In He OdysseyHomer records the first imaginings of autonomous ships guided by what appears to modern readers to be remarkably artificial intelligence. The ships of the Phaeacians, which carry Odysseus home to Ithaca, “know every city, every fertile land.” “They have no helmsmen” and “they know instinctively what their crews think and propose to do.”

Homer’s epic tells the adventures and mishaps of Odysseus as he struggles to return from the Trojan War. Along with its prequel, The Iliadis a fundamental piece of literature with roots dating back to the year 1600. B.C.. but for everyone The OdysseyIn addition to fantastic tales of monsters and magic, it also offers glimpses into the science, medicine, and technology of the Homeric world.

Here, Nature looks at how researchers are finding the truths behind the legend.

metallurgy and trade

After being transmitted orally for centuries, He Odyssey It was written during the Iron Age, around the year 800 B.C.. Consequently, it reflects an anachronistic mix of metalwork, from iron knives and doors to bronze spears and swords that reveal its late Bronze Age roots. There are also signs of steel production.

In one passage, Odysseus and his men thrust a spear into the Cyclops’ eye, and the hot stake sizzles like quenching a blade in water to strengthen it during blacksmithing—a technique that works with steel, but not pure iron or bronze. Whoever composed that passage, suggests Michael Wright, a craftsman and former curator at the Science Museum in London, “witnessed the preparation of a steel-edged tool.”

Archaeologists have found other details that echo Homer’s text during excavations of Nestor’s Mycenaean Palace near Pylos, Greece. These include vessels made from a mixture of bronze, silver and gold, and a rare depiction of a “fenestrated” ax with holes, dating from around 1450. B.C.. The holes could explain a puzzling archery challenge that takes place after Odysseus finally returns home, which involves shooting an arrow through a line of twelve axes. “The more we dig, the more we confirm,” says archaeologist Sharon Stocker of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.

He Odyssey defends the existence of long-distance trade networks between civilizations of the late Bronze Age. Archaeologists found no evidence of such trade until the 1980s, when they discovered a B.C. shipwreck in Ulu Burun, southern Turkey, packed with luxury treasures from Europe, Africa and Mesopotamia.

These archaeological discoveries show that eastern Mediterranean peoples “were traveling throughout the Mediterranean much earlier than we would have believed,” says Brendan Foley, a naval and maritime archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden.

The wreck was a small, slow freighter, about 15 meters long. Odysseus’ ship had 50 oarsmen, meaning it was a much longer, narrower ship optimized for speed, Foley says.

Botany and poisons

The Odyssey mentions a variety of plant-related medicines, poisons, and antidotes. Helen of Troy uses a drug called nepenthe to banish the pain, while the sorceress Circe gives Odysseus’ men a potion that makes them forget their homeland and take the form of pigs.

Researchers chasing nepentheReal-life origins say it could contain plants like henbane and mandrake, which contain compounds that block the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. They were widely used in the ancient world as analgesics and anesthetics, says Rafael Molina-Venegas, a botanist at the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain.

In the poem, Hermes gives Odysseus a mysterious herb called molybdenum to protect him from Circe’s potion. It is described as having a black root and a flower like milk. Molina-Venegas and his colleague Rodrigo Verano have suggested that molybdenum could refer to a group of local plants, including sea daffodils (pankration spp.), which have white flowers, dark bulbs and inhibit the action of henbane and mandrake.

Color perception

The 19th-century British Prime Minister William Gladstone noted that Homer’s color palette was extremely limited: mainly variations of black and white, with a few mentions of purple and red. He found Homer’s descriptions of a “purple” rainbow and a “wine-dark” sea particularly irritating, and suggested that the Greeks’ eyes were less evolved than ours. An article in Nature in 1886 he argued that Homer was often actually describing the luminosity of something rather than its color.².

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Far from not seeing in color, says Mark Bradley, a classicist at the University of Nottingham, UK, the Greeks had a different way of organizing their visual world.³. Today, thanks to Isaac Newton, we understand color as related to the wavelength of light, but for the Greeks, Bradley says, colors were inseparable from physical objects and would have included all their multisensory properties and connotations.