Uncovering Ancient Manuscripts: Dr. Graeme Bird’s Exploration of The Iliad  

Is ignorance bliss, or is knowledge power? Archeologists finding a piece of an ancient manuscript like the Homeric epic The Iliad is a rare occurrence. It can bring some long-awaited answers—or it can raise a hundred more questions: Why does this manuscript have different phrasing than other manuscripts of the same poem? Does this mean the writing is less accurate—and therefore less relevant?   

Questions like these are exactly what Homer-lover, researcher and jazz enthusiast Dr. Graeme Bird (classics and linguistics) studied over his sabbatical last semester when he took a deep dive into several newly discovered papyrus fragments of The Iliad in connection with the Homer Multitext Project. He also explored the connection between Homer’s poetry, oral history and jazz improvisation—an ongoing passion of his that has helped him better understand the seemingly contradictory questions of Homeric research.  

Researching The Iliad Translations 

Bird has been studying the poems of Homer ever since his Ph.D days and for several years before that. Every few years, he spends some time of his sabbatical looking at newly discovered pieces of Homeric manuscripts. As the years have gone on, archeologists have found a few new fragments of The Iliad in Egypt on old papyrus dating back to 300-200 BC. Scholars used to have to travel to gain access to these fragments, but with the age of digitalization, everything is now accessible online from prestigious universities in Boston, Germany, Paris, Venice, England and more.    

Reading the fragments isn’t easy. They’re usually in rough condition, with holes from worms, wear from the weather and fading from age. They also require translation from ancient Greek. But the hardest—and also the most interesting—part of the research is comparing different fragments of the same passage that aren’t exactly alike.    

Over the years, many people after Homer have copied the story to preserve it, but they haven’t always copied word for word. Sometimes they change a word, a sentence or even a whole section. Maybe it was a mistranslation, maybe it was a mistake, maybe it was because they felt the piece was missing something—or maybe there was never just one original version of The Iliad.    

“Modern researchers then have to ask, ‘Does this different version add to the story? Is it organic? Is it really genuine? What does it mean to be genuinely Homeric or not?’” explained Bird.   

Do Autographs Exist? 

When it comes to famous ancient pieces of writing like The Iliad, the common belief in the Western world of research has been that there was one original version written down, called an autograph, that spawned many subsequent versions. The older the copy, the closer to the original it is, and therefore the more accurate it is. But as Bird has discovered, more or less the opposite is true for The Iliad—which means it could be true for other ancient texts as well.   

“There is no one single text; there’s a multiplicity. Though we want an original, there may not be one. The further back you go, the more divergent the fragments are from each other. You’d think they’d be more similar to the original, but maybe this means there wasn’t an original. Some people are threatened by that,” Bird said.    

As a Christian, Bird’s research has potential implications as well for biblical manuscripts. There have been a few known interpolations in New Testament manuscripts, such as the end of the Gospel of Mark. A footnote explaining “the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark do not contain verses 9-20 of chapter 16" exists in many translations of the Bible.    

“The traditional view is that there were original manuscripts written by the gospel writers that they penned themselves or that scribes wrote down for them. But the manuscripts that have been discovered over the centuries present many (though mainly small) variations. This raises the question for some scholars: Was there never one original autograph of each Gospel in the first place? And if so, what might that mean for divine inspiration?” Bird said.  

"Multiple things can be genuinely Homeric even if they contradict each other. As with jazz, they’re both different, but they’re both good. We can keep them as both authentic and wonderful. Perhaps we can do the same sort of thing with the Scriptures."

Dr. Graeme Bird

Homer and Jazz: An Unexpected Harmony 

As a jazz pianist, Bird knows the power and necessity of improvisation. Just as jazz musicians add personality and flair each time they play a piece, so too did Homer when performing The Iliad, long before paper was easily accessible, and even before writing was in common use. It's very unlikely that Homer would have remembered a 15,000-line poem word for word each time. And he may have layered on his own emotions of suffering or grief or joy to various performances.  

Scribes listening at different times would have heard and written down slightly different versions; this might account for some of the variations. Bird has even displayed different versions of passages from Homer and then played improvised versions of particular songs (his favorites are “Night and Day” and “Green Dolphin Street”) at conferences throughout his career to illustrate this point.   

Instead of being threatened, Bird believes these new studies can challenge and grow our basic assumptions about history and autographs. “In relation to the Bible, we should ask: Do we believe God is big enough to allow for that? Multiple things can be genuinely Homeric even if they contradict each other. As with jazz, they’re both different, but they’re both good. We can keep them as both authentic and wonderful. Perhaps we can do the same sort of thing with the Scriptures, although I would not want to say that there are obvious contradictions there,” said Bird.  "Could we think of God as a sort of ‘Divine Improviser?’” 

The God of Creativity 

Bird will eventually compile his research into a second edition of his book Multitextuality in the Homeric Iliad: the witness of the Ptolemaic Papyri, building on past research and the multiplicity of Homer. But ultimately, Bird is excited to continue researching new fragments as they are uncovered and connecting them to jazz music—digging into a relatively untapped field.   

“The search for knowledge is a God-given desire to build on what’s already there,” Bird says. “Anything we find out is also finding out more about him. God gave us creativity to express ourselves in this. Research on an early example of human creativity [like The Iliad] is helping us also learn more about God.”