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Comment by staplung | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, the article says nothing about how old the fragment is or how it compares to other early copies of the Iliad. Somewhat amazingly, the earliest complete copy of the Iliad is from around 950 C.E.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetus_A

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It's not that surprising. The earliest complete copies of many ancient texts is similarly dated. For example, the earliest copy of the Rg Veda is dated to about that age as well. It's hard to keep complete copies of big books.

As well, both the Iliad and Vedas are originally oral traditions. Likely there were different versions and different parts of the stories were emphasized to appeal to their audiences and local tastes and current events. Something that can still be apparent in historical texts but probably greatly reduced by the function of printed versions presenting a singular "authoritative version."

Only in the beginning, in the wake of the Greek Bronze Age dark age, was Homeric epic an improvised oral tradition that could be tailored to a listening audience’s preferences. By fifth-century Athens, writers depict the text as already definite, composed by one guy named Homer (instead of a long series of anonymous bards). Greeks may still have been learning and passing on Homer orally, but it was as a text that one received and was expected to relay onward faithfully.

Alexander the Great (died 323 bc) famously kept a copy of the Iliad under his pillow.

That's how I learned Calculus.

By keeping a copy of the Iliad under your pillow?

Because alexander the great kept a copy of the illiad under his pillow

The Vedas are surprisingly uniform across a very long time period.

It's likely that there have been bottlenecks, where a single written version became the main common ancestor to copy from. Long after the oral tradition died down and other written versions were lost. Or because some patron decided to fund the dissemination of a particular copy, like Guttemberg or King James, or the Toledo School of Translators. Or because a particular heir of the oral tradition wrote it down, like Homer.

It doesn't necessarily mean that the story was stable, it's just the version that got to us.

What you are saying is generally true (and certainly true for many Indian texts), but the oral tradition of the Vedas really is old. Having been brought up in the West I only learned enough for daily and occasional rituals. My guru taught me without looking at a book and although I have such books now I bought them for curiosity only; if I had a question about recitation it would not occur to me to consult them. My son has learned the same way.

Could be but all across different regions across the subcontinent where the Vedas are orally recited, except for some technical tones and notes (which is the mechanical part of Vedic Sanskrit) there is little difference.

There are serious attempts made to write down the vedas. The thing is, historically, very few people learned all 4 vedas by heart; Instead different families recited very small part and passed the recitation as heirloom.

If you meet all those families and compile their recitation, it exactly matches to what we have from different earlier efforts of canonisation.

Most complete copies of anything were destroyed by the end of the ancient world. So that is not a surprise. Even the bible that most people considered sacred only has copies from the 4th century and at one point the only Hebrew sources available were from the middle ages.

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