GoKawiilChristopher Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey puts a twenty-first century spin on Homer’s epic tale. Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures/Shutterstock
In The Odyssey, Homer records the earliest imaginings of autonomous ships guided by what sounds remarkably like artificial intelligence to modern readers. The ships of the Phaeacians, which carry Odysseus home to Ithaca, “know every city, every fertile land”. They “have no steersmen’, and “know by instinct what their crews are thinking and propose to do”.
Homer’s epic tells of the adventures and mishaps of Odysseus as he struggles home from the Trojan War. Along with its prequel, The Iliad, it is a foundational piece of literature with roots as far back as 1600 bc. But for all The Odyssey’s fantastical tales of monsters and magic, it also gives 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, The Odyssey was written down during the Iron Age, around 800 bc. Accordingly, it reflects an anachronistic mix of metalwork, from iron knives and gates to bronze spears and swords that reflect its late Bronze Age roots. There are also hints of steel production.
In one passage, Odysseus and his men plunge a spear into the Cyclops’s eye and the hot stake sizzles like when a blade is quenched in water to strengthen it during smithing: a technique that works for steel, but not pure iron or bronze. Whoever composed that passage, suggests Michael Wright, a craftsman and ex-curator at the Science Museum in London, “witnessed the preparation of a tool with a steel edge”.
Archaeologists have found other details that echo Homer’s text during excavations of the Mycenaean Palace of Nestor near Pylos, Greece. These include vessels made from a mix of bronze, silver and gold, and a rare depiction of a “fenestrated” axe with holes in, dating to around 1450 bc. The holes might explain a puzzling archery challenge that takes place after Odysseus finally returns home, involving shooting an arrow through a line of twelve axes. “The more we excavate, the more we confirm,” says archaeologist Sharon Stocker at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.
The Odyssey argues for the existence of long-distance trading networks between late Bronze Age civilizations. Archaeologists didn’t find evidence of such trade until the 1980s, when they discovered a fourteenth-century bc shipwreck at Ulu Burun in southern Turkey, packed with luxury treasures from Europe, Africa and Mesopotamia.
Such archaeological discoveries show that people from the eastern Mediterranean were “voyaging all over the Mediterranean much earlier than we would have believed”, says Brendan Foley, a naval and maritime archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden.
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