Tribal Encyclopedia

Havelock’s term for the function the Homeric epics performed in pre-literate Greek culture: the Iliad and Odyssey were not primarily literature but the storage medium of the community’s technical, ethical, genealogical, and ritual knowledge. The Catalogue of Ships in Iliad Book 2 is an index to a world; the embedded genealogies are family records; the embedded ethical directives are paideia.

“All human civilisations rely on a sort of cultural ‘book,’ that is, on the capacity to put information in storage in order to reuse it. Before Homer’s day, the Greek cultural ‘book’ had been stored in the oral memory” (Havelock 1963). The oral encyclopedia had to be metrical because metre was the medium of survival: “under strictly oral conditions a wholly up-to-date poem on any subject could never get into circulation. To be mnemonically effective, all oral training remained intensely conservative” (Havelock 1963, Ch. 6).

For the Lineage, the concept grounds the claim that Homer is not an early work of art but a psychological artifact — a record of how the pre-literate Greek held what he knew. The transition from this form of storage to Hesiod’s abstracted catalogue, and then to prose, tracks a parallel transition in the shape of the knower.

Relationships

• oral-literate-transition
• mnemosyne
• muses
• iliad
• odyssey

Primary sources

• havelock-preface-plato (Havelock 1963)