A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich, Clifford Harper

he experienced the strangest adventures,
     
Till, at last, on miraculous ships, he returned to his homeland,
     
To the wife who awaited her lord all the years of his absence.
     
     
    Verses like these were chanted at feasts by Greek minstrels as they played their lyres. Later, they were written down and people came to believe that one poet, called Homer, had composed them all. They are read to this day and you, too, can enjoy them, for they are as fresh and vivid as ever – full of beauty and wisdom.
     
    ‘Now wait a minute,’ you’re going to say. ‘These are stories, not history. What I want to know is, when and how did these events take place?’ A German businessman called Schliemann asked himself that same question, more than a hundred years ago. He read Homer over and over again, and longed to see all the beautiful places described by the poet. If only he could hold in his hands, just once, the wonderful weapons with which these heroes fought. And one day he did. For it turned out that all of it was true. Not in every detail, of course: the heroes named in the songs were no more real than the giants and witches in fairy tales. But the world that Homer describes – the drinking cups, the weapons, the buildings and the ships, the princes who were at the same time shepherds, and the heroes who were also sea raiders – were not inventions. When Schliemann told people this they laughed at him. But he didn’t give up. He just kept putting money aside, so that one day he could go to Greece and see for himself. And when he had finally raised enough money, he hired labourers and set about digging in search of all the cities mentioned in Homer. At Mycenae he discovered palaces and the tombs of kings, armour and shields, just as the Homeric songs had described them. And he found Troy, too, and dug there. And it turned out that it really had been destroyed by fire. But in all those tombs and palaces there wasn’t one inscription, so that for a long time no one could put a date to them until, one day, quite by chance, a ring was found in Mycenae that didn’t come from there. On it, in hieroglyphs, was the name of an Egyptian king who had lived around 1400 BC, and had been the predecessor of Akhenaton, the great reformer.
     
    Now at that time there was living in Greece, and on the many neighbouring islands and shores, a warlike people who had amassed great treasures. Greece was not so much a kingdom as a collection of small fortified cities, each with its own palace and king. The people were mostly seafarers, like the Phoenicians, only they traded less and fought more. They were often at war with one another, but on occasion would gang together to plunder other shores. And as their fortunes grew bigger, they grew bolder – and not just bolder, but braver, because to be a sea raider takes courage as well as cunning. So sea raiding was a task which fell to the nobility. The rest of the population were simple peasants and shepherds.
     
    Now, unlike the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, these noblemen weren’t interested in preserving the ways of their ancestors. Their many raids and battles with foreign peoples had opened their eyes to new ideas and taught them to relish variety and change. And it was at this point, and in this part of the world, that history began to progress at a much greater speed, because people no longer believed that the old ways were best. From now on, things were constantly changing. And this is why, nowadays, when we find even a fragment of pottery – in Greece, or anywhere else in Europe – we can say: ‘this dates from roughly this or that period.’ Because a hundred years later a pot like that would have gone out of fashion, and nobody would have wanted it.
     
    It is now thought that all the beautiful things that Schliemann found in his excavations of Greek cities – the fine vessels and daggers decorated with hunting scenes, the golden shields and helmets, the jewellery