Adam Parry and Richard M. Dorson, shocked his fellow scholars arguing that the Iliad and Odyssey had been orally composed and recited by wan- dering bards for several generations before being written down.
For at least a century, scholars of an- cient writing have split hairs over such questions as whether Homer was the sole author of his epics and whether the alphabet spread from a single source or was independently invented in several places. Among the notable works in this tradition are archaeolo-...