A non-linguistic way of analyzing the Iliad

Homeric analysis has always been in Greek. This article presents a new, non-linguistic way of analyzing the Iliad and its exceptionally great number of significant results. This is achieved by keeping track of translatable oral scopes and their oral characteristics. With ‘oral scope’, a subspecialty of a bard is denoted that consists of a traditional set of conceptual or mental patterns, which are the oral characteristics. Oral scopes are often hidden if they are mixed with other oral scopes, have many oral characteristics, or are distorted because they are centuries old. By manually clustering translatable oral characteristics, hidden oral scopes and their historical backgrounds can be revealed. This has resulted in the discovery of 25 hidden Homeric oral scopes and the distinction of at least 776 oral characteristics, all documented in an English Homeric Traditions Apparatus. The five most important oral scopes are the Mycenaean, Aeolian, and Ionian Traditions, and the European War and Narrative Roles that form the European Tradition together. The other hidden oral scopes are stories, story types, type-scenes, and roles.