The voyage of Odysseus

Voyage · c. 1,184–1,175 BCE · in Europe

In Homer’s Odyssey, composed around 700 BCE, the hero Odysseus takes ten years to sail home from the Trojan War to Ithaca, losing every ship and every man on the way. The voyage is legend: the places on the map are where ancient Greeks and Romans believed it happened.

Related

• Lapita expansion (c. 1,350–850 BCE): Seafarers of the Lapita culture, known for their dentate-stamped pottery, spread from the Bismarck Archipelago through Vanuatu and New Caledonia to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, the first people to settle Remote Oceania.
• Sparta (c. 900 BCE): Dorian city-state in Laconia, famous for its militarised society and its leading role in the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars.
• Rigveda (c. 1,500 BCE): The oldest of the Vedas, a collection of Sanskrit hymns composed in the north-western Indian subcontinent between roughly 1500 and 1000 BCE.
• Greek alphabet (c. 800 BCE): Greeks adapted the Phoenician script and added letters for vowels; the result became the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.
• Oracle of Delphi (c. 800 BCE): The sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi housed the Pythia, the most prestigious oracle of the Greek world, consulted by cities and rulers for over a thousand years.
• First Olympic Games (776 BCE): Traditional date of the first Olympic Games at Olympia, a festival for Zeus with athletic contests held every four years until the late 4th century CE.
• Romulus and Remus (c. 771 BCE – 717 BCE): In Roman legend, twin sons of the god Mars, left by the Tiber and suckled by a she-wolf. Romulus founded Rome on the Palatine Hill, traditionally on 21 April 753 BCE, after killing his brother in a quarrel over its walls.
• Iliad (c. 750 BCE): Epic poem attributed to Homer about the Trojan War, generally dated to the 8th century BCE; with the Odyssey, a foundational work of Western literature.
• Syracuse (c. 734 BCE): Founded by Greek colonists from Corinth, Syracuse became the most powerful Greek city of Sicily.
• Byzantium (c. 667 BCE – c. 329 CE): Greek colony founded by settlers from Megara on the Bosporus; it was refounded by Constantine as Constantinople in 330 CE.

Around the same time and place

• Minoan civilization (c. 3,000–1,100 BCE): Bronze Age civilization centred on Crete, known for palace complexes such as Knossos, vivid frescoes and the undeciphered Linear A script.
• Mycenaean Greece (c. 1,750–1,050 BCE): Last phase of the Bronze Age in mainland Greece, dominated by palace centres such as Mycenae, Pylos and Tiryns, which collapsed around 1200 BCE.
• Late Bronze Age collapse (c. 1,200 BCE): Around 1200 BCE many Eastern Mediterranean states, including the Hittite Empire and Ugarit, collapsed amid attacks by the Sea Peoples, drought and systemic breakdown.
• Tyre (2,750–501 BCE): Capital of Phoenicia (1150 BCE–501 BCE).
• Hattusa (c. 1,650–1,180 BCE): Capital of the Hittite kingdom in central Anatolia; its tablet archives include texts in Hittite, the earliest attested Indo-European language.
• Memphis (c. 1,213–1,069 BCE): Capital of New Kingdom of Egypt (1213 BCE–1069 BCE).
• Hallstatt culture (c. 1,200–450 BCE): Late Bronze and Early Iron Age culture of Central Europe, named after the rich cemetery by the salt mines of Hallstatt, Austria.
• Sidon (c. 1,150–501 BCE): Capital of Phoenicia (1150 BCE–501 BCE).

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