power across the Aegean they called “Ahhiyawa” — probably the Mycenaean Greeks, or a shifting constellation of Mycenaean powers. This is not a detour from the history of writing. It is the reason the question matters.
The Tawagalawa Letter has the Hittite king Hattusili III proposing the very words his Ahhiyawan “brother” should write back, and its real subject is not Wilusa at all but a slippery western Anatolian warlord, Piyamaradu — pursued by armies, prayed against by a queen, married into a rival court, and never once caught in the surviving archive. A separate tablet, AhT 6, survives as a letter from an Ahhiyawan “Great King” himself, addressed by Hatti as a diplomatic equal alongside Egypt and Babylon. And one Hittite festival tablet preserves, in Luwian, the opening words of a song: “when they came from steep Wilusa” — tantalisingly close to Homer’s later formula “steep Ilios.” The link may be more than an echo: Greek Ilios once began with a lost consonant, digamma, and Homer’s metre still quietly requires it wherever the poems write the name. A war, if there was one, remembered for four illiterate centuries, then fixed at last in a script that did not yet exist when it was fought.
Now rewind to the technology itself. The oldest writing in the world is a record of beer — a ration tablet from Uruk, just after 3300 BCE. Not a hymn or a law or a story: an inventory. The earliest Gilgamesh comes twelve centuries after the first tablets; a technology and the uses we eventually find for it can be separated by a thousand years. What makes any of this possible is the phonetic leap — the rebus principle, using a sign for the sound of its name rather than the thing it pictures. That gives us a working test for what writing actually is: it must encode a specific language, have a stable set of signs, and be able to record anything a speaker can say. Hold that test steady and some scripts pass and can be read — Linear B, cracked by Ventris in 1952 because the language survived, the corpus was large, and proper names gave a way in — while others, like the Phaistos Disk, fail not because we are not clever enough but because the evidence a real decipherment needs no longer exists.
Mycenaean writing was a property of institutions, not individuals, and it died with them: when the palaces fell around 1200 BCE, Linear B vanished, and Ugaritic cuneiform with it — a thousand years of scribal literacy gone within a generation. The conventional picture is four completely silent centuries. Willemijn Waal’s recent work complicates that without overturning it: a Cypriot grave spit engraved “of Opheltas” shows ordinary Greek writing surviving past 1050 BCE, and she argues the blackout may partly be a preservation effect — baked clay survives palace fires; wood and papyrus do not. Writing can be lost. Whether it was ever quite as completely lost as the silence suggests is now a live question, not a settled one.
When the script does return, it is transformed: the Phoenician alphabet, twenty-two consonants, cheap enough to need no scribal school, to which the Greeks added the world’s first systematic vowels — necessary, among other things, to scan hexameter verse. That single modification sits at the centre of the week’s biggest debate. Barry Powell argues the alphabet was adapted specifically to write poetry, probably the Homeric epics, citing the Cup of Nestor — a hexameter joke about Nestor’s own golden cup, scratched onto a cheap clay one and buried in a child’s grave within one generation of the alphabet’s probable adoption — as his strongest evidence. Waal pushes back on two fronts. First, the earliest Greek inscriptions still show the writing-direction instability and regional diversity of a script with time to spread quietly before 800 BCE, not one that arrived in a single sudden generation — and an independently dated Phrygian alphabet at Gordion is hard to reconcile with one clean transfer moment. Second, a newer find at Methone shows verse, ownership marks, and ordinary commercial notation already sitting side by side within a generation of the Cup of Nestor — exactly why John Papadopoulos argues that the first leg of Powell’s case, poetry before commerce, is hard to sustain.
As we discuss, keep the master theme in view: writing was invented for control, first at Uruk and again, in its own way, in the Hittite chancery at Hattusa, and only slowly, unintentionally, became something else — a way of remembering a war no one could yet write down, and eventually a technology that could preserve, and dispute, poetry itself. Two tasks follow this week, framed explicitly as alternatives rather than a checklist: choose one and go deep. Task A stays inside the Hittite archive and asks what a Bronze Age warlord’s afterlife in someone else’s diplomatic correspondence can, and cannot, tell us about the world behind Homer. Task B returns to Powell’s thesis on the alphabet’s origin and asks you to weigh it, stated at its strongest, against Waal’s case that both the Dark Age and the alphabet’s own arrival may be effects of what happened to survive rather than of what actually happened.
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Setting up the two tasks
The two tasks are now framed explicitly as alternatives — “there are two tasks to choose from” — rather than a set every group works through in sequence. Both grow directly out of material the lecture itself now opens and closes with; the notes below mark the line between that framing and the work the groups will do. The same thread continues to run through the course: as the tasks increasingly ask you to identify and verify your own sources, AI tools such as Claude (claude.ai) or Microsoft Copilot are useful starting points for locating peer-reviewed scholarship, but always verify what any AI tool tells you against the original source, and always prefer primary and peer-reviewed material over synthesis.
Task ASteep Wilusa — what can Hittite diplomacy tell us about the world behind Homer?
This task asks groups to read the lecture’s opening material as historical evidence in its own right, on its own terms, before any Greek could write a line of it down. Starting from the Tawagalawa Letter and Manapa-Tarhunta’s sickbed letter, groups reconstruct what a Hittite king could, and could not, actually compel from his “brother” across the sea — and then map what the letters let us know about Piyamaradu, an outlaw to one side and a king in waiting to the other, pursued for a generation and never once caught. The task’s sharpest turn is the Luwian song fragment, “when they came from steep Wilusa,” tested against the popular claim that it is a lost “Wilusiad”: what would have to be true for the resemblance to Homer’s “steep Ilios” to be more than coincidence, and is the resemblance linguistic or only semantic? The extended discussion pushes further, into whether the identification of Wilusa with Troy itself can bear the weight put on it, and into whose stories survive from a partly illiterate society — a Bronze Age warlord we now know more about than any named Mycenaean Greek, purely because he happened to trouble a literate neighbour’s scribes. Primary texts are read directly from the lecture’s own translations, alongside the full scholarly edition of the Hittite correspondence, Beckman, Bryce & Cline’s The Ahhiyawa Texts, now linked as an open-access PDF so groups can check any letter’s fuller context for themselves.
Task BPowell vs. Waal — was the Greek alphabet really invented for Homer?
This task keeps the lecture’s central intellectual discipline: state an argument at its strongest before you attack it. Groups begin, as the lecture did, with the Cup of Nestor, then reconstruct Powell’s case fairly — the earliest datable Greek inscriptions are poetic, not commercial; vowel notation is unnecessary for administration but essential for scanning hexameter; the cup is the earliest secure evidence of the alphabet in use, and a Homeric joke besides. They read Powell’s own 1997 restatement of the thesis, “Homer and Writing,” in preference to the 1991 monograph (which the library holds as a single hard copy) — a compressed version of the same technical, chronological, and cultural argument, though its final causal claim is a little more cautious: it widens the target to include Hesiod alongside Homer and quietly retreats from the monograph’s strongest claim that the alphabet was invented specifically and exclusively to record the Iliad and Odyssey. Groups weigh this against Waal’s counterargument, distributed with the lecture: writing-direction instability in the earliest inscriptions, regional diversity among some thirty-three local Greek alphabets, an independently dated Phrygian parallel at Gordion, and the Methone evidence that verse, ownership marks, and commercial notation were never actually kept apart. The question to reach by the end is not simply who wins, but what kind of evidence would ever settle either thesis — and whether any part of Powell’s case survives even if Waal is right about an earlier, quieter transmission.