Barry B. Powell

Barry Bruce Powell (born 1942) is an American classical scholar. He is the Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of the textbook Classical Myth and many other books. Trained at Berkeley and Harvard, he is a specialist in Homer and in the history of writing.

Works

Powell's study Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet advances the thesis that a single man invented the Greek alphabet expressly in order to record the poems of Homer.^[1] This thesis is controversial. Powell's Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature follows up themes broached by the thesis. His Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) rejects the standard theories of the origins of both Sumerian cuneiform and the Phoenician alphabet as deriving from pictograms.^[2] and attempts to create a scientific terminology and taxonomy for the study of writing,

In Powell's critical study Homer,he suggested that Homer may have hailed from Euboea instead of Ionia.^[3]

He has translated the Iliad^[4] and the Odyssey. He has also translated the Aeneid and the poems of Hesiod. His Greek Poems to the Gods includes translation and commentary on Greek hymns from Homer to Proclus.

Works

Books

Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge University Press, 1991
Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2003
Homer, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, 2nd ed. 2007
Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009
Classical Myth, eighth edition, Pearson, 2014

Translations

The Iliad, Oxford University Press, 2013
The Odyssey, Oxford University Press, 2014
Vergil's Aeneid, Oxford University Press, 2015
The Poems of Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, the Shield of Heracles, University of California Press 2017
Greek Poems to the Gods, University of California Press, 2021

Notes and references

^ "When the Ancient Greeks Began to Write", Archaeology, pp. 44–49 (May/June 2017)
^ Powell 2009, chapter 14; Review by L. R. Siddall
^ Barry B. Powell, Homer, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, p. 30: "Although most handbooks call Homer an Ionian poet, who lived and worked in Asia Minor, he may have worked on the long island of Euboea that hugs the east coast of mainland Greece. Certain technical features of his dialect may mark it as West Ionian, as opposed to the East Ionian of the Asia Minor coast."
^ Review by Hayden Pelliccia, "As Many Homers as you Please", New York Review of Books (20 November 2017)

External links

[1] "When the Ancient Greeks Began to Write", Archaeology, pp. 44–49 (May/June 2017)

[2] Powell 2009, chapter 14; Review by L. R. Siddall

[3] Barry B. Powell, Homer, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, p. 30: "Although most handbooks call Homer an Ionian poet, who lived and worked in Asia Minor, he may have worked on the long island of Euboea that hugs the east coast of mainland Greece. Certain technical features of his dialect may mark it as West Ionian, as opposed to the East Ionian of the Asia Minor coast."

[4] Review by Hayden Pelliccia, "As Many Homers as you Please", New York Review of Books (20 November 2017)

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