The Curious Case of Out-Of-Place Technology

Mycenean artifacts (Ruth van Mierlo, photographer).

The Trojan War is supposed to have taken place in the late Bronze Age, but there are many curious cases that pop up in the myths, both cultural and in this case, technological, in which things seem out of place.

Iron:

The use of iron was as yet, not widespread (hence why the age is termed the Bronze and not the later Iron Age). People in the late Bronze Age would likely have known about iron, but not how to use it for any useful purpose. Indeed, Iron is described in certain parts of the Homeric epics as lumps that are treated as prized commodities (as evidenced by one such lump being a prize for one of the games during Patroclus' funeral).

However there are other more or less isolated cases in which iron implements and weapons are described as being used: in the Iliad an arrowhead in Book 4, an axe also in Book 4, an iron knife used to slaughter animals in Book 23. In the famous contest with the bow at the climax of the Odyssey, the task was to shoot an arrow through iron axes. Similes alluding to the use of iron are also found periodically, such as iron gates, implying a high degree of familiarity with the metal, as one might expect.

Of course, the reason why iron would have only come into use later was because of its higher melting temperature. Bronze Age furnaces were not yet powerful enough to use the metal. Nowhere is steel described as being used (thus putting a definite end date prior to which the myths must have been created and transmitted).

While the overwhelming descriptions of tools in the myths are with bronze, how do you explain this seeming discrepancy? For over a century, scholars struggled with this question, and it seemed to lend credence to the so-called Analysts arguments that the myths were not written by a single person (more on them later to come).

Horses:

Even rarer than the descriptions of iron are descriptions of horseback riding. These appears only in similes to Patroclus and in Book 10 of the Iliad. They appear nowhere in the Odyssey. It is an interesting historical anecdote that during the Bronze Age and up to around 1000 B.C., there are no texts or artwork concerning horseback riding. The use of the horse was always associated with chariots.

It seems that the reason for this is that the horse was not yet capable of bearing people on its back. It took thousands of years of selective breeding to create a horse that was capable of doing so.

It is also interesting to note that once horseback riding did appear on the scene, chariot use seems to have diminished dramatically, becoming utterly obsolete by the time of Alexander the Great, as he so amply demonstrated by his total destruction of Darius III's much-vaunted scythed chariots at the Battle of Gaugamela.

Obviously there were still far more chariots buzzing around the battlefields of the Trojan War than cavalry, but we seem to catch yet another glimpse at the future of warfare in these seemingly out-of-place descriptions.