A recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, used astronomical references in Odyssey to find the date on which the Greek hero Odysseus returned to his wife Penelope. Using three non-allegorical astronomical references, the researchers searched for a date between 1250 – 1115 B.C.E. where the astronomical references cohered and found that a date of April 16, 1178 B.C.E matched perfectly.

The authors of the paper believe that Odyssey is fiction and it was interpolated with valid astronomical data. But Homer lived five centuries after the eclipse and it is a mystery how he would have known about that event. One theory suggested in the paper is that, if Homer knew about Metonic and Saros eclipse cycles, he could have estimated the eclipse.

In fact the Greeks had a mechanical device which could do exactly that. Though sponge divers discovered the device in 1901, it was only recently that many mysteries of its mysteries were solved. The device called the Antikythera mechanism was thought to be an ancient mechanical computer.

A paper in Nature reveals that one dial on the bronze mechanism is a 19 year calendar based on the Metonic cycle and all 12 months in the calendar were identified. Also it was found that the mechanism was sophisticated enought to know which years had 13 months and which months had 29 or 30 days. The Babylonians too had a Metonic cycle based calendar, but it was not this precise.

Another dial on the mechanism was found to be the Saros eclipse prediction dial with an excellent prediction scheme. 18 eclipse glyphs were marked on the dial and it gave a perfect match for 100 start dates.

Homer could not have known about this particular device since it is dated to 146 BCE, when Corith, where the device was created, fell to Romans. Homer is dated to 8th century BCE and so far so such devices dating to that period have been found. So the mystery of how Homer knew about eclipses five centuries before him still remains.

See Also:

1. Calendars with Olympiad display and eclipse prediction on the Antikythera Mechanism Tony Freeth^1,2,Alexander Jones³, John M. Steele⁴&Yanis Bitsakis^1,5
2. Supplementary Notes
3. Video from Nature Magazine

In 730 BCE, Egypt was ruled by petty warlords and the civilization which would be the subject of many PBS documentaries had collapsed. One man, Piye, changed all that. In one year he subjugated every warlord and bought Egypt under his control. Piye and his successors not only united Egypt, but added many monuments including pyramids. Piye was a black pharaoh from Nubia (modern Sudan) and the Nubian history goes as far as the first Egyptian dynasty.

The fact that he was black did not matter to the ancient Egyptians. It also did not matter to the Greeks and Romans who knew that he was black and had art depicting it. Then, in the 19th century the Western scholars noticed.

Even famed Harvard Egyptologist George Reisner—whose discoveries between 1916 and 1919 offered the first archaeological evidence of Nubian kings who ruled over Egypt—besmirched his own findings by insisting that black Africans could not possibly have constructed the monuments he was excavating. He believed that Nubia’s leaders, including Piye, were light-skinned Egypto-Libyans who ruled over the primitive Africans. That their moment of greatness was so fleeting, he suggested, must be a consequence of the same leaders intermarrying with the “negroid elements.”

For decades, many historians flip-flopped: Either the Kushite pharaohs were actually “white,” or they were bumblers, their civilization a derivative offshoot of true Egyptian culture. In their 1942 history, When Egypt Ruled the East, highly regarded Egyptologists Keith Seele and George Steindorff summarized the Nubian pharaonic dynasty and Piye’s triumphs in all of three sentences—the last one reading: “But his dominion was not for long.”

The neglect of Nubian history reflected not only the bigoted worldview of the times, but also a cult-like fascination with Egypt’s achievements—and a complete ignorance of Africa’s past.[National Geographic Magazine – NGM.com]

Thus when a native civilization was found to have made great achivements, Western scholars wrote history to change them to light-skinned men who ruled over the dark skinned primitives. Where have we heard this before.?